Posted on 06/13/2004 12:00:44 PM PDT by Jane_N
Bratislava, June 11 (TASR-SLOVAKIA) - The National Anti-drug Unit detained the main boss of cocaine imports from South America to Slovakia as part of its Mosquito operation in Bratislava this week, Police Force Vice-president Jaroslav Spisiak reported Friday.
The Albanian man was charged with smuggling two kilograms of high-quality cocaine, which would have been sold in Slovakia for at least Sk65 million (€1.63 million).
"He was one of the main cocaine importers to central European region - not only to Slovakia but also to Hungary, Austria and Poland," Interior Minister Vladimir Palko detailed.
The police have been tracking the cocaine boss for a long time. In the end it co-operated with a Slovak courier, who brought two kilograms of concentrated cocaine in packs attached to his body.
This delivery was already controlled by the police in order to reel in as many of the involved criminals, including the most important, as possible.
Thusly the police caught three other couriers, all of them Slovaks, who were earning $5,000 each for every trip.
The operation, mounted by the Slovak police, was also joined by the police from South America, Germany, Austria, Hungary and USA.
Friend of Bill?
Well, it's good to see that the Slovakians have gotten their cocaine problem completely handled. No doubt they've totally put an end to all cocaine smuggling into their country by catching this guy and his three cohorts. Mr. Big must have been a major kingpin to have been caught smuggling 4.4 pounds of cocaine, which is apparently worth almost $2,000,000.00 U.S. in Slovakia. That's about ten times what it would go for here in the U.S. if sold for a $100 a gram, which these days is pretty expensive for coke in most parts of the country. Gosh, how do those Slovaks afford $1000.00 a gram cocaine when the average Slovak earns just over $400.00 per month?
The skeptic in me tends to think this is another load of exaggerated puffing by a government, something even our own government tends to do when it comes to drug busts. Value of drugs is often grossly exaggerated, as is the importance of the people they catch. Having represented several drug mules myself, including those caught with dozens and dozens of kilos of cocaine or hundreds of pounds of marijuana at a time, I suspect that these were just run of the mill drug mules. They don't own the drugs. They aren't the ones getting rich. The big guys who are getting rich don't go transporting 4.4 pound loads of coke. They leave that to expendable drug mules. In fact, they usually don't even talk to the mules. Underlings set these things up. The big guys stay as insulated as possible from the risk of getting caught. They usually don't even want the mules to know who they are because they don't want the mules to be able to implicate them. And if things in Slovakia are done anything like they are here, the people involved with the coke won't bail the mules out of jail or hire them lawyers. Here even most of the coke mules have to use a public defender. Our public defender office gets appointed most of the coke mules caught driving down the interstate with large loads of coke and we get almost all of the pot mules, even the ones with hundreds and hundreds of pounds.
I'd lay ten to one odds that this bust won't even put a dent in the cocaine market in Slovakia. More loads are probably coming in everyday. Prices will probably remain stable and availability as high as it ever was. Things won't likely change as long as people can smuggle one small load and earn more than the average Slovak does in an entire year. There will never be a shortage of people willing to risk the consequences for that kind of payoff. The smuggling will continue unabated while the government claims victory after victory. Typical.
And certain suckers/toadies will keep lapping up the government propaganda.
Is that their attitude when you represent them, or are they not so "willing to risk the consequences" after they're caught?
If they're not deterred, then I say raise the consequences. Are they "willing to risk the consequences" of lethal injection?
Obviously they aren't happy about the consequences after they get caught. Most of them will spend several years in prison before they are eligible for parole. The guys caught with large loads of coke generally do several more years than the guys caught with large loads of pot. Of course, none of them thought they would get caught, and most aren't too bright to begin with.
Upping the punishment doesn't work. The death penalty might deter many of those who act as mules today, but not all of them. The pay for hauling a load would go up, and out of the 200,000,000 or more people old enough to drive in this country the bad guys would still be able to find enough mules to get the drugs where they need to go to meet demand. Also, there would be more cases where unknowing people are conned into driving vehicles across the country with drugs stashed in false compartments. No doubt though you would derive much pleasure from mass executions like they have in some other countries for drug offenses, but other than that I doubt you'd see any real benefit from such a policy. Most of the cases would plead to lesser punishments anyway because prosecutors wouldn't be able to handle so many death penalty cases. The maximum penalty for possession of any amount of cocaine with intent to deliver in my state is already up to life in prison, cranking it up to death might make you feel better but it otherwise it's just going to further increase the likelihood that innocent people will plead to crimes they did not commit and be sent to prison it.
Which was probably not a bad assumption; how many smugglers get caught, especially given that nobody involved on either end has any interest in assisting authorities in catching them?
A lot of those guys were jumping from tall buildings in 1929.
You never know what their true financial situation is.
I am sure that Bill Clinton, Dick Holbrooke (Kerry's Sec. of State)and Madeleine Albright would not have allied us with bad criminal people. These Albanian folks just want to be free to do business in the various lands to which they are entitled under the Greater Albania concept.
Freepers must learn to look the other way while our loyal Muslim allies burn down an ancient monastery or two, or shoot a peace-keeper, or kidnap a child for brothel service, or steal your car. What's it to you when they seize a Christian village in Macedonia, or evict some Serb yahoo? Cocaine is a valid medical drug, and this Albanian chap was merely making sure his neighbors had an adequate supply. It is Winter in South America you know, and supplies can run short just as the Albanian party season is at its height. As faithful allies of America, the Albanians have much to celebrate.
Does it not say in the Bible "Turn a blindeye toward the utter cheek?' or words to that effect?
This is true, and it may also be true that this guy is guilty as sin. Most who are arrested for this sort of thing are guilty even though they deny having known anything about the drugs. But some of these people are not guilty, yet they would most likely be convicted if their cases go to trial because at least where I am juries are so inflamed about drugs that they tend to convict everyone and give out harsh sentences which could include decades of prison time (up to life) and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. I can't tell you how many of my clients have plead guilty even though they insist they are innocent because they are terrified of what a local jury might do to them. They'd rather take a few years in prison than risk having to go away a lot longer and then be stuck with fines they'll never be able to pay off. Were most guilty? Probably so, but not all of them. Raise the possible penalty to death and even more innocent people will plead guilty.
Slovakia is a mostly Christian country that it not in the Balkins. There are about 5000 Muslims in Slovakia which comes to about one tenth of one percent of their population of approximately 5,430,033 people. Slovaks are not Albanians. Albania is a couple of countries south of Slovakia. According to the CIA World Factbook the ethnic breakdown of Slovakia is as follows: "Slovak 85.7%, Hungarian 10.6%, Roma 1.6% (the 1992 census figures underreport the Gypsy/Romany community, which is about 500,000), Czech, Moravian, Silesian 1.1%, Ruthenian and Ukrainian 0.6%, German 0.1%, Polish 0.1%, other 0.2% (1996)."
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/lo.html
http://www.slovakia.org/sk-faq.htm
http://www.slovakspectator.sk/clanok-15246.html
Not guilty, as expressed as a legal term, I agree. There may not be sufficient evidence to convict beyond a reasonable doubt.
But innocent? I honestly have a hard time believing that. My friends, my friend's friends, don't use drugs. The thought of one of them getting pulled over with two kilos of cocaine in the trunk and the whole thing's a mistake (it's not their car, a friend asked them to deliver a package, they didn't know, it's their son's car, the parking garage attendant must have placed it there -- I'm sure you heard a thousand more like it) ... it's beyond belief.
Can it be true? Well, yeah. You can win the lotto, too. Same odds, would be my guess.
Maybe that's why I'm not a court-appointed public defender -- I'd plea bargain all of them, knowing they're guilty. We live in different worlds.
TKDietz's friend's clent didn't get the package from a friend but from "someone from the office." I couldn't swear that nobody in my office uses or deals drugs. You seem quite eager to disbelieve in the conviction of innocents.
There has been a maxim floating around since ancient times that always goes something like this, “it is better that [insert number] guilty men go free than one innocent man is wrongfully convicted.” The Roman emperor Trajan wrote that a person ought not “to be condemned on suspicion; for it was preferable that the crime of a guilty man should go unpunished than an innocent man be condemned.” Justice Blackstone, a famous English jurist and legal scholar we all learn about in law school said that it is “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Benjamin Franklin said that “it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer.” It is a fundamental principle in our judicial system that is far worse for innocent people to be wrongfully convicted than for guilty people to free. That’s why we have things like a “presumption of innocence.”
The truth is though that most people accused of crimes are in fact guilty at least of some of the things they are accused of doing. Although technically we have a presumption of innocense in our law, in practice neither jurors nor judges presume the accused to be innocent. The reality is that most people think that if someone has been accused of committing a crime, they probably did it. I’ve even been guilty of becoming convinced that clients of mine were guilty when it turned out that in fact they were completely innocent. It is human nature to at least strongly suspect that the accused are guilty. This is especially true in drug crimes where there is a war mentality against these substances and anyone involved with them. Jurors and judges come into these cases wanting to make a difference in the drug problem and only need a scant amount of convincing before they are ready to nail these people to the wall. From what I’ve seen, it appears that few people seem to be too worried about convicting innocent people anymore. This is war. All is fair in love and war and we can’t risk letting any of these guys go. Any innocent casualties are reasonable losses in this type of endeavor.
Is it clear that all of these people caught driving down the road with drugs are guilty? I don’t know that it is so clear. It depends on the facts of the case. If I've got a truck driver driving alone with 800 pounds of pot in the sleeper cab of his truck, it's pretty obvious he knew it was there. But there are other cases that aren't that clear cut. For instance, I had one where two junk yard workers were hired to haul a vintage car a few states over to have it totally restored. The people that hired them gave them the truck to drive along with the vehicle on a trailer. Wielded into well hidden false compartments on the trailer was 465 pounds of marijuana. The prosecutors offered them 20 years with 15 suspended because they knew the their case wasn't that solid. Instead of risking 30 years and huge fines with one of our juries, these guys took the deal. They still claim they are innocent.
I also get other cases where at least one of the people in the vehicle probably knew the drugs were there, but others might not have. In these types of cases, it is quite possible that one person agreed to transport the drugs but wanted others to be with him either to help drive and/or to act as cover for him to make it look like a family trip or something. Occasionally even children are found in these vehicles. It makes sense that these others he enlists for the trip could be unaware of the drugs. If he tells them about the drugs either they would not want to go or they would want a share in the fee for the delivery. I have one now where my client is a woman who was traveling with a man she had only known a short while. She swears she didn't know he was involved with drugs or that there was about 140 pounds of pot in the trunk. She claims the guy told her the trunk was broken so they had to put their things in the back seat. The lock on the trunk actually was broken, or had been disabled, because the police couldn't even get it open. Is she lying to me? Maybe, maybe not.
I have another one who I really believe who basically volunteered in the last minute to drive for some pretty girl who told him she was going out to visit her mom but her license was suspended. From what he and witnesses are telling me this girl was a friend of a friend who in a social setting asked him to do this just two days before they left. He didn’t really know anything about the girl except that she was pretty. He told me he wasn’t working at the time and his main incentives were the possibility of getting laid and the chance to go to California where he had never been before. When they got to California she came back to the hotel with a pick up truck instead of the car they had driven out there. She told him her car broke down but her brother had loaned her the truck to drive. About a 187 pounds of compressed Mexican pot was stashed in a false compartment under the bed of the truck. He's a bright twenty year old kid with a clean record. His offer is 20 years with 10 of those being suspended, and he'll probably take it. The female co-defendant who told the police he didn't have anything to do with it (hearsay) has skipped bail and left him holding the bag. I’ll do what I can to shave a couple more years off the offer, but the prosecutors don’t care what the girl said and they aren’t dropping the charges.
We often get cases where there is a real possibility that our client didn't know about the drugs, but the reality is that no matter how good their stories are they would most likely be convicted and harshly punished if their cases go to trial. Because like you, most jurors are going to think that if the dope was in the car the accused had to know about it. Given the reputation of our local juries, even innocent people are tempted to plead guilty and take a much lighter sentence than the jury would probably give them. There is no doubt in my mind that I have done pleas for people before who were innocent. I hate doing it, but even if I am convinced my client is innocent, if he doesn’t want to roll the dice with a jury trial I’m not going to twist his arm. It’s his decision.
Just remember, it may seem okay to you that sometimes innocent people get wrongfully convicted. Your tune would change though if it was happening to you or someone you love.
"My friends, my friend's friends, don't use drugs."
I bet some of them do and you just don't know it.
"But we must never forget that ideally the acquittal of ten guilty persons is exactly ten times as great a failure of justice as the conviction of one innocent person."
-- Carleton Kemp Allen, Legal Duties and Other Essays in Jurisprudence 286-287 (1931)Carleton Allen
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