Second, we took more power from the prosecutor and gave it back to grand juries. For any case where the potential sentence exceeds five years, we now allow the grand jury to propose a plea bargain, and if the prosecutor doesn’t wish to offer it, the judge may direct that it be offered.
Third, we required that the US attorneys reveal plea bargain offers to juries—they may wonder, rightly, why the US attorney would have accepted five years before trial but is asking for 30 years because the citizen demanded his right to a trial. The prosecutors were furious, but if the government can’t stand behind its actions, then we have a problem.
And fourth, our reforms required the federal government to pay the reasonable costs of defense for those charges it could not prove to a jury. That took care of a lot of the shakiest charges we used to see on those 100-count Christmas tree indictments, which is good. A prosecutor should not bring any charges he does not believe he can prove beyond a reasonable doubt anyway. Moreover, too many lives were being ruined and too many innocent people left destitute by having to fight dozens of false criminal charges. A jury sees a hundred-count indictment and figures, “Gee, something here has to be true,” even if it isn’t.
What did the Democrats do? They tried to get to our right on crime, and we were happy to let them. That left us minorities, libertarians, and young people, as well as constitutional conservatives.
The justice system still isn’t perfect today, but it’s no longer a disgrace. We promised to fix it and we did. And in the process, we helped to win over folks who used to blame us for this kind of injustice.
We wanted to win over the young, tech-savvy, 20-something generation, so we decided to not be the side that wanted to stick them in a federal prison for a third of a century for a glorified violation of a computer terms of service advisory.
We ended the so-called War on Drugs. I detest drugs and get tired of users, but I also detested cops getting killed saving people from themselves. And I hate the human and fiscal cost of putting admittedly stupid, often not great people in jail for decades over pharmaceuticals. I experienced that damage firsthand.
After Marlowe’s pardons, we pushed to reevaluate drug sentences, not because we like drug users but because the old approach was not solving the problem and was causing more problems than it solved. Putting people in jail for decades was clearly not deterring the conduct—if doing what we were doing worked, we’d have been a drug-free paradise of hard-working, solid citizens.
Note that we also pushed through a ban on any federal government aid for drug users. If the states want to subsidize them, fine, but as far as the federal government goes, if you use drugs you are on your own.
We needed to relook at our strategy not for the benefit of the people who got prosecuted but for our own benefit. Imprisoning people should be a last resort—though there are plenty of knuckleheads whose behavior puts them far beyond the last resort. We need to save jail for people who should be in jail.
The minority community viewed the drug war as an assault upon itself. Moreover, because it was the police who enforced the drug war—and because police are about the only “conservative” government workers—we conservatives ended up getting the blame for all the abuses and negative consequences.
Many minority Democrats saw what we were trying to do, and they were natural allies with conservatives for pro-family, pro-community justice system reform designed to minimize the impact of drugs while preserving families and strengthening communities. To their credit, they rejected the Clinton administration’s pleas not to cooperate with us.
The inner cities are still the least conservative parts of this country, not counting faculty lounges, and are therefore most in need of conservative solutions. We needed to be in these communities, if not winning them then at least making the liberals break a sweat to retain them. Criminal justice reform was just the ticket to earn us a fresh look
There were just too many damn laws. I think there still are. The federal government, frankly, has almost no business criminalizing any more behavior. Crime is predominately a state problem. Every new law is, therefore, an expansion of government, which is presumptively bad. Instead of coming up with a hundred new laws a year, we tried to change the dynamic to come up with a hundred to repeal. Or, better yet, two hundred.
Law is a powerful weapon in the hands of a too-powerful government. We started stripping some of that power away, and we did it in the name of the values of fairness, compassion, and justice. You know, the stuff liberals lie about holding dear.
Billy Coleman (Activist)
Coleman’s raw milk farming is what had originally brought him into conflict with Walmart and other large companies that had used their connections to drive small competitors under. As a liberal, what he did not expect was to see the full weight of the criminal justice system fall upon him.
In the late 2010s, I was running an organic farm. No antibiotics, not hormones, no chemicals—nothing. Pure cow. That was out motto: “Jacob’s Creek Farms: Pure Cow.”
Well, we sold in little stores around the region. A lot of these stores were mom and pop operations. I knew a bunch were Tea Partiers, and I didn’t like that because at the time I was what you would probably call a liberal. But, you know, they did their thing and I did mine. They wanted to sell my milk and I wanted them to, so we were cool.
Well, they start going under because Walmart was undercutting them. Then all sorts of new regulations come on that most of these small stores couldn’t handle. The Walmarts and the other big companies didn’t even notice the new regulations—in fact, they had supported them. It crushed the little guys!
What was keeping these small stores going was partly that they would sell raw milk. People would drive out from the city to buy it. Well, sure enough the feds start coming around, telling us our local raw milk is unsafe and we can’t sell it. The hell with that—my milk was healthier than any of that processed junk that Walmart was selling. Of course, Walmart was all over the campaign to ban local raw milk. They said it was to protect the children. We said it was to protect their profits.
Well, we keep selling our stuff and we start getting harassed. One day, I am out in the barn and suddenly I am looking down the barrels of a bunch of assault rifles!
I thought they had made some kind of mistake, but they hadn’t. They came to serve a search warrant on my farm and they brought the SWAT team. Why the hell did the Agriculture Department have a SWAT team anyway?
I got charged with a bunch of violations, including conspiracy. I was looking at 10 years in federal prison and losing my farm. They offered me a plea deal—plea to a felony, do two years, but I still lose my farm because it is “a mechanism of a criminal enterprise.” My lawyer told me to take it, but I told the deputy US attorney to go to hell.
I thought I was done for, but then I started getting all this support from these conservatives, and not just in my area. I started getting interviewed on conservative media—the regular media ignored it—and I got so well known that the US attorney tried to revoke my bail.
The feds complained to the judge that the conservatives were trying to taint the jury pool. They sure as shit were. The jury heard the evidence, saw that I was guilty as hell of selling raw milk, and acquitted me.
The feds went ballistic. There were more raw milk prosecutions and more acquittals. The feds finally got a judge to issue a gag order saying that no one could discuss the raw milk cases in public because it “perverted justice.” Well, there was sure some justice being perverted all right, but not by us.