11/19/13 – Jennifer Turner – The Scott Horton Show

Fact.
The new NSA data center in Utah requires 1.7 million gallons of water every single day to operate.
Billions of Fourth Amendment violations need massive computers and the water to cool them.
That water is being supplied by the state of Utah.
Fact.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution which requires your state to help the feds violate your rights.
Our message to Utah?
Turn.
It.
Off.
Water equals no NSA data center.
Visit off now dot org.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
It's got Horton show.
And our first guest on the show today is Jennifer Turner.
She's the human rights researcher in the American Civil Liberties Union Human Rights Program.
And boy, they got this new thing out that if you got a heart, it's going to break it.
It's the life without parole report.
More than thirty two hundred serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses.
And it's a living death is the living death life without parole for nonviolent offenses.
Welcome back to the show, Jennifer.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you on the show.
And boy, pretty upset about reading this thing.
First and foremost, can you explain a little bit about why you even write in this thing that these numbers are far too low, that you can't account for all the people who are really in prison for life without parole?
That's absolutely right.
We found that three thousand two hundred seventy people are definitely serving life without the possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes.
But that really underestimates the number of people who will die in prison for nonviolent crimes that they committed.
These numbers are just people are serving formal sentences that are life without parole.
It doesn't account for people who get sentences like three hundred fifty years for drug sales, for instance, or people who get life sentences who don't really get any kind of meaningful consideration for parole.
And in California, for instance, there are many, many prisoners serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes who are eligible for parole.
But the parole board has denied 98 percent of the parole requests it's heard and really doesn't consider them adequately.
Wow.
So, yeah, it's unfortunate.
I guess it would take a whole other study to try to account for all that.
I guess, you know, just judging from, you know, accidental kind of, you know, anecdotal knowledge from TV and that kind of thing I've picked up over the years, I get the idea that people are sentenced to those kind of three and four hundred years type of sentences quite often.
That maybe some states, they don't have a life without parole option, but they'll just go ahead and find you guilty on so many counts that they stack your years up so high that you'll die of old age in there anyway.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
So, for instance, Alaska doesn't have life without parole as an available sentence under its laws, but it doles out sentences of ninety nine years quite regularly.
People frequently are sentenced to 40 years, 50 years, 60 years for nonviolent drug crimes, including just drug possession.
And given their age, it's pretty much impossible that they would be released from prison during their lifetime.
Now, when it comes to life without parole here in Texas, for a long time, I believe pretty much the only debate about it was if we have an option of life without parole, then people won't be sentenced to death as often.
And that would be problematic.
And so we don't want to have life without parole as an option.
And it was really anti-death penalty forces, I believe, who finally fought for and won a life without parole option because you ended up having people sentenced to death who really shouldn't have been.
But the jurors still wanted them to be locked up and stay there, but maybe not have them executed was the thinking.
Right.
Well, and, you know, the reality is, you know, you would expect a sentence like life without parole, which is the most severe sentence short of the death penalty in this country.
You would expect this reserved for those who've committed the most heinous crimes.
But in reality, what's happening around the country is that people are being sentenced to life without parole for crimes as petty as siphoning gasoline out of a truck, for shoplifting three belts from a store, for a shoplifting laptop computer from Walmart, for having a bottle cap smeared with a smidge of heroin residue that's so minute it can't be weighed, for being the middleman in a sale of ten dollars in marijuana.
I mean, I can list case after case after case where clearly the punishment does not fit the crime.
Well, please do, in fact, slow down a little bit and elaborate on those.
So somebody has, you know, I don't know, the lab says that there's a smear of heroin on a bottle cap.
And how in the world does that end up equaling life sentence without parole?
Don't all of those drug charges have to have a weight involved?
Well, it turns out, no.
I found two cases where people were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for an amount of drugs that was not weighable.
So in the case that you're meant that we're talking about, the bottle cap case is a man named Paul Carter in Louisiana who's been, who's standing on a street corner.
And an undercover cop approached him and asked him to search his pocket.
He was a heroin addict, according to himself, and they found a bottle cap in his pocket, which had just a smear of heroin residue.
They sent it to the labs and found that it couldn't be weighed, but they said it counted as possession of heroin.
And because of prior convictions, one for escape at 18 and one for possession of stolen property when he was 21, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole under, in that case, Louisiana's three-strike laws.
He's been incarcerated now for 16 years.
And, you know, he's done substance abuse treatment in prison.
He's remained clean, and it's really both a waste of his life, but also a waste of taxpayer dollars to keep him incarcerated for the rest of his life.
Yeah.
Well, I try not to get too far into that because, you know, maybe just taking him out back and shooting him would be cheapest, but I don't want to encourage that.
You know, if it if the most just result costs the most, then that's fine with me, too.
Right.
What matters here is their human lives, which are priceless.
And and the thought, I mean, for anyone, put yourself in this position where somebody you say a middleman, somebody goes, oh, yeah, I know a guy who could probably sell you 10 bucks worth of weed.
Life in prison for that.
Imagine being locked up like an animal for the rest of your life in a cage.
And with other people who presumably at least some of them are guilty of violent crimes and deserve to be there.
You know what I mean?
And who might actually be dangerous to be locked up with.
I mean, that's no picnic going to the pen.
It's amazing to think that.
Well, anyway, the cost thing that I don't want to focus on as long as.
Yeah.
So how many states have these three strikes in your outlaws?
And don't they know the legislators who come up with that?
They know as well as the judges that this is going to end up leading to a lot of unfair circumstances and families.
Every state around the country has some form of a three strikes law, including the federal system.
I didn't know that at all.
Yeah.
But only nine states in the country have people serving life without parole for nonviolent crime.
At least according to the statistics, the data we got from the State Department of Corrections around the country.
Now, there will may be more states.
In fact, we just found out that Michigan has at least one person serving life without parole for marijuana.
Even though their state prison system told us no one is serving life without parole for nonviolent crime.
So it's at least nine states and people who are serving life without parole in those states are largely been sentenced under three strikes or other habitual offender laws.
But not exclusively.
Some states also very heavily punish drug crimes, especially, but also property crimes with mandatory sentences that can be life without parole.
Yeah.
Well, and OK, so now out of the thirty to seventy eight, you said seventy nine percent.
That's the thirty two hundred and seventy eight people locked up that you guys studied.
Seventy nine percent of them were there on nonviolent drug charges.
But how many what percentage of them were there on nonviolent charges one way or the other?
Like you talk about shoplifting and burglary and things like that.
Well, seventy nine percent are there for drug charges and the rest are pretty much there for property crimes.
So the property crimes are crimes like possession of stolen property, shoplifting, theft, burglary.
We didn't count crimes like robbery, for instance, as we categorize that as a violent crime.
Since the definition of robbery is is use or threat of force to get something.
So we were only looking at cases where there's no interpersonal violence.
Somebody who broke into someone's home, broke into an office building.
Many cases of possession of stolen property, including one guy who got life without parole for possession of stolen junk metal.
He was a junk dealer who bought a few a few valves and an elbow pipe from one junk dealer and sold it to another, which is what junk dealers do.
But it was found that the scrap metal had been stolen and he got life without parole for that.
Wow.
Yeah, where he they didn't even have to prove it.
Doesn't sound like that.
He knew he was stolen from another dealer.
Yeah, he wasn't even accused of having stolen.
These are possession of stolen property cases where there were no allegations that the person even was involved in the original theft of the goods.
But but they were found with them later.
OK, now.
So I'm sorry, because I guess I misunderstood the these statistics there.
The thirty two seventy the thirty two seventy eight.
It's two thousand five hundred eighty nine or so.
Those are drug charges, the rest burglaries and shoplifting and such.
But then.
So what percentage is that out of all the people doing life without parole?
Yeah.
So the overall number of people serving life without parole is much higher.
I'm just trying to remember exactly what the number is, but significantly higher than that.
So, you know, the percentage, I mean, it's one it's one part of the population.
I should say, you know, we're talking about people serving life without parole for nonviolent crimes.
You know, they're just a part of like a much bigger problem.
And I think these cases are really the most extreme manifestation of our sentencing laws in this country, which have truly gotten out of control.
It was extreme sentencing across the board for different types of crimes, not just nonviolent crimes and not just life without parole.
But these cases really, I think, show how how unfair our sentencing laws have become.
Well, sure.
I mean, you talk about, you know, somebody gets life without parole because they got in a bar fight or something like that.
That might count as violent, but it's hardly the kind of thing that someone should be sentenced like that for.
But now can you give us a ballpark as far as, you know, 20, 30, 70 percent or what percentage it is of people doing life without parole?
Are in there for one kind of nonviolent crime or another?
Well, the number of people doing life without parole for a nonviolent crime, it's 3,278.
And the total number of people serving life sentences of any kind are 159,500.
Now, the number of those who are doing it without parole are almost 50,000, 49,000 people.
So this is well, I'm way bad at math, but something on the order of almost 10 percent of them.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And really what we're saying is what these sentences show is how ineffective and how extreme our sentencing has become across the board in this country.
I mean, what does it say about us as a country if we would sentence someone to life without the possibility of parole for siphoning gas out of a truck?
And what does it say about how we sentence people for any crime in this country?
I think more than anything, it says that people are way too susceptible to the television because none of this has to do necessarily with and you guys are the world's experts on this.
If you go and overlay this in that graph of sentencing and punishment and harshness has a lot more to do with media coverage of crime than it has to do with the actual crime rate.
And I remember back in the so-called crack epidemic of the 1980s when Tom Brokaw was doing a special every couple of weeks about the Crips and the Bloods.
Oh, feral young black men with machine guns are coming to your neighborhood with their blue do rags and people were scared to death.
But it wasn't true.
It was so blown out of proportion.
It was completely ridiculous.
But the polls showed that the people's fear of it wasn't related to the real numbers of the crimes.
It was related to the amount of coverage on TV that the crimes got.
These sentences and the prevalence of life without parole sentences for nonviolent crimes is really a symptom of the more than four decades of the war on drugs and tough on crime policies, many of which were passed, as you said, especially in the 80s and early 90s because of public concern about crime rates, because of highly publicized murders.
There's a handful of publicized murders, the death of one athletic star from a drug overdose.
And that really helped fuel all the passage of laws that I think no one really expected the consequences would be that today we would be spending so much and throwing away the key for so many people's lives for nonviolent crimes.
And really, these laws very much can be traced back to that period.
And what's interesting, as you mentioned, with crime rates, the number of people serving life without parole, this is for both violent and nonviolent crime, has quadrupled in the last just 20 years.
And throughout those 20 years, crime rates have been dropping.
So there isn't even a correlation.
I mean, the number of people incarcerated is now over 2.3 million in this country.
And even though the crime rates have been dropping consistently for at least the past 20 years, if not longer.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, the typical talk radio talking point there is, well, that's right, because we locked up all the bad guys and now we're safe or something.
The numbers don't bear that out, do they?
Well, no, they don't.
Because if you overlay a map of the number of people incarcerated, what you'll see is that it stayed very consistent from 1930 through 1970, and then it shot up.
And then if you overlay that with the crime rate, you'll see that the crime rate has been consistently dropping now for over two decades, even as the incarceration rate was shooting up very high.
And it wasn't a direct correlation of, look, crime was going up, then we started incarcerating people, and then crime went down.
Rather, we're incarcerating more and more and more and more people, even though crime rates have been consistently dropping.
So it doesn't bear out.
The link isn't there.
What we know is that people are incarcerated because our laws have become much more extreme, because we've passed mandatory sentencing laws that don't give judges any kind of opportunity to judge and to chew the punishment that says it's a crime.
Instead, we're just locking people up reflexively with these one-size-fits-all policies that were passed a long time ago.
I don't think that the public really intended this outcome.
Right.
Well, now that this is what we've got, do you think the message is getting across?
Because we are talking about a lot of people who don't deserve to be there, which means a lot of Americans who know somebody who doesn't deserve to be there and who is.
It seems like at some point, maybe it'll be good politics for someone running for office to try to fix this.
Yeah, I think so.
I think we're really at a historic moment now for possibilities for reform.
The Attorney General himself in August said that we put far too many people in prison for far too long, and he announced some reforms of mandatory sentencing laws that don't really go far enough, but they're certainly a very, very important first step.
And even the president himself has expressed concern about how we sentence people, particularly people who've committed nonviolent crimes.
But beyond that, federal judges have for many years been opposing mandatory sentences and have really been rallying cry from the bench saying we need to change these laws so judges can do their job and judge in individual cases.
But more recently, particularly in states that are dealing with depleted state coffers, they're dealing with the fact that they're spending more to incarcerate than they are to educate the public and the states are calling for some reforms.
And some reform-minded governors have instituted some reforms.
But there's finally this moment where I think there is some growing consensus across both sides of the political aisle that there's a need for reform.
And this is the moment, I think, for the public to support those reforms.
And we have a petition on our website, aclu.org, slash living death.
If you click take action, you can sign a petition to President Obama to review the sentences of the prisoners and federal prisoners serving life without parole for nonviolent crimes.
But also both in the states and the federal government, it's really time to pass laws that would end life without parole sentences for nonviolent crimes.
And there are two bipartisan bills in front of Congress now that would somewhat limit the reach of mandatory minimum sentencing laws that would also help to make our sentencing system more fair and smarter.
Well, I sure wish you luck with that.
I know that Senator James Webb tried to do some reforms and then he just quit in disgust because he couldn't get anywhere, right?
Well, I don't know much about that, but I know that there have been some senators who've been leading the charge.
I mean, Rand Paul recently has made very strong statements about the need to reform mandatory minimum sentencing laws, particularly.
And there are especially, I think, among conservatives, there have been more and more, I think, spoken about the need for certain reforms.
And I just hope that it will result in some real change.
But I think that these lawmakers, the ones who do think it's time to change our sentencing system to one that's smarter and fairer, really need the support of the public behind them.
Well, you know what?
I think that it would be great politics if the ACLU would adopt a pro-Second Amendment position.
Because as I was reading through this, I saw where at least a few of these people doing life without parole are doing life without parole for having a gun on them, not for doing anything with it.
And I think that, you know, typical card-carrying ACLU supporters like to imagine that if we pass a bunch of gun laws, it's going to take guns away from, I don't know who they think is going to do something bad next.
But what it ends up being is a lot of poor, powerless, minority group-type people end up being victims of the DA's office and end up doing huge prison terms for nothing, just for owning an object.
And that's, you know, when we look at these kind of sentences and we say, you know, this is what's wrong with the war on drugs, we need to roll back the war on drugs, we ought to be saying let's roll back the war on guns, too.
Because that's a big part of this whole thing.
And then every right-wing group will go, wow, the ACLU found the Second Amendment, now they like the whole Bill of Rights, alright!
And then all that bad blood will be washed away and we'll have a whole new coalition of the whole Bill of Rights.
It's true that in some of the cases I documented, people were sentenced to life without parole purely for possession of a weapon.
So in these cases it was for the crime of being a felon, a convicted felon in possession of a weapon.
So there were no allegations that they used the weapon or that they committed any crimes with the weapon, it was just that because they had a criminal record, a felon record, that they weren't lawfully allowed to have a weapon.
And in some states, they were sentenced to life without parole for that crime.
Yeah, I mean, and now how many rich white guys were sentenced to life without parole for holding a gun in their hand?
Well, I didn't find any such cases, I'll tell you that.
For the most part, really, in the cases I documented at least...
Not that that would be okay, but of course we know who the victims are here, it's the brown and the powerless.
Yeah, in the cases I documented at least, the vast majority were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, many who dropped out of school or hadn't completed high school.
But what was also most shocking about my findings was that there's staggering racial disparity in sentencing people to life without parole for non-violent crime.
So we know that there's racial disparity in the criminal justice system, but we found that 65% of the people serving life without parole for non-violent crimes are black and 18% are white.
And those differences are much more striking than among just the general prison and jail population, which suggests that there is unequal treatment of blacks by the criminal justice system.
And in the federal system, blacks are 20 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to life without parole for non-violent crimes.
Latinos are five times more likely to be sentenced to die in prison for non-violent crime than whites.
And in the states it varies, in some it's worse than others.
In Louisiana, over 91% of the prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent crime are black, and they're 23 times more likely to be sentenced to die in prison for a non-violent crime than whites.
Wow, that is amazing.
What's the solution to that other than just the wholesale repeal of the drug war that we talked about?
Is there anything that can be done to...
Well, of course what'll happen is they'll just crack down on more white people and try to balance it out rather than lay off poor black folks.
Well, you know, eliminating non-violent crimes is a strike in the three-strike laws of the states, and eliminating life without parole sentences for drugs specifically, which is where we see the greatest disparities, would effectively reverse these racial disparities.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And it's a good place to start where it's not like me asking for the whole loaf all at once and everything, and actually be reasonable and get some work done.
Now, so one of the things that you write about in here too that's very important is about how the judges, and we hear this a lot, right, where the judge says, I'm so sorry to have to do this to you, but it's my job.
50 years or whatever, right, the mandatory minimums.
It seems like they could all just resign and get real jobs.
Anyway, they carry on, but who really has the discretion is the prosecutors, and the prosecutors decide with a stroke of a pen whether they want to charge this or charge that, and they know that if they charge that it's going to be life without parole, and in a sense they're the ones doing the sentencing on some of these slam-dunk drug possession cases and so forth.
And I don't know, does that seem right to you?
It really works out where they sort of are the judge, right, the prosecutor.
That's exactly the problem is that these laws, I mean discretion has been shifted to the prosecutors.
Mandatory sentencing laws have shifted all the discretion to the prosecutors.
So the prosecutor decides how the crime is going to be charged.
The prosecutor decides what the sentence will be.
And as you said, in many of the cases I reviewed, the judges objected to the sentence, but their hands were tied.
One judge sentencing a man to life in prison without parole for selling small amounts of crack at a time over the course of a couple of weeks at a run-down hotel room to support his drug addiction.
He said, this is a travesty, it's just silly, but my hands are tied.
And a big part of the problem is that the law casts a really wide net, so it subjects defendants to these extreme sentences that lawmakers simply never intended.
Legislatures just didn't anticipate that these crimes would be imposed and these sentences would be imposed on people for such minor crimes.
But now the prosecutors hold most of the power.
They have a responsibility to wield it fairly, and unfortunately in many of these cases they're simply not.
I mean, I even documented cases where the judge refused to impose the mandatory sentence.
One guy, the judge refused to impose any sentence.
He had threatened a cop while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser, but the prosecutor continued to appeal.
I saw cases where the prosecutor appealed two, three times, where the sentence kept going up incrementally.
The judge said, okay, fine, I'll give you 10 years, make it 20 years, make it 30 years.
But they were forced to impose life without parole under the law.
Amazing.
Well, you know, I've told this story over and over again, and I'll keep telling it.
I may have told it to you, sorry if I did, but I used to be a cab driver, and I met an assistant DA from Houston, which I think is in second place behind America, or maybe third place behind America and China for most executions in the world.
And she said that the motto at the Houston district attorney's office is, or Harris County district attorney's office is, if they really didn't do it, they'll get out on appeal, which means that anyone the cops bring them gets nailed to the wall for as much as they can possibly do to them.
And they don't care at all that these are human beings and that they have a natural born right to their life.
And they don't care whether they did it or not.
They don't even try to know whether they did it or not.
And, of course, they're wrong that if they're really innocent, they'll get out on appeal, because the appeal, correct me if I'm wrong, is only a question of whether the judicial process was fair or not, and the burden is on the convict to prove that something was wrong with the trial in the process, rather than, I really ain't the guy you were looking for.
That's not even the question in an appeal.
Well, the cases I looked at, the people who have been sentenced, who are serving these sentences until they die in prison for nonviolent crimes, have a lot of challenges in fighting their cases.
So many of them could not afford private attorneys, so they had court-appointed attorneys, many of whom are overworked and some of whom are just not doing their job.
I mean, I talked to people where their attorney did not put on really any defense, called no witnesses, didn't subpoena the witnesses in the case, barely made any argument at trial, and the trial lasted less than a day in some of these cases.
And it made it nearly impossible for these people to make any kind of legal claims to really assert their innocence adequately.
And what's more, once they have been convicted, they don't have a right to a court-appointed attorney for post-conviction appeals.
So you can have a court-appointed attorney for the trial, but if you can't afford a lawyer to represent you after you've been convicted, you don't have any choice but to represent yourself.
So I've looked at a lot of cases where people were really on their own after their trial.
Even if their lawyer did a terrible job, they were trying to make claims about ineffective assistance of counsel and couldn't go anywhere.
And I looked at cases where they filed their appeals in pencil, handwritten, people who weren't even literate trying to make legal arguments.
All right, we've got to go.
I'm sorry, Jennifer.
Thank you so much.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Oh, sure.
Jennifer Turner, everybody, from the ACLU.
I really appreciate it.
Okay.
The study is Living Death, Life Without Parole at ACLU.org.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and, of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out youtube.com, and email scotthorton.org for more details.
See you there.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindo.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the Web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
The Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas.overseas.
So Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against our depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money, and then be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
See what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to talk to you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
In the book, Swanson explains what the revolution was, the rise of empire, and the permanent military economy.
And all from a free market, libertarian perspective.
Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation, says the book is absolutely awesome, and that Swanson's perspectives on the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis are among the best I've read.
The poll numbers state that people agree on one thing.
It's that America is on the wrong track.
In The War State, Swanson gets to the bottom of what's ailing our society.
Empire.
The permanent national security bureaucracy that runs it, and the mountain of debt that has enabled our descent down this dark road.
The War State could well be the book that finally brings this reality to the level of mainstream consensus.
America can be saved from its government and its arms dealers.
First, get the facts.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson, available at your local bookseller and at amazon.com.
Or just click on the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org.
Hey, Al Scott here.
Man, I had a chance to have an essay published in the book, Why Peace, edited by Mark Gutman, but I didn't understand what an opportunity it was.
Boy, do I regret I didn't take it.
This compendium of thoughts by the greatest anti-war writers and activists of our generation will be remembered and studied long into the future.
You've got to get Why Peace.
You've got to read Why Peace.
It features articles by Harry Brown, Robert Naiman, Fred Bronfman, Dahlia Wasfy, Richard Cummings, Karen Gutowski, Butler Schaefer, Kathy Kelly, Robert Higgs, Anthony Gregory, and so many more.
Why Peace?
Because war is the health of everything wrong with our society.
Get Why Peace, down at the bookshop or amazon.com.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new project, Listen and Think Audio at listenandthink.com.
They've got two new audiobooks read by the deepest voice in libertarianism, the great historian Jeff Riggenbach.
Our Last Hope, Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty by Michael Meharry of the Tenth Amendment Center is available now.
And Beyond Democracy, co-authored by Frank Karsten of the Mises Institute Netherlands and journalist Carl Beckman will be released this month.
And they're only just getting started.
So check out listenandthink.com.
You may be able to get your first audiobook absolutely free.
That's Listen and Think Audio at listenandthink.com.