{"id":5630,"date":"2009-10-27T06:00:26","date_gmt":"2009-10-27T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5630"},"modified":"2009-10-26T11:40:11","modified_gmt":"2009-10-26T16:40:11","slug":"what-if-our-judges-were-all-totally-baked-dude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5630","title":{"rendered":"What If Our Judges Were All Totally Baked, Dude?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the irritating realities about the law, the part that most vexes us non-lawyers, is that laws pretty much mean what they say they mean, word for word, letter for letter.<\/p>\n

Which isn’t, in and of itself, a bad thing; once you learn to read a statute, you get a pretty clear idea of what the “law” actually is (barring “case law”, or other courts’ decisions which bear on the law you’re reading, which is one of those things you need to hire a lawyer for, since finding cases is one of those things that is pretty much designed to be impenetrable to people who haven’t been to law school.\u00a0 And it’s designed that way by the people who write and pass the laws, most of whom have been to law school.\u00a0 Connect the dots, people.\u00a0 Connect the dots).\u00a0\u00a0 And this can be enlightening; for starters, I’m able to tell people who say “if someone breaks into my house, I’m gonna shoot ’em, and nobody’s gonna do anything about it!” to “shut up and quit being an ignorant effing cracker” with some authority.\u00a0 (These people are never <\/em>Minnesota carry permit holders, by the way).\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’ve digressed a bit, here.<\/p>\n

The problem, of course, is that often the law is ambiguous.\u00a0 This is partly due to the fact that many legislators are idiots.\u00a0 It’s even more due to the fact that no legislator can anticipate all the possible implications of the law he\/she is trying to write.\u00a0 This, indeed, is usually a good thing; would we want <\/em>a clairvoyant legislature?\u00a0 Would it be a good thing if Phyllis Kahn could predict your future?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Again, I’ve digressed.<\/p>\n

It’s when you mix vague, inconsistent, ambiguous laws with big, ugly, emotional topics – in this case, the “war on drugs”, which a third of Americans believe to be a quagmire, a third believe to be a righteous holy war, and a third of Americans don’t care about because they’re tweaking, jonesing, baked, zoobed out or bombed out of their minds?<\/p>\n

Well, then you get decisions like this one <\/a>from the Supreme Court of Minnesota:<\/p>\n

In a 4-3 decision Thursday, the state’s highest court said a person can be prosecuted for a first-degree drug crime for 25 grams or more of bong water that tests positive for a controlled substance.<\/p>\n

The decision, which reverses two lower court rulings, came in the case of Sara Peck. Items seized during a search of her Rice County home in 2007 included a glass bong \u2014 a type of water pipe often used to smoke drugs \u2014 that contained 37 grams \u2014 about 2 1\/2 tablespoons \u2014 of a liquid that tested positive for the presence of methamphetamine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note that this decision reverses two <\/em>lower court rulings – which means that some county attorney spent tons and tons of taxpayer money to appeal the ruling all the way to the SCOM.<\/p>\n

Over two teapoons of meth-infused bong spew.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court said that unambiguously counts as a drug “mixture” under the wording of state law and sent the case back to Rice County District Court for further proceedings. The decision, authored by Justice G. Barry Anderson, noted that the liquid wasn’t plain clear water, but had a pink color and fruity odor, and that a narcotics officer had testified that drug users sometimes keep bong water to drink or inject later.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The statute defines a drug “mixture” as “a preparation, compound, mixture, or substance containing a controlled substance, regardless of purity.” When the language of a statute is unambiguous, the high court said, precedents prohibit courts from disregarding the letter of the law under the pretext of pursuing the letter of the law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The possibilities are endless.\u00a0 If you have a roommate\/spouse\/family member who smokes a lot of pot, and the the smoke collects on the ceiling, and some narcotics officer testifies that sometimes stoners will lick residue off of ceilings for a cheap buzz, then is your paint-job a “drug mixture?”<\/p>\n

If you snort some coke, and then blow your nose and toss the kleenex,\u00a0could your host be prosecuted over your snot being in their wastebasket?<\/p>\n

In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Paul Anderson said the majority’s decision “does not make sense, and borders on the absurd.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paul Anderson is the hero of the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the irritating realities about the law, the part that most vexes us non-lawyers, is that laws pretty much mean what they say they mean, word for word, letter for letter. Which isn’t, in and of itself, a bad thing; once you learn to read a statute, you get a pretty clear idea of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5630"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5632,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5630\/revisions\/5632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}