Dear All,
Mr. Charles has served our nation well for several years at the highest
levels of America's governance and in many different capacities. While he is not currently serving in the US Government,
he has continued to provide Americans insight into several issues of his concern
for our nation; with illegal drugs being just one of those concerns.
Mr. Charles words below are extremely important for “The Folks” to read
and be aware of when it comes to the recent Obama commutations of convicted
drug trafficking criminals.
Best regards,
Ronald L. Kirkish, CDFC/IFBC/CALM
Beware
the Jury of One
Robert B. Charles, a
former law clerk on the US Court of Appeals, litigator and adjunct on law and
government oversight at the Harvard University Extension School, served as
Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell. He currently leads a
Washington DC consulting group.
This week, President Obama suddenly “commuted” -- read: canceled,
reversed, and summarily ended -- the federal mandatory minimum sentences of 22
federally convicted drug traffickers.
Of that group, eight were serving life sentences for their endangerment
of the public, others ten years or more, and all likely had other encounters
with the law.
Exactly what kind of message is this president sending to America’s kids,
parents, teachers, mayors, governors -- in an old fashioned phrase, America --
and what can we expect next?
Three serious questions need to be asked and answered by the White
House.
First:
What is going on with these 22
offenders? Specifically, how, why, on what basis, for what compelling
reason could such sentences be lifted for such egregious federal crimes --
effectively re-endangering the American public?
What public policy suddenly outweighs the public’s
interest in preserving terms secured with federal taxpayer money, with all the
protections of due process, with all the opportunity for appeals -- which
produced no reversal of the conviction or reduction in
sentence?
Note that, in every single case, a federal
prosecutor had the discretion to bring a lower charge or seek a lesser penalty,
but did not.In every case, escape valves from imposing a mandatory minimum
sentence existed, since a federal judge can “depart downward” in sentencing if
circumstances warrant -- that is, if under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 a
convicted drug trafficker cooperates with the government or meets “specific
criteria relating to criminal history, violence, lack of injury to others, and
leadership.”
Apparently, no such circumstances were presented in
these 22 cases. So what was the compelling reason for freeing these
specific, major drug traffickers? By all indications, there were
none.
Second:
How does the president intend to explain to the
newly endangered populations of Illinois, Florida, Texas, Kansas, California,
Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio,
and Washington DC that he felt compelled to let these federal prisoners,
convicted of major crimes, more than one third of whom were serving full life
sentences, now loose in their communities?
Answer: he apparently does not intend to explain
it.
Strangely, the president took the entire group and
said they were the product of “an outdated sentencing regime.” What does
that mean? Particularly since many were sentenced within the past
decade? If the president means that drug trafficking is an outmoded crime,
or that the U.S. Sentencing Commission thinks these major criminals ought to be
free, he is wrong on both counts.
Far from “outmoded,” drug trafficking at the level
for which these offenders were convicted is both dangerous and
growing. Indeed, drug trafficking has been proliferating under this
president at a rate unseen before his tenure.
President Obama not only condoned drug abuse by
minimizing the addictive, gateway and proven damage associated with regular
marijuana abuse -- betraying tens of millions of parents with the implied
message that this drug is not dangerous.
But he has overseen an era of runaway drug abuse and
trafficking in heroin and prescription drugs, with other drug abuses in train,
including cocaine and methamphetamine.
DEA reported in 2014 that “heroin abuse and
availability are increasing… There was a 37 percent increase in heroin
initiates between 2008 and 2012.” Dollars to doughnuts, the vast majority
of those heroin addicts started their descent into addiction with -- you
guessed it, marijuana.
But the betrayal of parents, teachers, public,
church and civic leaders, not to mention young Americans themselves, has been
profound in other ways.
In addition to sending the absurd signal that drug
abuse, broadly construed, is actually “recreation” of some kind, this president
has literally begun opening the prison doors to those who have helped kill
American kids in large numbers -- through high level drug
trafficking. What can justify this abdication of the public trust?
Whatever his motivation, the president’s actions
certainly cut against the grain of the longstanding constitutional and criminal
justice system under which we live, common beliefs and understandings of most
Americans, and the best interests of the country at large, particularly the
country’s youth.
Which only returns us to the opening question, what
message is this president sending?
The answer is: a message of profound indifference to
rule of law, antipathy to America’s families and communities and the values
that they most dearly revere, including protection of their children and
preservation of public safety.
Third:
And so the big, final question is this: If we
cannot discern this president’s root motivations in looking the other way on a
plethora of serious drug crimes; if we see an unconscionable indifference to
the damage done to America by drug traffickers; if we see unabashed defense of
drug abuse on one hand and a refusal to enforce federal anti-trafficking laws
on the other; and if we now see this president indiscriminately freeing an
unprecedented number of drug traffickers -- a real danger to society, all duly
prosecuted and sentenced to long terms -- what does all this mean?
The answer, unfortunately, is likely this: with
whatever misshaped views of public safety define this president’s conception of
America and the world -- including the danger of drug trafficking -- we may be
about to see another unprecedented act.
What act? Potentially, the freeing of thousands
of drug traffickers and others incarcerated for parallel crimes, including terrorists
behind bars in the United States or held at Guantanamo by recourse to what has
now become a commonplace, the abuse of executive authority.
In sum, beware the impending use of what was -- until now -- a very
limited tool of constitutional equity, a means for remedying a specific
injustice, the presidential pardon and presidential ability to commute specific
sentences for case-related reasons.
We may be about to enter a “Brave New World,” graduating against our
common will and under this president’s “power of the pen” to a world in which
longstanding norms are viewed as simply “outmoded” -- and summarily reversed by
a jury of one.
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