Posted on June 14,
2018
Johnson Commutation
Calls Libertarians’ Bluff
by
Daniel
Clark
We’re all familiar with libertarians’ anecdotal
evidence of the War on Drugs run amok.
It seems that practically everybody knows a guy who met a guy who heard about
a guy who had no criminal record at all, until one day he got pulled over for a
traffic violation, when the cops found two joints in his glove compartment and
– BAM! – 20 years in the hoosegow.
Then how come the most famous victim of allegedly
excessive drug prosecution is Alice Marie Johnson, whose life sentence was commuted
by President Trump at the behest of celebrity activist Kim Kardashian? If our prison walls are bulging with
recreational drug users, it seems odd that the one drug offender the president decided
to spring was a woman who was described as “the quintessential entrepreneur” in
a cocaine distribution ring by the judge who had sentenced her.
Most
news reports have presented Johnson’s own version of events as the unvarnished
truth, while emphasizing the points that she’s a great-grandmother, and a
nonviolent offender whose first arrest was met with a lifetime sentence. How being a great-grandmother qualifies her
for clemency in unclear. It’s not as if
she was responsible to her family in the first place, when she got involved in
an illicit drug operation to cover her gambling habit.
It may have been her first conviction, but it’s not as
if she had committed her crime only once, given that she was a cog in an
organized criminal enterprise.
Furthermore, nonviolent does not equal nondestructive. Facilitating the distribution of more than
20,000 kilos of cocaine onto American streets is far from a victimless
crime. There are many crimes that are
literally nonviolent, including theft, counterfeiting, fraud, embezzlement,
racketeering, bribery and identity theft, just to name a few. Even some physically destructive crimes, like
arson, are considered to be nonviolent, but since when does that mean we
shouldn’t jail the offenders?
Nevertheless, Trump has set Johnson free, and he has
indicated that he’s willing to consider more commutations and pardons. So where are the pro-pot activists with their
presumably extensive list of far more innocent people who have been left
rotting in prison? Where are all the
people who have gone to the clink for the single offense of possessing a small
amount of narcotics for personal consumption?
In 2014, President Obama declined a plea for clemency
on Johnson’s behalf, even though he was extremely lenient toward drug offenders
in general. During his presidency, Obama
pardoned 18 of them, and commuted the sentences of six more. All but one of these were guilty of
conspiracy to produce, import or distribute illegal drugs, or some combination
of the three. The lone exception was an
Air Force court martial case, in which the defendant was found guilty of not
only cocaine use, but also adultery (which violates the Uniform Code of
Military Justice) and passing bad checks.
Of
those 18 pardon recipients, seven had not even served any prison time, and only
one had served a sentence of greater than five years. There was not a single “guy who heard about a
guy” case among the lot of them. There’s
been no word of all the harmless, first-time possession offenders who are supposedly
squirting through the bars of our overcrowded prisons.
So where are they?
Since libertarians are so animated by this issue, they ought to have
jumped at the chance to publicize all those alleged victims of prosecutorial
overreach. If such cases really are choking
our criminal justice system as we’re often told, then they ought to be as
visible as the secret NAFTA superhighway, and the Texas-sized Pacific island
made of plastic grocery bags. Well,
maybe those aren’t very good examples, but you get the point. The tales the pro-pot activists tell about
the persecution of casual marijuana consumers are every bit as unrealistic as
those giggling overactors from Reefer Madness.
The belief that our prisons are crammed with casual
drug users whose crimes have never hurt anyone but themselves is a libertarian
martyrdom fantasy. Libertarians like to
tell themselves that every time they light up, they’re openly defying the
omniscient rulers of a dystopian prison state, and are thereby putting
themselves at constant risk of imprisonment, torture, and drone-zapping, and
are basically staring death or worse in the face on a daily basis (and … loving it!) Seriously, fellas, you’re not that
brave. If you really thought you were
putting yourselves in that kind of danger, you’d find some other way to amuse
yourselves.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press