Articles Posted in Drug Crimes

It’s a rainy night in Georgia” crooned Brook Benton in the 1970 R&B classic, which is fitting on this rainy Monday during this rainiest time of the year here in soggy Atlanta, Georgia.  Although it’s very wet and ugly outside, here in my office I am pondering possibilities for resolving a certain federal criminal case in which my client wants me to negotiate the best “deal” he can get. Looking for a deal sometimes means we need to get creative, and this leads to my never-ending quest for quirky and oddball federal crimes that sometimes come in handy.  These strange federal crimes can be useful if they have a lower penalty than the one suggested by the prosecutor in the first place.  I will do another post some other time soon to lay out some of the really stupid federal crimes that are on the books.

However, considering my current matter, I am facing the fact that some federal crimes have mandatory penalty structures.  These make it especially hard to do my job of getting the lowest possible sentence for my client.  For example, even if I convince the Judge that my client is entitled to mercy, the Judge’s hands are tied and he or she cannot impose anything less than the mandatory minimum punishment.  As a result, I try to convince prosecutors to let my client plead guilty to a different, but related, crime which carries no mandatory minimum and a relatively low maximum punishment. Continue reading

I have several federal criminal cases in Atlanta and other parts of Georgia involving allegations that my clients dealt in marijuana.  Some folks in other parts of the country also have contacted me recently about federal criminal prosecutions in states where the local laws permit personal use and state-sponsored sale of marijuana.  In virtually all of these cases, someone always asks: “But I thought Pot was legal? How can the federal government prosecute me (or my loved one) if the state where the federal court is in lets people use this drug?”

One of the less well-known parts of our wonderful Constitution is called the “supremacy clause.”  If you are interested, you can find it in Article VI, the second paragraph.  Here is what it says: “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The supremacy clause makes a lot of sense for many aspects of life in a democracy.  For example, things would be a bit untidy if the law on how to build and maintain a highway changed at the state line separating Alabama from Georgia.  Keeping some level of uniformity means that our people can expect the same basic guidelines and laws as we move from place to place in this enormous and beautiful land.

Ever since I was a young federal criminal defense attorney, our country has been locking up people at an unprecedented pace.  The United States holds the title as the country that has locked up the highest number of people.  On a per capita basis, we are number 2, only behind the tiny Seychelles Islands.  Ever since I was a young man I have observed firsthand how these short-sighted “lock ’em all up” policies decimated entire communities, ruined families, and basically did no good (other than making a lot of jobs for jailers, people who design and operate jails, drug agents, prosecutors, probation officers, judges, and yes, criminal defense lawyers). However, over the past 5-8 years, some changes have come about.  Furthermore, it is now possible to reduce many federal criminal sentences that were imposed years ago.  More changes could be on the horizon.

As many readers know, one big change that resulted in reductions of some federal sentences is the “crack reduction”.  Back when our Nation locked up tens of thousands of citizens, our lawmakers decided that some dumb kid dealing in crack cocaine should be punished 100 times more severely than the disco-dancing fool who peddled the powder version of the very same drug.  After an entire generation was impacted by such unfair sentencing, Congress and the U.S. Sentencing Commission changed the rules, resulting in some prisoners getting reductions to their sentences.

More recently, Congress and the Sentencing Commission approved a reduction in the “drug table”.  Those who know about federal criminal sentencing realize that the “Sentencing Guidelines” is a point-based system designed to spit out a recommended sentence.  In drug cases, the biggest factor is the quantity of drugs for which the Defendant will be held accountable.  This quantity is then tied to an “offense level”.  The more drugs in a case, the higher the offense level.  Realizing that we have locked up way too many people for far too long, Congress and the Sentencing Commission last year reduced everything in the Drug Table by 2 levels, which can mean a fairly sizable reduction even for a Defendant serving a lengthy sentence.  Just this morning I got an agreement from the federal Probation Office that the judge should reduce one of my client’s sentences by almost three years.  This means my client will be getting out of prison very soon, to the relief of his family (not to mention the overburdened taxpayers).

We handle lots of federal criminal cases. We also occasionally represent people accused of federal drug crimes, both here in Atlanta and around Georgia, Alabama and Florida. Over the past decade there has been a slow recognition that sentences for drug crimes are simply too long. This week, the United States Sentencing Commission votes on an important aspect of the decade-long effort to reduce sentences for federal drug offenses. You can read a paper here that describes the potential reduction and how it would impact people who are already serving sentences for federal drug crimes.

A little history lesson helps to understand this vote and how it can possibly help people already sentenced to federal prison for a drug crime. Back in the 1980’s, the media hyped up what it called the crack cocaine explosion. Politicians fell all over themselves in efforts to be “tough on crime.” This resulted in a very bad law enacted in 1986 which created mandatory minimum penalties for federal drug crimes. These mandatory penalties caused automatic enhancements to another set of rules for federal criminal sentences called the “Sentencing Guidelines.” As a result, an entire generation of offenders were subject to increased sentences, whether or not the Defendant was a young first-time offender or a seasoned long-term criminal. Taxpayers spent billions of dollars on useless and inhumane incarceration.
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Finally, with Monday’s announcement by Eric Holder, we have a public acknowledgment by our country’s top law enforcement official that the War on Drugs and its policies, implemented since the 1970’s, have failed. Holder went further than to offer an empty statistic. He basically stated that the U.S. has not only utterly failed at its claimed mission to reduce criminal drug activity, but our criminal justice system has instead exacerbated an epidemic of poverty, addiction, and criminality enough to create the almost inability to achieve public safety and effective law enforcement in our current society.

In federal courts each year, 25,000 people are convicted for drug offenses, with 45% of those convictions for lower level offenses. According to the Justice Department, the cost of incarceration in the United States was $80 billion in 2010. Despite the fact that the U.S. contains 5% of the world’s population, we incarcerate 25% of the world’s prisoners. Justice Department officials said federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent over capacity.
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Sitting here in Atlanta, I really like when I find out about bright, energetic lawyers handling federal criminal cases all around the country. One such case is Burrage v. United States, where this past Tuesday the United States Supreme Court agreed to review important questions as to what it means when “death results” from drug dealing. To many lawyers and others in this field, it might seem that a case like this only really matters to folks defending drug cases. However, this is an important appeal on issues related to causation, the appropriateness of jury instructions, and construing federal statutes.

Mr. Burrage was like too many folks, caught up in the drug business, selling relatively small amounts of controlled substances. His life intersected with Joshua Banka, another lost soul who was a long-standing poly-substance abuser. Burrage sold some heroin to Banka, who died after using some of the drug. Banka had lots of other drugs in his system as well, and his girlfriend acknowledged he’d used some of these other drugs in the day before he died. The experts who testified at trial gave complex answers about the cause of Banka’s death, but they could not say that Banka would not have died if he had not used heroin (this method of saying the word “not” three times in the same sentence appears in the briefs for each side of the case).
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In a earlier posts, I wrote about the Supreme Court’s “dog sniff” cases, the former in which the Defendant was stopped while driving his truck and a drug dog eventually alerted to the presence of dogs, the latter case where (based on a “tip”) the police walked a drug detector dog on the Defendant’s porch, the pooch alerted, and based on that they got a warrant to search the house. As I predicted, the Supreme Court affirmed the search of the truck, and yesterday, they sided with the homeowner in the sniff that took place on the porch of the home. Yesterday’s case is Florida v. Jardines, and by a 5-4 margin the Court held that the sniff on the porch was illegal as being a search not done pursuant to a warrant.

The opinion resulted in a somewhat unusual alignment of justices. Justice Scalia, perhaps the Court’s most conservative member, wrote the majority decision. He was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, a frequent ally, and three of the court’s more liberal members, Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan.
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The Supreme Court today issued one of the two dog cases on its docket, Florida v. Harris. Recall that we blogged on this case when it was accepted for review. In today’s unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court held that just because there are no performance records for how a dog does in the field, this by itself does not mean that a dog’s positive alert cannot form the basis for a probable cause search.

The pooch in this case is “Aldo.” His handler obviously had it out for Mr. Harris. The officer stopped Harris two times, and had Aldo run around the truck, sniffing for the odors of dope, etc. The first time, Aldo “alerted”, but the officer did not find any of the substances for which the dog was trained to alert. However, they did find chemicals used to make methamphetamine, so they arrested Harris. The same officer again stopped Harris while the latter was out on bail. Once again, the loyal pooch ran around the vehicle, again alerted, but this time no illegal substances or precursors were discovered.
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I am looking down from my office here in Atlanta at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the federal appellate court that handles cases from Georgia, Florida and Alabama. Yesterday, that court issued a huge decision in which they decided that Congress violated the Constitution by enacting a law that allows for prosecuting international drug dealers in U.S. courts. It’s kind of complicated, and even after this case there still can be similar prosecutions using different laws, but the case is nevertheless worth looking at. The case is U.S. v. Bellaizac-Hurtado.

United States surveillance detected a vessel sailing in international waters near Panama with no flag or lights. They informed the Panamanian navy, which went after the boat, eventually capturing its crew and the boatload of drugs inside the vessel. Eventually, the crew were brought to Florida and prosecuted in federal court. The defense lawyers wisely argued that a U.S. court did not have jurisdiction, and in yesterday’s decision, the Court of Appeals agreed and threw out their convictions.
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While most of our federal white collar criminal cases do not involve drug detection dogs, I noted last week in this post that the Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a case to decide whether an “alert” on a motor vehicle by a drug-detecting dog is enough to let the police then search the car. In “Going to the Dogs: Part 2”, the Supreme Court comes at the same issue from a different context: the pooch is on the porch of a home. The case is Florida v. Jardines, and it will be argued on Halloween Day.

Here is what happened in the lower courts. Miami police got a tip that Mr. Jardines was growing marijuana in his house. Based on that tip, a dog handler took the certified drug detecting dog (named “Franky”) to the door of Jardine’s house. Franky indicated that he had smelled drugs, and a detective then went to the door, where he too smelled marijuana. The police got a warrant, and found several live marijuana plants growing inside.

Jardines moved to suppress the drugs, arguing that the dog sniff at his door violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. The Florida Supreme Court agreed, holding that the dog sniff was a “search” that itself required a warrant. It was very important to the ruling by the Florida Supreme Court that the sniff took place at the front door of a house, because such activity invades the sanctity of the home, which generally gets more protection under the Fourth Amendment.

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