Libertarian Party of Montgomery County
Promoting liberty throughout the Greater Dayton area and the Miami Valley
Aaron Dean’s conviction and sentence show that cops can be held accountable when they kill someone for no good reason. But the counterexamples suggest that many jurors are inclined to accept almost any excuse that highlights the hazards of the job, even when those hazards are imaginary.
The iron law of prohibition states that, all things being equal, as enforcement ramps up, smugglers prefer higher potency forms of a drug for the same reason those who sneak alcohol into a football game prefer hard alcohol in flasks to 12‐packs of beer. The lethal logic of the iron law of prohibition means that we cannot enforce our way out of the opioid crisis. And if fentanyl smugglers become somehow easy to catch, there’s always carfentanil, which is about 100 times more potent than fentanyl and has already been showing up in America’s drug supply.
https://www.cato.org/blog/dea-seizes-record-amounts-fentanyl-2022
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2.5 percent of inmates are serving life sentences; that means 97.5 percent of all federal inmates will eventually be released. Our prisons must effectively prepare inmates for release, which includes the bare minimum of protecting them from violence, but also providing them the resources they need to turn their lives around.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-law-and-order-agenda-must-include-prison-reform/
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg wants credit for investigating the blatantly corrupt behavior of Goines and other Houston narcotics officers. Meanwhile, her office, which is hardly without blame for prosecuting falsely accused defendants, is eagerly engaged in money grabs that victimize innocent people and make a mockery of justice.
“Surely, if the Excessive Fines Clause means anything, it means that the government cannot confiscate a defendant’s entire net worth when the maximum fine set by the legislature is less than one-tenth of the value of the forfeited asset.”
Over the past few years, some Republican politicians have made defending qualified immunity a core prong of their campaigns. Ensuring government unaccountability is, by partisan definition, a strange hill for conservatives to die on.
https://reason.com/2022/10/20/what-happens-when-a-county-employee-acts-like-a-police-officer/
We have a broken criminal justice department with long wait times, harried, overworked public defenders, and an imperfect police force (to put it as diplomatically as possible). A state sanctioned death penalty simply can’t be trusted.
https://www.newsweek.com/jury-was-right-not-give-parkland-killer-death-penalty-opinion-1752055
As a nation, we keep horrible, incomplete data that makes it impossible to get an accurate sense of the scope or impact of crime.
https://reason.com/2022/10/06/did-murders-rise-in-2021-no-one-knows/
Can you do prison time for a criminal charge of which you were never convicted? Known as acquitted conduct sentencing, the practice allows judges to bloat a prison term when sentencing a defendant by punishing them for a separate charge or charges on which a jury deemed them not guilty.