12 Marijuana Politics
Effects on Law Enforcement
Randy Barnett, a former prosecutor assistant state’s attorney for Cook
County, Illinois, recently described the devastating effect the so-called
war on drugs, and particularly marijuana, had on the prosecution of vio-
lent crimes in his district. In 1979, before the crackdown on drug users,
he had a caseload of between 125 and 135 cases. With such a relatively
low caseload, he was able to take defendants charged with the most vicious
and violent crimes to trial, offering only those plea bargains that involved
fair and correct sentences for those crimes. When the war on drugs set a
new priority of cracking down on drug users, however, he saw his case
load skyrocket to more than 400 annually. He then had no choice but to
offer “giveaway” plea bargains even to the most vicious of the violent
offenders. He later concluded, “There is no such thing as a free crime.
Every enforcement effort consumes scarce resources. The more conduct
we define as criminal, the more that scarce resources have to be allocated
selectively among different crimes.” 74
Unlike other countries in which drugs and prostitution have been
legalized, the United States has deliberately adopted the policy of placing
a higher priority on enforcing consensual crimes than crimes involving
helpless and brutalized victims. Two poignant cases that took place less
than one year apart serve to illustrate this point.
In 1991, four popular students at a middle-class high school in Madi-
son, Wisconsin, became jealous of another classmate and friend’s new
blue jeans. They took her out in a car, locked her in the trunk, and for
several hours amused themselves by beating, stabbing, and sodomizing
her with a sharp tire iron. When their victim dared to beg for mercy and
call out for her mother, her four classmates dragged her out of the trunk,
sprayed Windex on her wounds, poured gasoline over her, and then slowly
burned their screaming classmate to death. The ringleader later described
what they had done by saying, “You should have seen it. It was so funny.” 75
After the perpetrators were convicted of first-degree murder, the judge
decided to relieve the burden on the overcrowded prison system by prom-
ising the chief perpetrator of the crime, “She could do something useful
with her life after being released from prison.” 76 In response to a relatively
light sentence received, one perpetrator responded by saying, “It’s so stu-
pid when you think about it. I don’t blame me. We just need a little grow-
ing up.” 77
Under this nation’s existing priorities, the early release of such defen-
dants is needed in order to provide prison space for people like J. Harme-
lin. The year before the Madison torture murders, Harmelin was sentenced
