8 ms·

That's a tough one. And I think these sentences need to be reviewed and some of them revoked. However, the underlying problem was that these people who are cur

That's a tough one. And I think these sentences need to be reviewed and some of them revoked. However, the underlying problem was that these people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment. Their sentences need to be revised, but it's probably not something I'd exonerate from all guilt. According to the Ex Post Facto law [1] definition, a court could issue amnesties or pardons for scenarios like this, but I don't think it would be an automatic process over all convictions. >> Disclaimer: IANAL [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law

jonreem 8y ago
I believe it is morally wrong to keep people imprisoned for actions that are now legal, especially given the viciousness of our penal system. This is a great injustice of our time.
- sturadnidge 8y ago
  If you commit a legal act today that becomes illegal in the future, is it reasonable to be retrospectively convicted? 2 sides of the same coin.
  - k3d 8y ago
    It's absolutely fatuous to assume that this has to be a symmetrical relationship. No inherent contradiction exists between the two statements.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    Not the "same coin" at all. See "lex mitior": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
  - jonreem 8y ago
    If you simply follow the basic compassionate principle that you should lock up as few people as necessary for as short a time as necessary to maintain the law then the answers are obvious for both cases: If someone committed an act which was illegal at the time and is now legal, they should be freed. If someone committed an act which was legal at the time and it is now illegal, they should not be prosecuted. They're not two sides of the same coin at all. EDIT: This compassionate principle is known as "lex mitior", which simply means that you should apply the mildest version of the law (from the perspective of the accused) in these cases. This is also in line with the widely accepted innocent-until-proven-guilty principle.
  - pizza 8y ago
    Not the same. > Congress is prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 3 of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...
    - sturadnidge 8y ago
      That is not the case in UK however, which is where I'm drawing my (outlier, going by Wikipedia) experience.
      - pizza 8y ago
        Fair enough, that's pretty interesting actually
  - stordoff 8y ago
    I don't see them as the same at all. If something is made legal, it indicates that the act is OK and that the person should not _continue_ to be punished. On the other hand, people should only be prosecuted for acts that were illegal at the time they were committed - it isn't equitable to prosecute people under laws they were not subject to at the time of the action, and even on a practical level it is necessary for maintaining trust in the law.
dogbreath 8y ago
> people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment But consider that their actions are the reason why marijuana is becoming legal. The public sentiment against the War on Drugs is partly or mostly due to outrage the public felt at long sentences for possessing or dealing in marijuana. The people who did the most to get the laws overturned (even though they did it unwittingly) do not benefit from the changes. Everyone should benefit from the relaxed laws going forward except for the people who suffered to make it possible?
sp332 8y ago
Marijuana was explicitly prosecuted [edit: criminalized] more aggressively to target certain groups of people. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... The laws were never just and that's why the "criminals" should be exonerated.
- irrational 8y ago
  Why did you put criminals in quotes? Even if you don't agree with the law, breaking the law makes one a criminal. Of course probably everyone is a criminal. Who hasn't jaywalked, gone over the speed limit, killed a neighbor's pet, done remodeling without permits, etc.?
  - jdblair 8y ago
    I haven't killed a neighbor's pet. Is that a common infraction?
    - johnsonjo 8y ago
      Well I know a couple of pets I’ve had have been ran over by drivers. Possibly that is what he is implying.
  - merinowool 8y ago
    Not if the law is corrupt. Would you call people who "committed" same sex intercourse criminals if the place they did it had such laws that it was a "crime" to do so? What about people of which presence was declared unlawful because of their race and administered death penalty on the spot?
    - freedomben 8y ago
      Should that maxim become universal standard, I don't know that we would be better. I think you could make a case that at some level, every single law is corrupt, especially if we allow for relativism (every law will be in someone's opinion, corrupt). The word loses all meaning at that point.
anonytrary 8y ago
> are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment. "Sorry, we weren't enlightened 20 years ago, so you're going to stay in jail" is an embarrassing cop-out. This is a systematic flaw in the legal system, and is unjustified. If it took decades to figure out that marijuana was wrongfully illegal, then those persecuted under such a law should be removed from incarceration at once. How can it be any other way? This is common sense. Keeping people in prison for actions now known to be harmless is a terrible and embarrassing flaw in moral structure.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  Maybe if a law is found outright unconstitutional, sure, exonerate those who are serving time for it. This isn't the case with marijuana. No conclusion has been reached that it is "wrongfully illegal," it's just not something we want to continue prosecuting for. This does not excuse the actions of those currently in prison for drug offenses-- we aren't punishing them because marijuana is/was illegal, we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed.
  - anonytrary 8y ago
    > we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed. Should we punish lawmakers for implementing oppressive laws which prevented good people from pursuing viable businesses? Why can't there be accountability in the reverse direction?
    - another-one-off 8y ago
      We can't criminalise making mistakes, even if it is lawmakers who are making them. I see wisdom in a general amnesty for light drug crimes if it is decriminalised; but it isn't like there is a double standard being applied here. This is how a fair legal system works - the consequences of your actions are clearly known when you act, and you face the consequences of your actions once the legal system catches up to you.
merinowool 8y ago
Given that: Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman told a journalist that the main purpose of the War on Drugs was to attack Nixon's "enemies" and that they knew the WOD was based on lies about drugs: > "You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on-drugs-how-president-nixon-tied-addiction-to-crime/254319/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on... I think those people should not only be exonerated, but also treated as victims of Nixon corrupt politics and given hefty compensation. Advocating for the War on drugs should be a criminal offence.
- RaceWon 8y ago
  90% of the world's heroin supply is from the Poppy fields in Afghanistan, and everyone knows where those fields are. Do we (the USA) destroy those plants in our Drug War efforts... nah. Some reports say US troops even guard them.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    Many reports.
    - RaceWon 8y ago
      I believe it was in the book "Everything We Had" (although I am not certain of the source, because I read about it a while ago) that the only reason we were in Nam, was so the CIA could protect the Poppy plants which they needed to fund their Black Ops.
      - nyolfen 8y ago
sturadnidge 8y ago
Ex post facto applies both ways - you can do something legal today and be punished in the future if it becomes illegal (UK tax law has some good examples of this). It would be inconsistent to say past crimes should be revoked if the law changes, but present legal acts cannot be retrospectively classed as illegal if the law changes in the future. That's a contradiction I'm sure many people operate under however (myself included). I am also not a lawyer :)
- rubidium 8y ago
  Ex post facto is not required to operate the same way for new laws vs laws being removed. In fact, there are good reasons for when criminal laws are changed to automatically review people prosecuted under them. The law was made for people, people weren't made for the law.
  - sturadnidge 8y ago
    Sure, but in terms of consistency they are 2 sides of the same coin.
    - doesnt_know 8y ago
      There doesn't appear to be any law of physics or higher power that enforces us to make these two things consistent, why would you assume they have to be?
    - DonHopkins 8y ago
      In terms of consistency, time should be able to flow in either direction. But it doesn't, apparently.
    - throwaway2048 8y ago
      Yeah just like rich people are forbidden to sleep under bridges and eat from the garbage, absolutely consistent.
- poizan42 8y ago
  So what you are saying is that symmetric ex post facto is more important than people's freedom?
mikeash 8y ago
Would you hold the same position if instead of being imprisoned for drugs, they were imprisoned for homosexuality or marrying someone of a different race?
OrganicMSG 8y ago
Depends on what you view the law for. Personally I think the law is a tool that acts as a proxy for group morality, and is useful as much as it serves that aim. The law itself is not sacrosanct and can be wrong, which is why we revise it. Under this view, those who broke a law we then get rid of should be released, as we have agreed that the law was wrong, we also have agreed that they were right. If the law itself is not put on a pedestal, then if the law was wrong then those people who broke it should also no longer be regarded as criminals as we are simultaneously admitting that it was also wrong to have labelled them as such in the first place.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
The obvious answer to this is: change the law. Do whatever is necessary to enable the bureaucracy to remove all drug related charges from a persons record.

jonreem 8y ago

I believe it is morally wrong to keep people imprisoned for actions that are now legal, especially given the viciousness of our penal system. This is a great injustice of our time.

sturadnidge 8y ago
If you commit a legal act today that becomes illegal in the future, is it reasonable to be retrospectively convicted? 2 sides of the same coin.
- k3d 8y ago
  It's absolutely fatuous to assume that this has to be a symmetrical relationship. No inherent contradiction exists between the two statements.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Not the "same coin" at all. See "lex mitior": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
- jonreem 8y ago
  If you simply follow the basic compassionate principle that you should lock up as few people as necessary for as short a time as necessary to maintain the law then the answers are obvious for both cases: If someone committed an act which was illegal at the time and is now legal, they should be freed. If someone committed an act which was legal at the time and it is now illegal, they should not be prosecuted. They're not two sides of the same coin at all. EDIT: This compassionate principle is known as "lex mitior", which simply means that you should apply the mildest version of the law (from the perspective of the accused) in these cases. This is also in line with the widely accepted innocent-until-proven-guilty principle.
- pizza 8y ago
  Not the same. > Congress is prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 3 of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...
  - sturadnidge 8y ago
    That is not the case in UK however, which is where I'm drawing my (outlier, going by Wikipedia) experience.
    - pizza 8y ago
      Fair enough, that's pretty interesting actually
- stordoff 8y ago
  I don't see them as the same at all. If something is made legal, it indicates that the act is OK and that the person should not _continue_ to be punished. On the other hand, people should only be prosecuted for acts that were illegal at the time they were committed - it isn't equitable to prosecute people under laws they were not subject to at the time of the action, and even on a practical level it is necessary for maintaining trust in the law.

dogbreath 8y ago

> people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment But consider that their actions are the reason why marijuana is becoming legal. The public sentiment against the War on Drugs is partly or mostly due to outrage the public felt at long sentences for possessing or dealing in marijuana. The people who did the most to get the laws overturned (even though they did it unwittingly) do not benefit from the changes. Everyone should benefit from the relaxed laws going forward except for the people who suffered to make it possible?

sp332 8y ago

Marijuana was explicitly prosecuted [edit: criminalized] more aggressively to target certain groups of people. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... The laws were never just and that's why the "criminals" should be exonerated.

irrational 8y ago
Why did you put criminals in quotes? Even if you don't agree with the law, breaking the law makes one a criminal. Of course probably everyone is a criminal. Who hasn't jaywalked, gone over the speed limit, killed a neighbor's pet, done remodeling without permits, etc.?
- jdblair 8y ago
  I haven't killed a neighbor's pet. Is that a common infraction?
  - johnsonjo 8y ago
    Well I know a couple of pets I’ve had have been ran over by drivers. Possibly that is what he is implying.
- merinowool 8y ago
  Not if the law is corrupt. Would you call people who "committed" same sex intercourse criminals if the place they did it had such laws that it was a "crime" to do so? What about people of which presence was declared unlawful because of their race and administered death penalty on the spot?
  - freedomben 8y ago
    Should that maxim become universal standard, I don't know that we would be better. I think you could make a case that at some level, every single law is corrupt, especially if we allow for relativism (every law will be in someone's opinion, corrupt). The word loses all meaning at that point.

anonytrary 8y ago

> are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment. "Sorry, we weren't enlightened 20 years ago, so you're going to stay in jail" is an embarrassing cop-out. This is a systematic flaw in the legal system, and is unjustified. If it took decades to figure out that marijuana was wrongfully illegal, then those persecuted under such a law should be removed from incarceration at once. How can it be any other way? This is common sense. Keeping people in prison for actions now known to be harmless is a terrible and embarrassing flaw in moral structure.

jstarfish 8y ago
Maybe if a law is found outright unconstitutional, sure, exonerate those who are serving time for it. This isn't the case with marijuana. No conclusion has been reached that it is "wrongfully illegal," it's just not something we want to continue prosecuting for. This does not excuse the actions of those currently in prison for drug offenses-- we aren't punishing them because marijuana is/was illegal, we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  > we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed. Should we punish lawmakers for implementing oppressive laws which prevented good people from pursuing viable businesses? Why can't there be accountability in the reverse direction?
  - another-one-off 8y ago
    We can't criminalise making mistakes, even if it is lawmakers who are making them. I see wisdom in a general amnesty for light drug crimes if it is decriminalised; but it isn't like there is a double standard being applied here. This is how a fair legal system works - the consequences of your actions are clearly known when you act, and you face the consequences of your actions once the legal system catches up to you.

merinowool 8y ago

Given that: Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman told a journalist that the main purpose of the War on Drugs was to attack Nixon's "enemies" and that they knew the WOD was based on lies about drugs: > "You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on-drugs-how-president-nixon-tied-addiction-to-crime/254319/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on... I think those people should not only be exonerated, but also treated as victims of Nixon corrupt politics and given hefty compensation. Advocating for the War on drugs should be a criminal offence.

RaceWon 8y ago
90% of the world's heroin supply is from the Poppy fields in Afghanistan, and everyone knows where those fields are. Do we (the USA) destroy those plants in our Drug War efforts... nah. Some reports say US troops even guard them.
- acct1771 8y ago
  Many reports.
  - RaceWon 8y ago
    I believe it was in the book "Everything We Had" (although I am not certain of the source, because I read about it a while ago) that the only reason we were in Nam, was so the CIA could protect the Poppy plants which they needed to fund their Black Ops.
    - nyolfen 8y ago

sturadnidge 8y ago

Ex post facto applies both ways - you can do something legal today and be punished in the future if it becomes illegal (UK tax law has some good examples of this). It would be inconsistent to say past crimes should be revoked if the law changes, but present legal acts cannot be retrospectively classed as illegal if the law changes in the future. That's a contradiction I'm sure many people operate under however (myself included). I am also not a lawyer :)

rubidium 8y ago
Ex post facto is not required to operate the same way for new laws vs laws being removed. In fact, there are good reasons for when criminal laws are changed to automatically review people prosecuted under them. The law was made for people, people weren't made for the law.
- sturadnidge 8y ago
  Sure, but in terms of consistency they are 2 sides of the same coin.
  - doesnt_know 8y ago
    There doesn't appear to be any law of physics or higher power that enforces us to make these two things consistent, why would you assume they have to be?
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    In terms of consistency, time should be able to flow in either direction. But it doesn't, apparently.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    Yeah just like rich people are forbidden to sleep under bridges and eat from the garbage, absolutely consistent.
poizan42 8y ago
So what you are saying is that symmetric ex post facto is more important than people's freedom?

mikeash 8y ago

Would you hold the same position if instead of being imprisoned for drugs, they were imprisoned for homosexuality or marrying someone of a different race?

OrganicMSG 8y ago

Depends on what you view the law for. Personally I think the law is a tool that acts as a proxy for group morality, and is useful as much as it serves that aim. The law itself is not sacrosanct and can be wrong, which is why we revise it. Under this view, those who broke a law we then get rid of should be released, as we have agreed that the law was wrong, we also have agreed that they were right. If the law itself is not put on a pedestal, then if the law was wrong then those people who broke it should also no longer be regarded as criminals as we are simultaneously admitting that it was also wrong to have labelled them as such in the first place.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

The obvious answer to this is: change the law. Do whatever is necessary to enable the bureaucracy to remove all drug related charges from a persons record.