Jeff Sessions' Crackdown on Marijuana - Is It Really All About Disenfranchising Minorities?

As previous posts have indicated, in my opinion, U.S. Attorney General Sessions is a foul individual. My view dates all the way back to the late 1970's when he and I were both members of the Mobile, Alabama legal community. Sessions has a long history of racism and, as noted previously, failed to prosecute KKK members who lynched a 19 year old young black man, Michael Donald, while I still lived in Mobile (a photo of Donald's body is here). Now, it seems that Sessions has come up with a new means to assault minority communities: crackdown on marijuana - even legal marijuana - to increase convictions that will often lead to felony convictions that will deprive individuals of their voting rights and make it difficult to ever have successful employment opportunities.  Similarly, Sessions cares nothing about youths ensnared by the often draconian marijuana laws (Virginia's laws are horrific thanks to the GOP control of the Virginia House of Delegates).  Sessions likewise ignores the research that negate his  or the fact that research hows that marijuana is not a serious health threat.  A piece in Salon looks at Sessions ugly agenda.  Here are excerpts:

Soon after his election, Donald Trump announced he would appoint Jeff Sessions as attorney general, sending a wave of panic through the world of activism around legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Sessions is an old-line drug warrior who opposes all state-level efforts to liberalize marijuana laws, and it was widely feared he would reverse Obama-era Department of Justice policies recommending that federal authorities not interfere with states that legalize marijuana.
In July, Sessions made his first tentative move toward cracking down on states that legalize pot, sending a letter to Washington state officials in which he expressed skepticism about marijuana legalization, repeatedly singling out the fear that such laws would lead to more pot smoking among minors.
If Sessions is legitimately concerned about high school kids and that’s not just a front for promoting laws that are disproportionately enforced on black people, then he probably shouldn’t worry so much. A new study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that the effects of liberalizing marijuana laws on the behavioral outcomes of minors are . . . well, nothing. At least nothing of significance. “Notably, many of the outcomes predicted by critics of liberalizations, such as increases in youth drug use and youth criminal behavior, have failed to materialize in the wake of marijuana liberalizations,” the report reads.
In fact, the researchers found the opposite: Marijuana liberalization was associated with “reduced marijuana, alcohol, and other drug use; reduced desirability of consuming these substances; and reduced access to these substances on school property.”
Marijuana legalization or decriminalization apparently doesn’t do much to change young people’s behavior. Getting arrested for possessing or selling marijuana, however, can have a massive impact on a person’s life.
“Arrests prohibit individuals from fully participating in society, inhibiting their ability to get a job, get a loan, go to college, or even have a place to live,” Kassandra Frederique, the New York State Director at the Drug Policy Alliance, argued in a recent study of New York City’s marijuana arrest rates.
This life disruption, in turn, helps reinforce serious racial disparities in our society. Black and white people smoke marijuana at the same rate, but black people are almost four times as likely to be arrested for it. Even after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio enacted policies that reduced marijuana arrest rates in the city, black and Latino people made up 85 percent of marijuana arrests, despite being only about half the population.
Criminalizing marijuana does little or nothing to reduce crime or improve youth outcomes, but it is highly effective at increasing racial disparities, criminalizing young people of color and derailing career opportunities for young Latinos and African-Americans. Sessions is widely perceived as hostile to civil rights and full equality for people of color, so it’s entirely possible that his interest in escalating marijuana crackdowns is not as innocent as he claims.
If Jeff Sessions does begin to roll back decades of progress on marijuana reform, he’s fighting against the political tide: A survey conducted earlier this year found that 57 percent of Americans believed pot should be legal (although only 40 percent of Republicans held that view). Furthermore, Sessions is pursuing this crusade for no good reason. There is simply no evidence that marijuana liberalization leads to bad outcomes for younger people, while the evidence that being arrested for marijuana causes bad outcomes is overwhelming. Of course, if Jeff Sessions is actively trying to send more people of color to prison on minor drug offenses and damage their future prospects, maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Mitch McConnell's Effort to Muzzle Coretta Scott King.

Click image to enlarge

As I have noted before on this blog, I lived in the Mobile, Alabama area from 1977 to 1981.  Back in that time period, Jeff Sessions was Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and was considered reactionary even by many wealthy conservatives. Things did not get better with time with Sessions. While I was still living in Mobile, a 19 year old black man named Michael Donald was murdered in what was the last recorded lynching in the United States. Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, and hanged his body from a tree.  Session's office did not prosecute the case, but both men were arrested and convicted.  Subsequently, due to the efforts of Thomas Figures, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Mobile, FBI agent James Bodman, and Michael Figures, a state senator and civil rights activist, the killers were ultimately arrested over two and a half years after the murder and were prosecuted, with one receiving the death penalty.After dropping the ball on the Donald case, Sessions prosecuted three black community organizers in the Black belt of Alabama, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s former aide Albert Turner, for voter fraud, alleging tampering with 14 absentee ballots. The prosecution stirred charges of selective prosecution of black voter registration. The defendants, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted of all charges by a jury.

Fast forward to this week and hearings on the nomination of Sessions to the office of Attorney General of the United States are taking place (sadly, Senate Republicans confirmed him). During the hearings Senator Elizabeth Warren sought to read into the Senate record a 1986 letter written by Coretta Scott King (see the image above) who, based on the facts recited above, held Sessions in low regard.  Mitch McConnell, among the most despicable and hypocrisy filled members of the Senate invoked an arcane Senate rule to silence Warren.  A piece in Slate makes the case that McConnell - who clearly hates Warren - was most motivated by his desire to muzzle the words of Coretta Scott King.  Here are article highlights:

By design, the U.S. Senate is a deliberative body in which members have every opportunity to speak their minds on the subject at hand. There are exceptions tied to decorum: Attack or impugn a colleague and the chamber reserves the right to strip speaking privileges from the offending member. On Tuesday night, it did just that to Elizabeth Warren. . . . This extraordinary step was initiated by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader. What did Elizabeth Warren say? How did she “impugn the motives and conduct” of the senator from Alabama? She read a letter. Specifically, Warren read from a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the subject of then–federal prosecutor Jeff Sessions, submitted in opposition to his nomination for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. It was because of the letter that McConnell sought to silence Warren. And it’s in revisiting that letter that we can see how McConnell was right to be shook. Not because King was mistaken, but because her 30-year-old indictment of Jeff Sessions is now an indictment of the entire Republican Party. In Sessions, King saw a throwback to the Jim Crow officials who fought to disenfranchise black Americans throughout the South. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge," wrote King in her 10-page statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which ultimately rejected Sessions in a 10–8 vote with two Republicans joining eight Democrats in voting against Ronald Reagan’s nominee. “Mr. Sessions’ conduct as U.S. Attorney, from his politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights law, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.” King went on to describe Sessions’ role in pursuing and prosecuting a trio of black voting rights activists in Perry County, Alabama:

“Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists ... who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among Blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. The only sin they committed was being too successful in gaining votes.”

King detailed clear abuses of authority, from selective prosecution—ignoring allegations of similar behavior by whites—to pressuring and intimidating witnesses. “Many elderly blacks were visited multiple times by the FBI who then hauled them over 180 miles by bus to a grand jury in Mobile when they could more easily have testified at a grand jury twenty miles away in Selma. These voters, and others, have announced they are now never going to vote again,” King wrote.

For McConnell and his Republican colleagues, King’s critique of Sessions’ work was a personal attack. He saw this well-grounded accusation of racism as worse than the actions it described. And so he called for silence.

Despite the pivotal role the letter played in Sessions’ confirmation hearing in 1986, the then-chair of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, never entered it into the congressional record. Now that we have the letter, however, we can see how relevant it is not just to Sessions’ bid for the attorney general’s office but as a judgment on the Republican Party as a whole.