Who votes for marijuana reform? And some predictions

Since this is a bit wonk-ish, I decided to put my predictions up front. The explanation (and some cool graphs) are below.

This is what I expect to see from the House of Representatives in the next two years on marijuana issues:

81% of votes in support of medical marijuana
54% of votes in support of marijuana decrim
32% of votes in support of marijuana legalization

According to this, decriminalization has a better than even chance of passing the house. I don't know what the margin of error is on these, so I can't say exactly how high the odds are, but higher than 50%, at least. (I'm sure my newly elected state representative -- drug warrior Delmar Burridge, from Keene -- will be upset about that!)

Legalization garnered much less support than decriminalization, and likely won't pass this session. But it's nearly a certainty that New Hampshire will have medical marijuana within the next two years, since Maggie Hassan has vowed not to veto it.

Lawyers prepare for jury nullification

Criminal defense attorneys predict New Hampshire jurors routinely will be told they have the right to find someone innocent even if the state proves its case because New Hampshire has passed what appears to be the nation's first “jury nullification” law.

Earlier this month, a Belknap County Superior Court jury found a Barnstead man innocent of felony drug charges after the judge instructed jurors they could decide that acquittal was “a fair result,” even if the state had met the burden of proof.

It's a legal concept known as jury nullification, a power that experts say has resided in the U.S. Constitution since the nation began but is rarely applied in modern courtrooms.

And it's the basis for a new state law that permits the defense in all criminal cases “to inform the jury of its right to judge the facts and the application of the law in relation to the facts in controversy.”

Read the rest at the Union Leader.

I expect this to turn out well. Even good laws can be crude, leading to perverse results in a minority of cases. (Think of wire-tapping laws, which were intended to protect the public from spying, and how they've been used by the police to justify confiscating cameras.) And democracy can be pretty crude itself, churning out bad laws regularly. It's nice to have that extra check on the justice system. Another round of quality control, if you will.

Depending on how often nullification happens, it may even change the incentives faced by police. The police may altogether stop arresting or prosecuting those who are likely to be acquitted through nullification. A good deal for taxpayers and the unjustly prosecuted (though perhaps not for the police or lawyers).

It's true that there may be cases where the prospect of nullification ends up encouraging harmful crimes, but I suspect this effect will be overwhelmed by the many cases where it can be used positively.

The best way to find out is to experiment. We'll see for ourselves soon enough.

Good advice from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

From Micheal Leachman, here (more here):

Corrections spending is absorbing a growing share of states’ budgets (see map), leaving less for education, health care, and other priorities. Some states have adopted criminal justice reforms that reduce costs while protecting public safety — offering effective addiction treatment to more people convicted of drug-related crimes instead of incarcerating them, for example, or imposing sanctions other than prison time for people who miss meetings with their parole officer.


More states might implement these reforms if lawmakers had a rigorous assessment of the likely impact on the state budget, such as expected cost savings. Unfortunately, many states do a poor job of producing this vital assessment (called a “fiscal note”), as a new report from CBPP and the ACLU explains.

If you look at the chart at the end of the report, you find that New Hampshire enacted 17 "significant adult corrections bills", none with fiscal notes.


Unrelatedly, the CBPP also recommends annual, rather than biennial, budgeting. (New Hampshire is biennial.)

Drug war opportunity costs

From New Hampshire Magazine:

Reducing that access [to marijuana] was John Tommasi's life in the 1980s. An undercover cop in Salem, N.H., he was assigned in 1987 to the New Hampshire Drug Task Force, a state agency funded by the federal War on Drugs. He says the action was fast and furious: "As soon as you arrest one person, there's another five to 10 to take that person's place."
Tommasi was also a pilot and that became his undercover persona: "You're doing great felony work and you're not stuck on the barking dog calls. But at some point I realized I was not having any effect whatsoever. This is having no effect at all. So is this really the right way to go? So I started doing some research."
Tommasi's research was part of earning a Masters Degree in Economics to go with his MBA. His principal conclusion: "We have in economics what is known as opportunity cost. So if I'm working on violations with drugs then I'm not working on, say, burglaries or other crimes. And if you're out there on the drug war, you must be taking the dealers off the streets, right? That's not the case."
Instead, the purity and potency of the drugs had increased while the price had gone down. Tommasi published a report on how much money would be saved if marijuana were legalized. The report drew much public attention and criticism from law enforcement agencies.
Tommasi began teaching courses on the Drug War and is now a full-time professor at Bentley College in Massachusetts. But he's also still a cop: "I do Hampton in the summer and I've arrested people for marijuana because I took an oath to uphold the state laws and my integrity transcends my own personal views." Then Tommasi, the economist, has to add: "But if I make a marijuana arrest, I'm tied up for a couple of hours at the station booking and I'm not keeping peace on the streets of Hampton - and in the summer, it gets busy."

And more:

Opponents of decriminalization often point to the fact that charges of simple possession rarely lead to any jail time. Still, the number of marijuana arrests has been rising steadily. In 1995 arrests for marijuana possession were a third of all drug arrests. Now they are nearly half and that, says Ed Kelly [administrative justice of New Hampshire's circuit courts], creates a big problem. "If we have a courtroom filled with cases like the ones we're talking about - first offenders who are never coming back again and don't have a drug abuse problem - and it takes us all day to deal with those cases, that's a day that we don't have to deal with, say, a very difficult divorce case involving children. So we've got a family in crisis waiting to get into court and us trying to find a day to get that family into court to deal with their issues so they can get on with their lives. And we're dealing with these cases over in the other court room that are going to result in a $500 fine and cost the state lots of money to prosecute. All for what I think is a pretty unclear objective."

It's a fantastic article. Definitely worth reading.