I recommend Jack McCullough's excellent post on a recent Vermont Supreme Court decision. The Court reversed a criminal crop cultivation conviction after the police broke Vermont law protecting our State's civil society. Unlike the defendant's conduct, growing marijuana plants, the police conduct really does have victims – us.
In addition to the high cost of fighting a war against people who grow marijuana as Jack explains in his post, another unfortunate and frustrating, aspect of this case is the seemingly accepting attitude of the trial court toward the police behavior.
Let's see what the Supreme Court had to say . . .
The officers filed false affidavits with the court and gave perjured testimony at the suppression hearing. The Vermont Supreme Court explained how the trial record showed:
¶ 6. After the flight, the state trooper prepared an application for a search warrant based solely on his observation during the aerial surveillance of what he believed to be marijuana plants. In the application, the trooper characterized the surveillance as having been from “an aircraft at least 500 feet above the ground . . . .” The warrant was issued and executed, and three marijuana plots were discovered by defendant’s home.
¶ 7. Based on the evidence presented at the suppression hearing, the court found that the helicopter circled defendant’s property for approximately fifteen to thirty minutes, well below 500 feet in altitude, and at times as low as 100 feet above the ground. Although both the trooper and the pilot testified that the helicopter remained at least 500 feet off the ground at all times, the court did not find their testimony to be credible.
The court further found that pilots doing MERT flights in Vermont are told to stay at least 500 feet above the ground and that, according to a National Guard pilot who testified for the State, the reason MERT pilots are so directed is to avoid invasions of privacy.
The truth, of course, was that the cops were buzzing the town and the defendant at tree-top level, no more than 75-100 feet above ground. The police lied, the knew they were lying and the court knew they were lying.
The judge thus had a felony case brought against a citizen based on an officer's false written statements. The officer compounded the deceit by appearing in Court; and when asked about the false written statements, showed no compunction about giving false testimony in open court as well. “Testimony not credible” — My experience, when a judge says a police officer's testimony is “not credible,” is that the judge is being extremely diplomatic. Saying the officer is “not credible” is court talk for “they guy is blowing smoke up my robe and damn well knows it.”
Still, this was just another drug case, and the over-burdened trial court choking with public health issues gave it a pass. The result was, unlike a few plants growing in the forest that hurt no one, the police committed a crime against Vermont civil society. Worse, they lie about it under oath and in open court after-the-fact. It then takes the over-burdened judiciary five years to fix some of the damage done by the illegal use of police resources against Vermonters.
The war on people who use marijuana wastes millions of dollars of Vermonter's assets every year. From the record in this case, Vermont's front on the war against people using marijuana also is corrupting a vital public asset and institution – our police – as well. That is a huge expense and an enormous intangible waste of resources.
Would the trial judge let slide the same type of highly disrespectful and insulting attitude toward her court had the police looked her in the eye and made her listen to false testimony about a white collar crime, a domestic violence crime or a burglary? I have no idea (and I certainly hope not).
Think about the “true cost” of this for a moment. The State invests millions in the training, salary, healthcare, benefits etc. of its public safety officers. Police officers do not just investigate (thankfully) victimless acts of crop cultivation or other agricultural offenses involving relatively benign substances such as marijuana. Rather, the police are also responsible (remember?) for crimes that leave victims. The Department of Public Safety needs to allocate resources to handle that end of the job as well.
Imagine you are a victim of any number of real crimes: domestic abuse, rape, assault, battery or armed robbery. Do you want your case investigated by an officer with a public record of falsely sworn affidavits? How secure will you feel and how sure will you be that the person who victimized you will be convicted if a judge or jury cannot trust testimony from the officer investigating the crimes perpetrated against you?
Imagine being a crime victim, someone shot or raped, and you are sitting in the courtroom during the perpetrator's trial. How much comfort will you take hearing a police officer being cross-examined on the sworn testimony needed in your case to send a violent criminal to prison?
It seems the more we continue and the further we escalate our war on people who use substances, the less reliable our core public institutions are when it comes to matters of honesty, perspective and civil rights. Drugs may be poisonous intoxicants for some people. In the case of State v. Bryant, it is hard to tell which party's judgment was more impaired by illegal drugs. One thing is for sure, the defendant is definitely not on the top of the impaired judgment list.
And this takes us right back to Jack's original point that bears repeating. It bears repeating because it goes in the face of the lie the police, the politicians, the incarceration industry and the commercial drug companies keep are telling us every day about the resources lost to criminalizing public health matters. The truth is, we pay out the ass for this folly. Mr. Bryant did not have an opportunity to cultivate his marijuana plants. However, over the five years his case worked its way through the criminal justice system and the appeals' process, hundreds of hands worked on countless aspects of this case. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more, from the police, the courts, judges, law clerks, private investigators, dozens of private citizens losing days of work to investigation and traveling to court to testify, prosecutors, appellate attorneys in the Attorneys General's office and Mr. Bryant — all went up in smoke.
Doin' a heckofa job.
