5 Senior Citizens Serving Life Without Parole for Pot

5 Senior Citizens Serving Life Without Parole for Pot

Should five non-violent offenders die behind bars for a crime Americans increasingly believe should not even be a crime?

Right now, five adults await death in prison for non-violent, marijuana-related crimes. Their names are John Knock, Paul Free, Larry Duke, William Dekle, and Charles “Fred” Cundiff. They are all more than 60 years old; they have all spent at least 15 years locked up for selling pot; and they are all what one might call model prisoners, serving life without parole. As time wrinkles their skin and weakens their bodies, Michael Kennedy of the Trans High Corporation has filed a legal petition with the federal government seeking their clemency. Otherwise they will die behind bars for selling a drug 40% of American adults have admitted to using, 50% of Americans want legal, and two states have already legalized for adult use. Since these men were convicted of these crimes many years ago, public opinion and policy related to marijuana have shifted greatly. Should these five non-violent senior-citizen offenders die behind bars for a crime Americans increasingly believe should not even be a crime?
1. John Knock, 65, has been incarcerated for more than 16 years. The only evidence against him was the testimony of informants; Knock was convicted of conspiracy to import and distribute marijuana. The judge sentenced him to 20 years for money laundering plus not one, but two terms of life-without-parole -- a  punishment typically reserved for murderers. Despite the uniquely unjust sentence, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court denied his pleas for reconsideration via appeal or court order.
Waiting for death in jail, Knock suffers from chronic sinus problems linked to an untreated broken nose. Due to circulatory problems, one of his ankles swells to twice its size. Knock also suffers from what the legal petition called “untreated" hearing and vision problems. Easing some of his pain are visits from his family and his participation in prison programs. He has taught home building and physical education inside the prison that has become his home. According to the legal petition, he is assured employment and a home should his sentence be commuted.
2. Before he was incarcerated, Paul Free obtained a BA in marine biology and was starting a school while teaching English in Mexico. Now 62, he has continued his passion for education behind bars, where he has lived for the past 18 years. Free helps inmates prepare for the General Equivalency Diploma tests, and according to the petition, prison officials have applauded Paul’s hard work and his students’ high graduation rate. Paul suffers from degenerative joint disease, failing eyesight, sinus problems, and allergies, and he has had 11 skin cancers removed.
3. Once a union carpenter, Larry Duke, a 65-year-old decorated Marine, has spent the last 23 years of his life behind bars for weed. On top of the difficulties life in prison lays on the psyche, Duke suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from multiple tours in the Vietnam war. Like Knock, Duke received two life sentences without parole for a non-violent marijuana conspiracy, and was unsuccessful at appeal. According to the legal petition, Duke is the longest-serving nonviolent marijuana prisoner in the nation.  
Despite his incarceration in a country that has failed him, Duke works from behind bars to design patentable concepts that would assist the general public. While locked up, he has already managed to obtain a federal patent for a water-delivery system he plans to market to the U.S. Department of Defense. According to the legal petition, Duke enjoys the support of his wife and a growing family including two children, two grandsons, three siblings and many nieces and nephews. “They all want him to come home and be part of their lives and dreams,” the petition said.
4. William Dekle, 63, is also a former U.S. Marine serving two life sentences without parole, 22 of which he has already completed in a Kentucky penitentiary. Despite the depressing possibility that he will die behind bars, Dekle has participated in more than 30 prison courses, including counseling other inmates. Before his conviction, Dekle was a pilot certified in commercial and instrument flying, as well as multiengine aircraft. Now he suffers from a chronic knee injury. He is supported by his wife, two daughters, and grandchildren, who call him “Papa Billy.” Dekle’s relatives would ensure a stable home environment should he be granted clemency, the legal petition said.
5. Charles “Fred” Cundiff is a 66-year-old inmate who has served more than 20 years of his life sentence for marijuana. Before the marijuana arrest that changed his life forever, he worked in construction, retail and at a plant nursery. In prison, he worked for Unicor (Federal Prison Industries) for 12 years before his declining health interfered with his ability to work. Battling skin cancer, eye infections, and severe arthritis in his spine, Cundiff uses a walker. While the legal petition makes no mention of family, it says he is regularly visited by “friends from his youth.”
While these men have all spent many years behind bars for crimes they were convicted of many years ago, the same draconian punishments are handed down to marijuana criminals -- young and old -- to this day. Conspiracy charges, combined with mandatory minimums for marijuana sale and firearms charges, can quickly add up to decades behind bars. Should anyone in the entire criminal operation have a gun (legal or not), everyone involved can be charged with firearm possession during a drug offense, a five-year mandatory minimum that can reach 20 if the person is charged with continuing criminal enterprise -- a long-term, large-scale operation. In the end, these sentences are often not applied, but used to encourage guilty pleas in exchange for a lesser sentence.
Marijuana prisoner Chris Williams is an example of one such case. He was recently facing a mandatory minimum of 85 to 92 years behind bars for providing medical marijuana in Montana, where it is legal. Citing a moral opposition to plea bargains forced by the threat of a lifetime in jail, WIlliams rejected a deal that would have drastically reduced his sentence by cutting away mandatory minimums. Then, this Tuesday, federal prosecutors agreed to drop six of eight of Williams’ charges, provided he waive his constitutional right to appeal. Now Williams faces a mandatory minimum of five years for the firearm-related charge, and another five for distribution.
“With the rest of my life literally hanging in the balance, I simply could not withstand the pressure any longer,” Williams said in a statement. “If Judge Christensen shows mercy and limits my sentence to the five-year mandatory minimum, I could be present at my 16-year-old son’s college graduation. This would most likely be impossible had I rejected the latest compromise.”

2012 The Year We All Got High

If liberalizing marijuana laws becomes the next big social issue, we will have 2012 to thank for it, as this was the year that the issue finally moved from the fringes to the center of American politics.
“In the now nearly fifty-year-old effort to end cannabis prohibition laws led by non-profit citizen advocacy groups, 2012 must be viewed as a watershed year for cannabis law reformers,” said Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of NORML, a leading marijuana reform group.
Tom Angell, the chairman of Marijuana Majority, agreed. “This was the year that we broke through and succeeded in getting prominent political observers and the media to pay attention to the fact that this is quickly becoming a mainstream issue.”
The biggest victories for advocates, of course, came in Washington and Colorado, where voters approved ballot measures to legalize cannabis for private recreational use. Washington’s law has already gone into effect, while Colorado’s will soon. Advocates hope that if all goes according to plan, other states will see there’s nothing to be afraid of and follow the example.
“It’s hard to ignore marijuana legalization when it gets more votes than a winning presidential candidate in an important swing state, as occurred in Colorado this year,” Angell said. Indeed, President Obama received 1.23 million votes in the state while Amendment 64 earned 1.29 million votes, greater than 53,000 more.
But the 2012 effect extended beyond Colorado and Washington. Nationally, marijuana is now more accepted than ever, with numerous public opinion polls showing support for legalization breaching the critical 50 percent mark. Nearly two-thirds — 64 percent — of Americans want the federal government to stay out of states that legalized the drug. Support for medical marijuana also climbed to new highs, with polls showing up to 83 percent of Americans now favor allowing doctors to prescribe cannabis for certain ailments.
“Public support for ending marijuana prohibition is greater than ever before,” said Mason Tvert, the communications director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “More Americans than ever before recognize the fact that marijuana is far less harmful than alcohol to the consumer and to society. We can all agree that alcohol prohibition was an abject failure, and people are increasingly coming to appreciate that marijuana prohibition is just as bad a policy.”

Other states also made advances. Rhode Island became the 15th state to decriminalize possession while Massachusetts and Connecticut came in as the 17th and 18th states to establish medical marijuana regimes.
In Washington, the White House signaled it may reverse its crackdown on marijuana liberalization when Obama told Barbara Walters that it doesn’t “make sense” for the federal government to be “going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal.” While the news should be taken with a grain of salt, it’s unquestionably a step in the right direction from an administration that has been the harshest in history when it comes to states with medical marijuana laws. A tiny but growing group of lawmakers also worked to advance pro-reform legislation.
The capital itself will soon have its own medical marijuana dispensaries, with the district government approving a handful of dispensaries and growing centers this year.
And while difficult to quantify, there is a marked shift in the media coverage of the issue. No longer does every story on marijuana get snickering treatment and puns about the munchies or Bob Marley. Google Trends shows an enormous spike in news coverage of medical marijuana and legalization around the election, matching a jump in general web searches. There were 2,830 news stories written and broadcast about legalization in the past year, according to Nexis, up from just 812 in 2011.
Tvert credits the states for changing the way people talk about marijuana. “The successful initiatives this year in Colorado and Washington inspired thoughtful and open dialogue about the potential benefits of taking marijuana out of the underground market and regulating it like alcohol. The debate is no longer just about whether marijuana should be legal. The debate is also about how we should move forward now that it is becoming legal,” he said.
And a growing, and sometimes surprising, cadre of leaders from across the political spectrum recognized the need for reform this year. 2012 was the year that Pat Robertson, of all people, said, “I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol.” It was also the year that Bill Clinton, a leading drug warrior in his time in the White House, said the drug war “hasn’t worked” and called for dramatic reform.
At the same time, it was almost impossible to find pundits or other voices who strongly opposed legalization. The silence was almost more surprising than the support.
Meanwhile, there was a host of good news coming out of academia for reformers. A big study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found no adverse pulmonary effects from moderate long-term usage; a federally-funded criminology study found marijuana dispensaries don’t increase crime rates, as some critics feared; while other studies found positive benefits for diabetes and treatment-resistant MS. A major literature review found the federal government’s classification of the drug — Schedule I, the most severe, which holds there is zero medical benefit — to be scientifically “not tenable” and “not accurate.”
Still, advocates say there is plenty of work to do. They’re eager to make sure Colorado’s and Washington’s examples go well, aware that a negative outcome could doom the entire project in other states — Rhode Island, Maine and California are eyed next — and even set things back. California passed a very loose medical marijuana law years before other states, but did such a poor job in writing and implementing the law that it made other states wary and led to a federal government crackdown in 2010 and 2011.
“I think a lot of states will take a ‘wait and see’ attitude — about the federal response, about the effects on consumption, and about the revenue possibilities,” said Rob MacCoun, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies marijuana policy.
But there’s no question that 2012 has fundamentally changed things going forward.

Recent Bills Introduced In Texas, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Others Prove The Entire Nation Is Legalization-Oriented

By Rick Thompson

 2013 has already seen a flood of cannabis-friendly legislation introduced in the legislatures of numerous states. At least seventeen states have introduced pro-marijuana bills or have stated their intent to do so. Legalization, medical marijuana, decriminalization-even industrial hemp- have all been introduced despite the Obama administration’s lack of a clear response to 2012′s full legalization votes in Washington and Colorado. Click here to read more.


Email me with any questions or for any reason what-so-ever, @ bjonsie94@gmail.com

Medicinal Marijuana, Decriminalization Efforts Back

• by Julián Aguilar
• January 24, 2013        

A veteran lawmaker hopes actions taken by state legislatures in Washington and Colorado will pave the way for Texas policymakers to consider a bill that hasn’t been heard in committee in nearly a decade.
House Bill 594, by state Rep. Elliott Naishtat, D-Austin, would provide an affirmative defense for patients who use marijuana based on the recommendation of their doctors. The bill would not allow a doctor to prescribe the illegal drug, but there would be no penalty levied against a physician who discusses it or recommends it, Naishtat said.
“There are two hurdles,” for the patient, he said. “You have to have a bona fide medical condition like cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis. And you have to have a licensed physician who has suggested or recommended you try marijuana to alleviate the symptoms of the conditions.”  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE.

I am Brandon Jones and I am a marijuana activist.

I try my hardest to get the word out about the wonders

and miracles marijuana is in itself,

Whether smoked, eaten, or drank.

It is all good for you.

I have to say, 

some people have no business with marijuana

But those are the people who should go to jail.

Not the everyday marijuana smoker.

Marijuana on the street is often poorly grown and has grown mold on the inside of your bud that blends in.

Dispensaries are a much safer way to distribute and tax marijuana.

My email is bjonsie94@gmail.com Feel free to email me with any questions, donations, or anything else. stay medicated.

 

 

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