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Former federal judge savages the Drug War and compares its damage to the destruction of cities in World War II
From Mark Perry.
"From Conor Friedersdorf writing in The Atlantic
about federal judge Nancy Gertner, who left the bench after 17 years,
and compared the damage caused by drug prohibition to the destruction of
cities in World War II in a speech she gave last Sunday at the Aspen
Ideas Festival:
Former Federal Judge Nancy Gertner was
appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 1994. She presided
over trials for 17 years. And Sunday, she stood before a crowd at The
Aspen Ideas Festival to denounce most punishments that she imposed.
Among
500 sanctions that she handed down, “80 percent I believe were unfair
and disproportionate,” she said. “I left the bench in 2011 to join the
Harvard faculty to write about those stories––to write about how it came
to pass that I was obliged to sentence people to terms that, frankly,
made no sense under any philosophy.”
No theory of retribution or
social change could justify them, she said. And that dispiriting
conclusion inspired the radical idea that she presented: a call for the
U.S. to mimic its decision after World War II to look to the future and
rebuild rather than trying to punish or seek retribution. As she sees
it, the War on Drugs ought to end in that same spirit.
“Although we were
not remotely the victors of that war, we need a big idea in order to
deal with those who were its victims,” she said, calling for something
like a Marshall Plan.
She went on to savage the War on Drugs at greater length.
“This
is a war that I saw destroy lives,” she said. “It eliminated a
generation of African American men, covered our racism in ostensibly
neutral guidelines and mandatory minimums… and created an
intergenerational problem––although I wasn’t on the bench long enough to
see this, we know that the sons and daughters of the people we
sentenced are in trouble, and are in trouble with the criminal justice
system.”
She added that the War on Drugs eliminated the political
participation of its casualties. “We were not leveling cities as we did
in WWII with bombs, but with prosecution, prison, and punishment,” she
said, explaining that her life’s work is now focused on trying to
reconstruct the lives that she undermined––as a general matter, by
advocating for reform, and as a specific project: she is trying to go
through the list of all the people she sentenced to see who deserves
executive clemency.
Her remarks can be watched in full beginning at about the 41 minute mark in the video above."
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