The urgent need for crime lab reform (discussed in recent TalkLeft posts here and here) is exemplified by the disaster that was the Detroit police crime lab.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy says her office has identified 147 cases of convicted and imprisoned people that will require the retesting of evidence as part of the investigation into the now-closed Detroit police crime lab -- unveiling the first of potentially thousands of cases that are at risk of unraveling because of mishandled evidence.

Worthy calls the 147 cases "the tip of the iceberg." It's an iceberg that is causing damage to Detroit justice of Titanic proportions. [more ...]

Steve Chapman at the Chicago Tribune asks:

Nine years into the 21st Century, why isn't every squad car in America equipped with a dashboard video camera? Why do we persist in relying on the slippery, self-interested, incomplete and unverified accounts of opposing participants when we have the means to see the truth with our own eyes?

Chapman spotlights an arrest of a driver who, according to the arresting officer, was "lurching and unable to walk a straight line or stand on one foot." The squad car's video recorder showed the driver keeping his balance during his field sobriety tests.

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“It will be a top priority of the Justice Department to hold accountable executives who have engaged in fraudulent activities.”

-Justice Department spokesman Matthew A. Miller

As opposed to the attitude towards investigating the abuses of the Bush Administration, it seems that the Obama Administration is foregoing the Establishment-favored "Lets not bicker over who killed who" approach and is gung ho for prosecuting financial fraud:

The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) opened its Summit on Global Drug Policy today at which they are expected to approve another decade of the War on Drugs. Human Rights Watch explains why the U.N. approach should be rejected.

On March 11-20, 2009, the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) will meet, opening with a high-level segment that will set the international drug policy agenda for the next decade.

In many countries around the world, drug control efforts result in serious human rights abuses - torture and ill-treatment by police, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, and denial of essential medicines and basic health services. UN drug control agencies have paid little attention to whether international drug control efforts are consistent with human rights protections, or to the effect of drug control policies on fundamental human rights.

In our own country, the war on drugs has been a failure, emphasizing prison over treatment. [More...]

The Innocence Project released an 84 page report today showing that under the Bush Administration, the Department of Justice failed to enforce federal forensic oversight requirements. The report lays out corrective measures for the Obama Administration.

A report released today by the Innocence Project shows that nearly five years after Congress passed legislation to ensure that forensic negligence and misconduct are properly investigated, the law is largely being ignored due to a lack of federal guidance and, as a result, serious problems in crime labs and other forensic facilities nationwide have not been addressed.

[More...]

The New York Civil Liberties Union today released a report on the draconian Rockefeller drug laws.

The report – The Rockefeller Drug Laws: Unjust, Irrational, Ineffective – presents overwhelming evidence that New York’s mandatory minimum drug-sentencing scheme has failed to improve public safety or deter drug use. It documents the grave harm the drug laws cause to low-income communities of color, and it calls on lawmakers to adopt a public health approach to addressing substance abuse.

[More...]

The Economist has an excellent cover story this week cataloging the extraordinary failures of the drug war.

I was particularly gratified to read the Economist's editors write that the fear of legalization is "based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer."

That's exactly right, as I argued a couple of weeks ago here at Talk Left in a post titled "The Legalization Scare" [More...]

Researchers warned the media this week that the field tests used by cops to determine whether drugs are present in substances are unreliable and produce too many false positives.

More....

Human Rights Watch released a new report this week,
Decades of Disparity, Drug Arrests and Race in the United States (pdf.) The report analyzes the arrest statistics released by the FBI.

Adult African Americans were arrested on drug charges at rates that were 2.8 to 5.5 times as high as those of white adults in every year from 1980 through 2007, the last year for which complete data were available. About one in three of the more than 25.4 million adult drug arrestees during that period was African American.

Via Drug War Chronicle: [More...]

35 years of draconian drug offender sentencing may come to a halt in New York as the Assembly votes today on reforming the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

The New York State Assembly is set to vote today on legislation that would allow judges to send drug offenders to substance abuse treatment instead of prison. The legislation would also allow thousands of prisoners jailed for nonviolent drug offenses to have their sentences reduce or commuted.

It’s the latest step in a long campaign to repeal the draconian Rockefeller laws. The laws impose lengthy minimum sentences on drug offenders, even those with no prior convictions. The laws have disproportionately targeted people of color, while giving prosecutors de facto control over how long convicts are jailed.

The Albany Times Union says Just Say Yes to Drug Law Reform. Our post from last week on this is here.

The Pew Center on the States and its Public Safety Performance Project have released a new report,One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections (Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts, March 2009) (pdf). The findings:

Explosive growth in the number of people on probation or parole has propelled the population of the American corrections system to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 U.S. adults, according to a report released today by the Pew Center on the States. The vast majority of these offenders live in the community, yet new data in the report finds that nearly 90 percent of state corrections dollars are spent on prisons.

[More....]

Reuters today provides a timeline for the War on Drugs in Latin America.

It began in 1970 with passage of the Controlled Substances Act. President Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs in 1971 and the DEA was established in 1973.

Pablo Escobar formed the Medellin cartel in 1983.

By 1985, Mexico began to replace Colombia. In 1993, Columbian police, with assistance from the U.S., kill Escobar. By 1996, the Cali Cartel was dismantled.

In 2000, President Clinton provides Colombia with $1.3 billion to fight the war on drugs. In 2004, George W. Bush provides $1.4 billion to Colombia and Mexico. In 2008, more than 6,000 are killed in drug violence in Mexico.

And they still don't get the picture, the War on Drugs is a failure. Defense Secretary Robert Gates now wants to use our military to continue the losing battle.