presumed guilty.txt

黑客培训教程

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GOVERNMENT SEIZED HOME OF MAN WHO WAS GOING BLIND

     James Burton says he loves America and wants to come home.

     But he can't. If he does, he'll wind up in prison, go blind, or both.

     Burton and his wife, Linda, live in an austere, concrete-slab apartment
furnished with lawn chairs near Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It is a home much
different from the large house and 90-acre farm they owned near Bowling Green,
Ky., before the government seized both.

     For Burton, who has glaucoma, home-grown marijuana provided his relief -
and his undoing.

     Since 1972, federal health secretaries have reported to Congress that
marijuana is beneficial in the treatment of glaucoma and several other medical
conditions.

     Yet while some officials within the Drug Enforcement Administration have
acknowledged the medical value of marijuana, drug agents continue to seize
property where chronically ill people grow it.

     "Because of the emotional rhetoric connected with the marijuana issue, a
doctor who can prescribe cocaine, morphine, amphetamines and barbiturates
cannot prescribe marijuana, which is the safest therapeutically active drug
known to man," Francis Young, administrative law judge for DEA, was quoted as
saying in Burton's trial.

     In an interview this past July 4, Burton said, "We don't really have any
choice right now but to stay" in the Netherlands, where they moved after he
completed a one-year jail term for three counts of marijuana possession.  "I
can buy or grow marijuana here legally, and if I don't have the marijuana, I'll
go blind.

     Burton, a 43-year-old Vietnam War veteran, has a rare form of hereditary,
low-tension glaucoma. All of the men on his mother's side of the family have
the disease, and several already are blind. It does not respond to traditional
medications.

     At the time of Burton's arrest, North Carolina ophthalmologist Dr.  John
Merritt was the only physician authorized by the government to test marijuana
in the treatment of glaucoma patients. Menitt testified at Burton's trial that
marijuana was "the only medication" that could keep him from going blind.

     On July 7, 1987, Kentucky State Police raided Burton's farm and found 138
marijuana plants and two pounds of raw marijuana. "It was the kickoff of
Kentucky Drug Awareness Month, and I was their special kickoff feature.  It
was all over television," Burton said.

     Burton admitted growing enough marijuana to produce about a pound a month
for the 10 to 15 cigarettes he uses each day to reduce pressure in his eye.

     A jury decided he grew the dope for his own use - not to sell, as the
government contended - and in March 1988 found him guilty of three counts of
simple possession.

     The presentence report on Burton shows he had no previous arrests. The
judge sentenced him to a year in a federal maximum security prison, with no
parole.

     On top of that, the government took his farm: 90 rolling, wooded acres in
Warren County purchased for $34,701 in 1980 and assessed at twice that amount
when it was taken.

     On March 27,1989, U.S. District Judge Ronald Meredith - without hearing
any witnesses and without allowing Burton to testify in his own behalf -
ordered the farm forfeited and gave the Burtons 10 days to get off the land.
When owners of property live at a site while marijuana is growing in their
presence, "there is no defense to forfeiture," Meredith ruled.

     "I never got to say two words in defense of keeping my home, something we
worked and saved for for 18 years," said Burton, who was a master electrical
technician. Linda, 41, worked for an insurance company.  "On a serious matter
like taking a person's home, you'd think the government would give you a chance
to defend it."

     Joe Whittle, the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the Burton case, says he
didn't know about the glaucoma until Burton's lawyer raised the issue in court.
His office has "taken a lot of heat on this case and what happened to that poor
guy," Whittle says. But "we did nothing improper.

     "Congress passes these laws, and we have to follow them. If the American
people wanted to exempt certain marijuana activity - these mom and pop or
personal use or medical cases - they should speak through their duly elected
officials and change the laws. Until those laws are changed, we must enforce
them to the full extent of our resources."

     The action was "an unequaled and outrageous example of government abuse,"
says Louisville lawyer Donald Heavrin who failed to get the U.S. Supreme Court
to hear the case.

     "To send a man trying to save his vision to prison, and steal the home and
land that he and his wife had worked decades for, should have the authors of
the Constitution spinning in their graves."

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DRUG AGENTS MORE LIKELY TO STOP MINORITIES
PART TWO: THE WAY YOU LOOK

     Look around carefully the next time you're at any of the nation's big
airports, bus stations, train terminals or on a major highway, because there
may be a government agent watching you. if You're black, Hispanic, Asian or
look like a "hippie" you can almost count on it.

     The men and women doing the spying are drug agents, the frontline troops
in the government's war on narcotics. They count their victories in the number
of people they stop because they suspect they're carrying drugs or drug money.

     But each year in the hunt for suspects, thousands of guiltless citizens
are stopped, most often because of their skin color.

     A 10-month Pittsburgh Press investigation of drug seizure and forfeiture
included an examination of court records on 121 "drug courier" stops where
money was seized and no drugs were discovered. The Pittsburgh Press found that
black, Hispanic and Asian people accounted for 77 percent of the cases.

     In making stops, drug agents use a profile, a set of speculative
behavioral traits that gauge the suspect's appearance, demeanor and
willingness to look a police officer in the eye.

     For years, the drug courier profile counted race as a principal indicator
of the likelihood of a person's carrying drugs.  But today the word "profile"
isn't officially mentioned by police. Seeing the word scrawled in a police
report or hearing it from a witness chair instantly unnerves prosecutors and
makes defense lawyers giddy. Both sides know the racial implications can raise
constitutional challenges.

     Even so, far away from the courtrooms, the practice persists.

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STEREOTYPES TRIGGER STOPS

     in Memphis, Tenn., in 1989, drug officers have testified, about 75
percent of the people they stopped in the airport were black. The latest
figures available from the Air Transport Association show that for that
year only percent of the flying public was black.

     In Eagle County, Colo., the 60-mile-long strip of Interstate 70 that
winds and dips past Vail and other ski areas is the setting of a class-action
suit that charges race was the main element of the profile used in drug stops.

     According to court documents in one of the cases that led to the suit, the
sheriff and two deputies testified that "being black or Hispanic was and is a
factor" in their drug courier profile.

     Lawyer David Lane says that 500 people - primarily Hispanic and black
motorists - were stopped and searched by Eagle County's High Country Drug Task
Force during 1989 and 1990. Each time, Lane charged, the task force used an
unconstitutional profile based on race, ethnicity and out-of-state license
plates.

     Byron Boudreaux was one of those stopped.

     Boudreaux was driving from Oklahoma to a new job in Canada when Sgt. James
Perry and three other task force officers pulled him over.

     "Sgt. Perry told me that I was stopped because my car fit the description
of someone trafficking drugs in the area," Boudreaux says. He let the officers
search his car.

     "Listen, I was a black man traveling alone up in the mountains of Eagle
County and surrounded by four police off icers. I was going to be as
cooperative as I could," he recalls.

     For almost an hour the officers unloaded and searched the suitcases,
laundry baskets and boxes that were wedged into Boudreaux's car. Nothing was
found.

     "I was stopped because I was black, and that's not a great testament to
our law enforcement system," says Boudreaux, who is now an assistant basketball
coach at Queens College in Charlotte, N.C.

     In a federal trial stemming from another stop Penny made on the same road
a few months later, he testified that because of "astigmatism and color
blindness" he was unable to distinguish among black, Hispanic and white people.

     U.S. District Court Judge Jim Carrigan didn't buy it and called the
sergeant's testimony "incredible.

     "If this nation were to win its war on drugs at the cost of sacrificing
its citizens' constitutional lights, it would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed,"
Carrigan wrote in a court opinion. "If the rule of law rather than the rule of
man is to prevail, there cannot be one set of search and seizure rules
applicable to some and a different set applicable to others."

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LIVELIHOOD IN JEOPARDY

     In Nashville, Tenn., Willie Jones has go doubt that police still use a
profile based on race.

     Jones, owner of a landscaping service, thought the ticket agent at the
American Airlines counter in Nashville Metro Airport reacted strangely when he
paid cash Feb. 27 for his round-trip ticket to Houston.  "She said no one ever
paid in cash anymore and she'd have to go in the back and check on what to do,"
Jones says.

     What Jones didn't know is that in Nashville - as in other airports many
airport employees double as paid informers for the police.

     The Drug Enforcement Administration usually pays them 10 percent of any
money seized, says Capt. Judy Bawcum, head of the Nashville police division
that runs the airport unit.

     Jones got his ticket. Ten minutes later, as he waited for his plane, two
drug team members stopped him.

     "They flashed their badges and asked if I was carrying drugs or a large
amount of money. I told them I didn't have anything to do with drugs, but I had
money on me to go buy some plants for my business," Jones says.

     They searched his overnight bag and found nothing. They patted him down
and felt a bulge. Jones pulled out a black plastic wallet hidden under his
shirt. It held $9,600.

     "I explained that I was going to Houston to order some shrubbery for my
nursery. I do it twice a year and pay cash because that's the way the growers
want it," says the father of three girls.  The drug agents took his money.

     "They said I was going to buy drugs with it, that their dog sniffed it and
said it had drugs on it," Jones says. He never saw the dog.

     The officers didn't arrest Jones, but they kept the money. They gave him a
DEA receipt for the cash. But under the heading of amount and description,
Sgt. Claude Byrum wrote, "Unspecified amount of U.S. currency."

     Jones says losing the money almost put him out of business.

     "That was to buy my stock. I'm known for having a good selection of
unusual plants. That's why I go South twice a year to buy them. Now I've got
to do it piecemeal, run out after I'm paid for a job and buy plants for the
next one," he says.

     Jones has receipts for three years showing that each fall and spring he
buys plants from nurseries in other states.

     "I just don't understand the government. I don't smoke. I don't drink. I
don't wear gold chains and jewelry, and I don't get into trouble with the
police," he says. "I didn't know it was against the law for a 42-year-old
black man to have money in his pocket."

     Tennessee police records confirm that the only charge ever filed against
Jones was for drag racing 15 years ago.

     "DEA says I have to pay $900, 10 percent of the money they took from me,
just to have the right to try to get it back," Jones says.

     His lawyer, E. E. "Bo" Edwards filled out government forms documenting
that his client couldn't afford the $900 bond.

     "If I'm going to feed my children, I need my truck, and the only way I can
get that $900 is to sell it," Jones says.

     It's been more than five months, and the only thing Jones has received
>from DEA are letters saying that his application to proceed without paying the
$900 bond was deficient. "But they never told us what those deficiencies were,
says Edwards.

     Jones is nearly resigned to losing the money. "I don't think I'll ever
get it back. But I think the only reason they thought I was a drug dealer was
because I'm black, and that bothers me."

     It also bothers his lawyer.

     "Of course he was stopped because he was black. No cop in his right mind
would try that with a white businessman. These seizure laws give law
enforcement a license to hunt, and the target of choice for many cops is those
they believe are least capable of protecting themselves: blacks, Hispanics and
poor whites," Edwards says.

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MONEY STILL HELD