I dont mean to say you are insinuating the following, but i feel it is important to say:
Is that reason enough to keep them there? Isn't it better to do the right* thing at some point, than do the wrong thing forever? Should an innocent man be sentenced to death, if at some point before his extinction from this earth, we find out the truth?
Asking for forgiveness, and admitting the wrong had been done, is and will always be, the first step towards rectifying injustice.
<rant>
* Marijuana has never, from its physical effects, killed any one. It is one of the safest substances for humans to ingest on the planet. You would die from drinking too much water before you could kill yourself from a smoking/eating pot (long term smoking effects not included).
For those who insist on the "moral" cough bullshit cough perspective: People do not become menaces, belligerent, and or violent towards their families smoking weed. People don't black out and wake up wondering what happened. For alcohol, the same cannot be said. Yet, marijuana is immoral? Let me hopefully be the last to say, with a smile, fuck you and fuck that :)
Furthermore, as is the case, well in my opinion, with all drugs they are at most: medical problems, not criminal. The criminal system is anti-rehabilitation; and as a result; ensures the propagation of the problem and not the solution.
You don't have to smoke it. You can eat it or vaporize it. So keeping it illegal because one form of consumption, may, be harmful is okay? I think you're missing the point and focusing on one quite minuscule detail.
I have yet to read a paper that actually shows smoking marijuana has or does not have adverse effects long term.
As a parallel, consider Alan Turing. At the time, he was convicted of an offense. Whether or not this led to his premature demise, we must leave for another thread.
Now, that offense no longer exists. There have been attempts to pardon Alan Turing, as yet unsuccessful.
However, I feel it can be sensibly argued that what truly conveys justice is the retroactive abolishment of the crime - that he would be, tragically posthumously, of an untarnished record.
Ought not such be justly applied in these circumstances also?
Hopefully, yes. I think that pardons would be in order for those convicted of only pot offenses (carrying an illegal handgun while also dealing would of course not be pardoned).
In reality I expect we would let them continue to rot in jail since they were technically breaking the law at the time.
carrying an illegal handgun while also dealing would of course not be pardoned
Why? If dealing pot shouldn't be a crime, why should being prepared to defend yourself with a handgun while dealing pot be a crime?
I don't understand the "illegal" qualifier. Isn't it always illegal to carry a handgun when dealing pot? Isn't having a handgun while committing a federal crime also a federal crime?
Obviously there are drug dealers who are aggressively violent, but if they haven't been caught for being aggressively violent why should they be punished as if they were? What other aspects of "innocent until proven guilty" should we do away with?
Even violent drug dealers represent a philosophical problem. Practically I don't think I'm willing to support letting them out of prison, but rationally I have some sympathy for some of them. Their involvement in the drug market shouldn't be a crime, and the violence in that profession is almost always due to the fact that it's a black market, with extremely high profit to be made and no legal protection against getting ripped off.
Their aggressive violence is not something to be condoned or accepted in society, but neither are laws that establish black markets that lead to such violence. Drug criminalization advocates claim all sorts of reasons why they're not at fault, from drug dealers being inherently evil due to bad parenting or genetics or whatever, to proximity to the criminal act and free will (no doubt legislators are further removed from the crime than the drug dealer who pulls the trigger). But who's really more at fault? The socially marginalized drug dealer from a relatively poor background who probably had poor schooling, who gets caught up in drug dealing, and who kills someone because his drug organization needs him to? Or a legislator with (supposedly) much more wisdom, who nevertheless votes to create a black market that leads to conditions where violence is commonplace?
I'm not condoning the violence. I simply think the root cause is not the drugs or the guns, or even the drug dealers themselves. Scapegoating gun-carrying drug dealers for the violence is just that... scapegoating. I think it's ultimately unproductive if we want to fix the problem.
Because carrying an illegal/unlicnesed handgun in NYC, with our without also being a drug dealer, is, well, illegal. Maybe that isn't right, but that is the reality of that situation.
If this were Vermont that we were talking about, then the situation would be different.
I take a strongly libertarian view of that issue. Not only should gun carry by itself not be a crime, but the only reason most of these drug dealers carry guns is because they are in a business where the legal system won't protect them, not to mention the reason they usually get caught carrying guns is that they were also involved in drug dealing. Cops go looking for drugs, and they find drugs and guns. If they weren't looking for drugs, they mostly wouldn't find guns either.
We're talking about a hypothetical ideal legal policy with regard to drugs, right? Why the return to the status quo the moment guns are in the picture?
My thinking here is that NY changing their pot laws seems more plausible than them changing their gun laws... Certainly changing pot laws is what is being proposed here, not gun laws.
Most of them weren't breaking the law in a fight to change the world, they were doing it opportunistically (consciously placing their own financial wellbeing above social rules). Hence, their punishment technically does not depend on current social rules regarding any object accessory to their crimes.
It's also politically hard enough to make people approve full MJ legalization, without having to fight the ghost of a wide-scale amnesty that would likely threaten deeper social repercussions.
In practice, a sort of low-scale amnesty for smaller infractions would likely have widespread support, even just to clean up personal records.
