Anthony Diotaiuto Update
The Sun-Sentinel has a piece on the tragedy:
An ounce of pot, 10 bullets and one failed drug war
In the annals of drug takedowns, this wasn’t much. Three quarter-ounce bags of marijuana in a bedroom refrigerator, a joint and another loose gram on top. Four grams scattered on a dresser. Six pipes with pot residue, three ashtrays with less than a gram each, three packs of rolling paper and a digital scale.
For that, Anthony is dead. More:
“What in the hell were they doing with a SWAT team?” asked Eleanor Shockett, a retired Miami-Dade circuit judge who advocates a sweeping overhaul of drug laws. “To break into someone’s home at six in the morning, possibly awaken someone from a deep sleep, someone who has a concealed weapons permit? What did they expect to happen?”
This is a tragedy that never should have happened.
Even if Diotaiuto, 23, was a small-time pot dealer, which his friends and family deny, the methods used show the madness of our country’s war on drugs.
No discretion. No proportionality. No sense.
“Using SWAT in this case is like using a sledgehammer on a fly,” said Jack Cole, a former narcotics detective for the New Jersey State Police who heads Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a drug-law reform group. “I’d much rather use a little bit of stealth.”
Drugs are winning the war on drugs, which isn’t so comforting to its casualties.
August 17th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
Don’t you get it. If they’re after someone with only half an ounce, then they’ve got to go in in the middle of the night and bust the door down because it’s easy to flush that little. And if they go after the big dealers like they claim they are trying to do, then they have to bust the door down in the middle of the night so …. um, please tell me how long it takes to flush 10 kilos? (That’s 22 pounds, like maybe a whole garbage bag full, and in marijuana it’s still rather small time.)