Judge questions why feds went easy on big-name blogger caught with pot

Laura:

Then think of it this way. The effective cost for a citizen is a minor fine.

Sullivan, who has been a vital contributor to our national discourse and has been attempting to gain citizenship for years, would be - in all probability - barred from becoming a citizen. And it's worse than that. If it weren't for an old discriminatory policy still on the books, making it difficult for HIV+ individuals to become citizens, he would've been one already. And he was married, right here in Massachusetts, to a citizen. If the federal government recognized, as it should, the jurisdiction of the states over marriage, he'd also be a citizen.

So he's been discriminated against on the basis of illness and sexuality, and left uniquely vulnerable. Now, that vulnerability is a very good reason for Andrew not to publicly flout the law, no matter how stupid or unjust he feels it to be. But I suspect that he made the same error I would've made, and failed to appreciate that the beach was under federal jurisdiction.

This cuts to the core of juridicial discretion. There's no principle of justice that dictates one must levy the same punishment for the same offense - a $100,000 fine, for example, would be peanuts to a billionaire but would wipe most of us out, even though it's precisely the same sum in every case. The impacts are disparate. In this case, the fine amounts to a stinging inconvenience for most offenders, but would strip a good man of his chance for citizenship. It's perfectly reasonable for a prosecutor to conclude that the costs of pursuing this particular case - to the offender and to society - are entirely too high, while at the same time pursuing similar charges against others.

In fact, I'd like to see more of this. To the extent that Sullivan's celebrity worked in his favor, I suspect it's because the prosecutor felt he'd have sufficient cover to do the right thing. Consideration of individual circumstances is an aid, not a bar, to justice. And the magistrate in this case was way, way out of line to second guess the prosecutor on this. He seized the opportunity to cash in on Sullivan's notability to advance his own agenda. The truth is, prosecutors routinely use possession charges in the service of larger interests - pressing them in lieu of dealing charges because they're easier to prove, dropping them in exchange for cooperation, using them to clean up a specific area. In each of those cases, the prosecutor is deciding who to charge, what charge to levy, and who should walk free. It's not as if everyone caught with a joint faces equal sanction to begin with. A suspected dealer is likely to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for possession, whereas a user is unlikely to be. There's nothing new, in other words, about disparate treatment for individuals caught with exactly the same amount of pot. And there's nothing wrong with it, so long as it isn't driven by improper considerations, such as race, wealth, or other extraneous factors.