Archives for February 2010

The Virginia House of Delegates recently passed a bill that prohibits companies from forcing employees to be implanted with tracking devices like RF microchips, an act of legislation that as a civil libertarian I find both obvious and laudable.

But far from acting out of a concern for personal privacy in the digital age, Republican Delegate Mark Cole says he proposed the bill out of fear that the implants could turn out to be the mark of the beast as prophesied in Revelation:

“My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said, as quoted at the Washington Post. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”

Uh-huh. It’s good to see that Republicans have their priorities in order.

Um… huh?

FINALLY someone has stood up to the institutional urge at Seattle Public Schools to adopt constructivist or reform math: Judge Julie Spector of King County Superior Court ruled Thursday that the district’s adoption of the Discovering series of high-school math texts was “arbitrary” and “capricious.”

This is a kind of judicial activism, and as a method of selecting or rejecting math books it makes us uneasy. Normally a judge would defer to the School Board. But … Don’t appeal the ruling.

Shorter Seattle Times: This is a kind of judicial activism, but that’s okay when we agree with it.

Apparently unwilling to wait for U.S. cable and phone companies to catch up with the rest of the world in providing ultra-high-speed Internet access, Google just announced plans to build an experimental fiber network, delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 homes. From now until March 26 they will be accepting RFI‘s from government officials interested in participating in the project… and Seattle would have to be absolutely crazy not to make a concerted effort to throw its hat into the ring.

Really. First mayor or council member to come out enthusiastically in support of this, I’m buying a beer.

But of course we can’t rely on our elected officials to do this all on their lonesome. Let’s start brainstorming about how to make the most compelling proposal to Google, and how to organize promoting it. You’d think even the trolls could get on board with this, as it’s one of those public/private things that kinda trumps politics.

UPDATE: Pasco kicks Seattle’s ass
I got an email from Matthew Watkins, Mayor Pro-Tem of Pasco, that he started working on his online application the minute he saw the news on Slashdot, about an hour before I posted. So since I didn’t specifically specify a Seattle mayor or council member, I suppose I owe Watkins a beer. But I’ll still buy a beer for the first Seattle mayor or council member to take the lead.

I mean, come on… do we really want to cede the future to Pasco?

Despite the tough economic times, 20 0f 23 school levy and bond measures in King and Snohomish counties are passing, most by comfortable margins. Of the three that are currently failing, two are bond measures receiving over 50 percent of the vote, but which require 60 percent to pass. The only levy to fail is in Federal Way, and just barely at 49.7 percent.

And Seattle’s two school levies are both passing with over 71 percent of the vote.

That’s right, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a comfortable majority of voters in WA’s two most populous counties just voted to raise their own taxes to pay for schools.

Think about it.

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Today is election day (really…it is), so drop off your ballot and join us at Drinking Liberally for an evening of watching election returns under the influence. We’ll be meeting at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning about 8:00 pm. Or stop by early for dinner.

Tonight Clarence Eckerson will join us at Drinking Liberally. Clarence is a contributer to “Street Films” part of the Streetsblog family of websites devoted to documenting and improving urban livability issues. You can read more of his work here.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 344 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

I’m not having an easy time making ends meet, and yet I just voted to raise my own taxes to help pay for schools, as will a comfortable majority of voters in school levy elections throughout the state.

Think about it.

Over on Crosscut, Daniel Jack Chasan asks the question: “Are super-majorities in the legislature unconstitutional?”

Simple answer: of course they are… except for, you know, those super-majorities specifically prescribed within the constitution.

Think about it. Washington state’s constitution mandates a two-thirds legislative super-majority to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot, an intentionally difficult legislative hurdle. And unlike in California, Washington’s constitution cannot be amended via initiative.

But if constitutionally prescribed legislative majorities, like that required to amend the constitution itself, can be changed through a simple majority vote — either of the legislature or through a citizens initiative — then there’s really no point in having a constitution at all. What sets a constitution apart from, and primary over the rest of our laws is the extra effort it takes to modify it; if the majority provisions can be changed via simple majority, than so can the constitution, making it in essence, just another set of statutes.

The fact that I-960 makes it more difficult to pass legislation, rather than less, is neither here nor there. The constitution is the constitution.

So why has the Washington State Supreme Court never thrown out I-960 or its predecessor I-601 as unconstitutional? Because its never been forced to rule on the issue.

Hugh Spitzer, who teaches Washington constitutional law at the University of Washington law school, says it seems pretty clear that if the state supreme court were somehow forced to vote on the issue, the court would find the two-thirds rule unconstitutional. But so far, the court has managed to duck the question.

“The court is terrified of having to make a decision,” on the constitutionality of a supermajority, Spitzer suggests. “They do everything they can” to avoid it.

Huh. So here’s an idea that I’m confident my friends in the Democratic caucus will never embrace: why not just up the ante on Tim Eyman’s game of constitutional brinksmanship, and fight fire with fire? If Tim is going to insist on repeatedly running initiatives that increase the majority required to pass certain forms of legislation, then the Legislature should pass a bill — on a simple majority vote — that increases the majority required to qualify or pass certain types of initiatives.

You know, we could attempt to increase the number of signatures necessary to qualify an initiative for the ballot from 8 percent of the previous gubernatorial turnout to 12 percent, and/or increase the majority required for passage at the polls from a simple majority to say, 60 percent.

Of course, such legislation would be challenged, and of course, the Supreme Court would strike it down. You just can’t change such constitutionally prescribed majorities through simple legislation.

And that would settle that constitutional issue, once and for all.

WellPoint pays its CEO $10 million a year, and spent over $9.5 million last year lobbying against health care reform. And now with reform all but dead, the company is intent on enjoying the fruit of its labors, hiking premiums on its 800,000 individual policy holders in California by 39 percent.

Ah, the efficiencies of the market.

In a blow to House Republicans who had made him one of their favorite targets of scorn and derision, U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) died today at age 77 of complications from gallbladder surgery.

Although he’d earned wide renown amongst D.C. insiders for his pork-barrel prowess (you know, the kinda bring-home-the-bacon politics folks here in our Washington like to abuse Rep. McDermott for not plying), Murtha didn’t become a lightning rod for Republican criticism until 2005, when the normally hawkish Democrat prominently came out in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. A former marine whose honors include the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, Murtha was the first Vietnam War veteran to be elected to the U.S. House.

And in a curious historical note, Murtha has now become the third in a direct line of succession to have died in office, joining his immediate predecessor John P. Saylor (1973) and Saylor’s predecessor Robert L. Coffey (1949). So a word of caution to those seeking to succeed Murtha: few who hold this office manage to return alive.

UPDATE:
Speaking of pork, Murtha’s death bumps WA’s own Rep. Norm Dicks to the number two position on the all powerful House Appropriations Committee, where he will likely take over Murtha’s chair of the lucrative Defense subcommittee. Say what you want, but that can’t be bad for the military-industrial complex here in WA state.

A couple of thoughts on Lee’s excellent and provocative post regarding the Department of Corrections’ abuse of probationers’ rights to use medical marijuana.

First, one would think that folks in the legacy media might be all over such a scandalous abuse of state power, if not for A) our media’s tendency to to view medical marijuana patients as a bunch of worthless, lying potheads, and B) their fear of covering any story that might cast media-beloved AG Rob McKenna in an unflattering light.

Second, if there’s anything that illustrates the incredible stupidity and casual cruelty of our drug policy, it’s how it so easily turned a sickly grandmother with a medical marijuana prescription and less than a quarter ounce of pot, into an enemy combatant in our so-called War on Drugs. Read Lee’s post; is there any moral or social justification for this poor woman’s arrest in Arizona, and subsequent abuse at the hands of the Washington DOC? And yet such abuse is the inevitable consequence of our current, twisted system.

What a waste of time and money, not to mention the cost in human suffering. So come on, let’s legalize marijuana already so we can let law enforcement focus on enforcing laws that actually make sense.

The Cannabis Defense Coalition has now received the second and third bundles of documents from the Department of Corrections in response to their public disclosure request. Following the first set of documents the CDC received, I posted about how Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office was advising the DOC to take an extremely hard line against the use of medical marijuana for individuals on probation. With the newer sets of documents, even more has been revealed, including a flagrant case of police misconduct by several corrections officers, and an attempt by even the head of the DOC, Eldon Vail, to cover it up.

All three sets of documents released by the DOC have been indexed here and posted here. Within this post, I’ll be referencing the released documents the same way the index does – for example [2:256-258] would be the second document dump, pages 256 to 258.

The case in question involves a woman named Kathy Parkins (who also goes by Kathy Merry-Parkins), a medical marijuana patient from Washington who suffers from fibromyalgia. Parkins was considering moving further down the west coast in 2007. After spending some time in southern California, she decided to make a trip into Arizona to visit a friend and have her car looked at before driving back up to Washington for Thanksgiving. Along the way, on November 14, 2007, she was stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint just after entering Arizona (the Border Patrol is allowed to set up checkpoints like this within 100 miles of an international border).

Arizona is not a medical marijuana state, so Parkins was arrested and charged with three marijuana-related counts after a drug-sniffing dog located the less than 1/4 ounce that she had in her possession. So instead of making it back home for Thanksgiving, Parkins spent over three weeks in an Arizona jail. She was finally released back to Washington in January 2008, but had to return several times for court appearances. Parkins was eventually sentenced to probation by the judge in Arizona.

In order for Parkins to spend her probationary period back home in Washington, however, an Interstate Compact was required, an agreement between states to have someone on probation move from one state’s supervision to another. Neither Parkins nor the corrections officers in Arizona, however, understood the extent that the Washington DOC was attempting to fight their own battle against Washington’s medical marijuana law and medical marijuana users.

Upon her release back to Washington, Parkins moved in with a woman named Carla Cole, another authorized medical marijuana patient who says she heard about Parkins’ situation and volunteered to let her stay in her house. On May 21, 2008, hours after Parkins got an updated medical marijuana authorization from Dr. Bethany Rolfe at Sea-Mar Community Center, Community Corrections Officer (CCO) Jeremy Praven and another unidentified CCO conducted a home inspection at Cole’s West Seattle residence and found Cole’s small legal garden of 9 marijuana plants. Praven contacted Seattle Police and then attempted to get guidance from a supervisor, identified as Todd Johnson in an email written a week later by Field Administrator Donta Harper [1:125].

When Seattle Police arrived, according to Cole, they determined that Cole’s small grow operation was completely legal, apologized to Cole for bothering her, and took no actions other than filing a report. After that, a third Corrections Officer from the DOC, Michael Schemnitzer, arrived at Cole’s residence. Referring to both the initial contact from Praven and his partner and the later arrival of Schemnitzer, this is how Cole described what happened in an email complaint sent to the DOC on May 22, 2008, the day after the arrest [1:134]:

While the CCO’s were in my home, one very young man said to me, a retiree in my 60’s, and poor Kathy who is visibily pained and stressed, “I don’t care about her and I don’t care about her problems and I don’t care about you and I don’t care about your problems.”

…

Then your guys came back with a new guy who chose to speak to Kathy SO RUDELY and with such contempt I just had to add “Please” to his command for her to descend the stairs. This was in my home, and I naturally feel a right to ask people to behave in a civil way there.

Then, he said that because I said “please” he was going to take her in, which he did. I told him his cruelty does not become him and I’m telling you the cruelty of your staff does not become you. To make me feel like I sent my friend to prison because I asked her to be treated with kindness in my home – someone who has committed no real crime at all – is just so mean I’m speechless.

After being arrested by Schemnitzer, Parkins spent the next week in King County Jail without charges or a hearing. Her health deteriorated (as it had while locked up in Arizona as well) as she tried unsuccessfully to get information about her case. Throughout that week, Cole sent several frantic emails to elected officials in Olympia and folks within the DOC, trying to find out what was happening. Two separate Deputy Secretary Correspondence Logs were opened for the case [1:124][1:133]. On the evening of May 27, a full six days after the initial arrest, Cole sent her correspondence to several people in the media [1:130]. The next day, folks in the DOC began looking into the situation, and at 7pm on May 28, Parkins was finally released from custody. In making the decision to release her, Field Administrator Donta Harper conceded in an internal email that the CCOs had no authority to detain her in the first place [1:652]:

A review of the case and of DOC 380.605 Interstate Compact policy indicates that assigned CCO did not have jurisdiction to detain as the Interstate Placement had not been approved and the case had yet been gained whereabouts we agreed to assume supervision responsibilities. The CCO was in the investigation process of which he could have denied based on current behavior. The CCO had also further involved local law enforcement regarding the suspected illegal behavior of which she has not been yet charged.

Harper also followed up the next day by sending a letter to Governor Gregoire’s office admitting fault in the arrest [1:374-375].

It’s important to note that the reason that Praven and Schemnitzer didn’t have the authority to detain her wasn’t because they overreacted to the presence of a legal medical marijuana grow, but because it was up to Arizona officials to make the decision to detain her. At this point, Parkins was still largely unaware of the Washington DOC’s policy towards medical marijuana, which she assumed would be legal for her to use while under probation here. Upon leaving Arizona, she was told that during her probation, the restriction was that she was not allowed to use illegal drugs. As Parkins understood it, medical marijuana is not an illegal drug in Washington if authorized by a doctor. But less than a week before Parkins was arrested, however, the DOC released an Administrative Bulletin [1:156-157] that outlined a new process for people on probation who have authorizations to use medical marijuana. I’ll cover this in more detail later in the post, but the process was set up as little more than a formal way of preventing just about anyone from using medical marijuana while under probation.

Despite being let out of jail, Parkins was still understandably worried that she’d be sent back to Arizona for violating her probation. After several attempts to follow up with officials in both Arizona and Washington, Parkins discovered that a nationwide arrest warrant had been posted for her from Arizona, based upon a denial of the Interstate Compact agreement filled out by Praven. On June 20, 2009, an official in Arizona read Kathy the Interstate Compact paperwork that Praven had filled out after her arrest and sent to Arizona [2:20-22]. It contained a number of things that were completely made up out of thin air. On the same day, Kimberly Pearson of the Washington DOC notified Arizona probation officials to cancel the warrant and that they were rescinding the Interstate Compact denial. Parkins could now stay in Washington and apply to use medical marijuana while here on probation.

Despite numerous attempts, Parkins was never able to obtain a copy of that Interstate Compact denial filled out by Praven (she claims to have been told that it was lost). In fact, she didn’t see it until a few weeks ago, when it was released as part of the second document dump from the DOC. The report contains the following claims [2:20-22]:

Ms. Parkins has no family ties in Washington. She stated that she wanted to live in Washington because of the Marijuana laws.

This is complete fiction. Parkins was born and raised in Washington, has two grown kids in the state, a grandchild who had just been born in Wenatchee while she was in an Arizona courtroom, and 9 aunts and uncles all living in Washington state. On top of that, Parkins insists that she never said anything about wanting to living in Washington because of the marijuana laws.

Ms. Parkins was living with individuals from the Marijuana’s Growers Association of Washington.

Neither Cole nor Parkins has any idea where Praven came up with this. No such organization exists.

She stated that she had a physicians prescription for medical marijuana. Per information received from Interstate, there is a Physicians Statement from Medicann. Per this statement, marijuana is appropriate for her serious medical condition. This document has no validity in the state of Washington.

This part is more misleading than untrue. Parkins’ file from Arizona (which is not in the document dump) contained medical marijuana authorizations from both Washington and California. It’s true that she also had a Medicann card from California, and that it’s not valid in the state of Washington, but Praven appears to have ignored the authorization from Washington in order to write this. Parkins also claims that she offered to show the officers the updated Washington authorization that she’d received earlier that day, but they weren’t interested.

With all of this information now public, there’s no ambiguity to what occurred on May 21, 2008. CCOs Jeremy Praven and Michael Schemnitzer improperly arrested Parkins and then Praven filed a report with several things completely made up or intentionally misleading in an attempt to have her sent back to Arizona – a state where she has no family and has never lived in – to serve out her probation.

Even after the arrest and the discovery that her CCO lied about her case to officials in Arizona, Parkins still believed that once her doctor filed the necessary paperwork to certify her as a medical marijuana patient, everything would be taken care of. On July 23, 2008, two months after her arrest, that hopefulness bumped up against the reality of the DOC, as they denied her request to use the medicine that she’d been using for years – legally – before her arrest.

Without going too far into the details of the process that the DOC put into place earlier that year for handling medical marijuana requests, the official intent was to separate out valid medical marijuana users from addicts and others who were getting authorizations from shady doctors. In reality, the physician they put in charge of approving or denying the requests, Dr. Steve Hammond, considered any doctor who recommended medical marijuana a phony doctor. In fact, his animosity towards medical marijuana was so extreme, it extended to Marinol, the completely legal THC substitute medication that works just as well as the plant itself for a percentage of medical marijuana users. He even asserted in an email exchange from March 2009 [2:458-459] that the DOC had the right to overrule a doctor who prescribed Marinol to a terminal cancer patient unless they could confirm that the patient was going through chemotherapy at the time. Unlike the loophole that the Attorney General’s office found regarding medical marijuana, what Hammond suggested the DOC do in that email thread (prevent a probationer from taking a prescribed medication) is completely illegal. Fortunately, he was overruled internally and the DOC doesn’t appear to have crossed that line (although that’s something I hope to explore in a later post).

The entire situation had become surreal. A person who broke a law in Arizona – for something that’s completely legal here – was now being harassed for engaging in that legal activity, despite the fact that even the officials in Arizona seemed indifferent to her medical marijuana use while she was back in Washington. Whatever justification the DOC may have had to overrule certain people’s rights to use a medicine recommended to them by their doctor, it’s hard to fathom how they could justify denying it for a longtime medical marijuana user who only ended up on probation because she was arrested for it in a non-medical marijuana state. At this point, it’s clear that the DOC was denying medical marijuana use based upon an open hostility towards the voter-approved law rather than for any genuine attempt to weed out the people just cynically trying to get high while on probation.

Following the denial of Parkins’ request to use medical marijuana, Praven once again sent the partially fictional Interstate Compact denial to Arizona. Her Corrections Officer from Arizona, Susan Huntzinger, confirmed to me that they only had one denial document, so it appears that Praven just re-sent his previous report – with none of the false claims corrected. At this point, the protocol for dealing with her case started to become even more confusing. The appeal process for those who’d been denied wasn’t fully established, so it wasn’t clear whether she would need approval from Arizona for her appeal, or if she could just submit it herself. By the end of the summer, Parkins was concerned enough for her ability to stay in Washington that she moved out of Cole’s house and in with her son and his girlfriend.

Cole, however, remained furious over the way Parkins was treated and demanded that the CCO’s involved in her arrest be reprimanded for their behavior during and after the arrest. After several failed attempts, she decided to send a letter directly to the head of the DOC, Eldon Vail, who was appointed by Governor Gregoire to lead the agency at the beginning of 2008. On December 3, 2008, she wrote [2:450-451]:

This past May a recent tenant and friendly acquaintance who, like me, is authorized in Washington to use marijuana medicinally, was visited here by your Community Corrections Officers. The friend, [Kathy Parkins] is on an interstate compact probation from Arizona, which she thought was also a medical marijuana state, but isn’t.

She was roughly and unfairly removed from my home to the county jail downtown where she spent a truly miserable week with no contact from you whatsoever. The paperwork was filled with inaccuracies, and further moves by her CCO, Jeremy Praven in West Seattle, seem also to be filled with fabrications and are utterly unworthy of any decent government.

Nearly three months later, on February 20, 2009, Vail finally replied to Cole. At the time, the DOC was still refusing to release the falsified report to Parkins, and Vail attempted to cover up what his officer had done:

A review of jail records and discussion with staff indicates that Ms. Merry-Perkins [sic] was booked into King County Jail without any appearance of physical injury. Through a review of her field file, discussion with the assigned CCO and the unit supervisor, there is no evidence to support your statements that the CCOs inaccurately filled out paperwork or fabricated her supervision paperwork from Arizona.

Vail studied this case so thoroughly that he misspelled Parkins’ last name throughout the letter.

Ten months later, in December 2009, the second document dump from the DOC finally revealed the document that they’d been trying to hide the entire time – and it proves that Vail lied to cover up for the actions of CCO Jeremy Praven. Cole has since sent another letter to Vail asking for an explanation, but has yet to receive a reply. I attempted to interview folks still within the DOC to find out if Praven or Schemnitzer were ever reprimanded internally, but after initially saying that they would set up an interview for me, they failed to follow-up.

Parkins is currently finishing up her probation and searching for a lawyer to look into her case. After filing an appeal of her initial rejection, she was eventually cleared to use medical marijuana in January 2009. She’s one of only two people who have been allowed to do so, but it’s not clear what separated her case from the others, as there are dozens – including at least one person with AIDS, another who was paralyzed in a car accident – who were denied the use of medical marijuana, even with physician authorizations. This is a topic I hope to cover in a later post.

Last week’s contest was won by Greg in an impressive 55 minutes. It was Granbury, Texas.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Deuteronomy 25:11-12
If two men fight together, and the wife of one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of the one attacking him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; your eye shall not pity her.

Discuss.

– Initiative 1068 has been filed. It removes the criminal penalties for adult marijuana use. If enough signatures are gathered, Washington voters will join California voters this November in deciding whether to make it legal for adults to possess and use marijuana. Pete Guither has an interesting write-up on what the federal government might do in response. For now, the Obama Administration’s current strategy appears to be to bury their heads in the sand and pretend none of this is happening.

UPDATE: There will be a volunteer kickoff meeting in Seattle on February 17 (and in Spokane on February 10) to get people started with the signature gathering process.

– The State Senate passed ESSB 5516, which prevents people from being charged with drug crimes if they are reporting a medical emergency. On a less optimistic note, they passed a stricter law against driving while using handheld cell phones, even though a study this week showed that those laws don’t do anything to reduce accidents. [via Balko]

– The sight of ACORN pimp James O’Keefe – a young man whose ties to white nationalists are starting to be exposed – sitting across from Sean Hannity explaining that his arrest last week was just a “misunderstanding” says pretty much everything you need to know about the state of conservatism, race, and justice among the American right. As I watched that happen, my first thought was “when do the ACORN folks get their chance to sit across from Hannity and plead their case?” Compared to what O’Keefe just got caught doing (even just the parts he’s admitted to), what those ACORN workers did was petty. One can imagine what Hannity would say if four ACORN workers were busted trying to mess with the phones in Senator Mitch McConnell’s office. But that inequity never adds up to anyone in the Fox News alternate universe. Their world is one in which whites live by one set of rules involving the ideas of redemption, trust, and innocence until proven guilty, and everyone else is a potential terrorist.