Two Joints and Five

This is a story I heard on NPR recently, and it won’t leave me alone.




A boy traveled from Jamaica to America with his parents when he was 3 years old. They were illegal immigrants. However, they became legalized residence and worked towards their citizenship, which they were all granted.



The boy became a Man, got married, had children. During a routine traffic stop in the state of Georgia, he was found to have a small amount of marijuana on him, almost enough for “two cigarettes”. The man was provided a public defender, and was told that he could plead not guilty, which would lead to a court battle that would cost him more than he could afford, or he could plead guilty. In pleading guilty, charges of possession of marijuana would be expunged in 5 years, he would serve no jail time, and only have to do 50 hours of probation. Believing this was the best avenue for him to take, the Man plead guilty. What he wasn’t told was that, in pleading guilty, the charge could be altered to something more severe than what he was pleading guilty to, which was the case in Georgia law at the time. So he plead guilty to possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell and distribute. For this crime, just like his lawyer said, he spent no time in jail, served 50 hours of probation, and was deported to his “homeland” of Jamaica. He had no family there, no ties whatsoever, except that he had lived there until he was 3. He was sent away from his wife and five children because he had almost two joints-worth of marijuana.



I know the stuff is illegal. I know it’s against our laws. But our laws have grades, different levels, because there are some crimes that are more severe than other crimes. If you kill somebody, you could be charged with manslaughter, or you could be charged with murder in the first. If you abandon your child because he admits to you that he’s gay, you could be charged with negligence, or you could be charged with being a Republican. There are different grades of punishment that we have come up with in our society. And it seems completely out of the realm of reality that our legal system could make it a possibility to charge a man with an illegal substance that is barely enough to get high off of with the severity of intending to distribute and sell it. That’s like saying you own a bag of Doritos, so you must be planning on opening a grocery store. It’s completely unreasonable. And then, because his lawyer didn’t inform him that he could be deported, his American citizenship is completely ignored, and this American father and husband is sent away from his family for five years. He didn’t murder anyone. He didn’t steal from anyone. He didn’t burn down an orphanage. He didn’t declare war on a country without weapons of mass destruction. He didn’t even have a drug that could cause him to act in an aggressive fashion. He had a joint and a half. And then he paid for it by being sent to one of the poorest, most rancid places on earth, away from everyone and everything he knows, for five years.



Just recently, Georgia changed its laws to say that lawyers had to tell their clients about being deported. Since this Man was not informed, and has no prior criminal record, and has completely complied with all judgments against him, it’s likely that he will be able to return to his family soon. Five years later. Five years of no contact with his wife. Five years of no contact with his kids. Five years of no contact with his home. His friends. His bed. His belongings. His pictures. Anything.



I hope the first thing he does when he gets home is gets incredibly high and forgets about the giant hypocrisy that is our American legal system and the United States of Idiocy.