Evidence of pot smoking weeks earlier enough for DUI charge, Arizona prosecutor says

[Newsjock]

Source: Arizona Daily Star

A prosecutor argued Tuesday there’s nothing wrong with charging a motorist who smoked marijuana up to a month earlier with driving while drugged.

In arguments to the Arizona Supreme Court, Susan Luder, a deputy Maricopa County attorney, acknowledged that Carboxy-THC, a secondary metabolite of marijuana, can show up in blood tests for a month after someone has used the drug. And she did not dispute the concession of her own expert witness that the presence of that metabolite does not indicate someone is impaired.

But Luder told the justices the Legislature is legally entitled to declare that a positive blood test for Carboxy-THC can be used to prosecute someone who, if convicted, can lose a driver’s license for a year.

... The court ruling affects whether any of the 40,000 Arizonans who are legal medical marijuana users will effectively be banned from driving, given how long metabolite remains in the system. And it also makes potential criminals out of anyone else who drives and also has used marijuana in the last 30 days, including those who might be visiting from Washington or Colorado, where recreational use of the drug is legal.

Read more: http://azstarnet.com/news/state-and-regional/evidence-of-pot-smoking-weeks-earlier-enough-for-dui-charge/article_e109f472-19a1-5546-bd09-c2745c9e0b9b.html

[librechik]

1. reason number 1 not to sign up for a card. Then they know who you are and can

abuse you if they feel like it. And they usually do.

Who's they? The authorities in charge and their unseen enablers with the real power.

[Purveyor]

7. +1 eom

[Coyotl]

2. Boycott Arizona = one more reason. On this basis, almost everyone is driving drunk at all times.

No more bowl games, no more Grand canyon visitors .....

[woo me with science]

3. "States with highest (private prison) occupancy requirements include Arizona..."

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

This Is How Private Prison Companies Make Millions Even When Crime Rates Fall

—By Andy Kroll
| Thu Sep. 19, 2013 9:43 AM PDT MotherJones

We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full. (The report was funded by grants from the Open Society Institute and Public Welfare, according to a spokesman.)

All the big private prison companies—CCA, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation—try to include occupancy requirements in their contracts, according to the report. States with the highest occupancy requirements include Arizona (three prison contracts with 100 percent occupancy guarantees), Oklahoma (three contracts with 98 percent occupancy guarantees), and Virginia (one contract with a 95 percent occupancy guarantee). At the same time, private prison companies have supported and helped write "three-strike" and "truth-in-sentencing" laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.

....

http://tucsoncitizen.com/cell-out-arizona/2013/10/03/az-dept-of-corrections-wants-1500-more-private-prison-beds/

AZ Dept. of Corrections Wants 1,500 MORE Private Prison Beds
by cell-out-arizona on Oct. 03, 2013, under ADC statistics, Arizona, Arizona Department of Corrections, Corrections Corporation of America, Prison Construction, private prison, Privatization, sentencing reform

In its initial FY15 budget request to the Governor, the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) asked for legislative approval to contract out another 1,500 medium-security prison beds to a private, for-profit corporation.

This is in addition to the 2,000 private prison beds that are just beginning to come online. That contract was awarded to Corrections Corporation of America for its Red Rock Facility...

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/02/15/20120215arizona-private-prisons-slammed-by-report.html?nclick_check=1

Arizona private prisons slammed by report
Group: Facilities hard to oversee, aren't cost-effective

74 comments by Bob Ortega - Feb. 15, 2012 10:10 PM
The Republic | azcentral.com

Arizona's private prisons are not cost-effective for taxpayers and are more difficult to monitor than state prisons, according to a new report by a prison watchdog group that is calling for a moratorium on any new private prisons in the state.
....
Based on public-information requests and other data, the report by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that works on criminal-justice reform, concluded that Arizona paid $10 million more for private prison beds between 2008 and 2010 than it would have for equivalent state beds.

Arizona's pending plan to contract for another 2,000 private-prison beds would cost taxpayers at least $38.7 million a year, at least $6 million a year more than incarcerating those inmates in state prisons. Plans to add 500 more maximum-security beds in state prisons would add almost $10 million a year to the bill. The report questioned whether those beds are needed, since the state's prison population has declined over the past two years by more than 900 inmates, to 39,854 as of Wednesday.

In the past three years, private prisons in Arizona have experienced at least 28 riots and more than 200 other "disturbances" involving as many as 50 prisoners. Many of these incidents had not previously been reported to the public.

State law doesn't require the six private prisons that hold federal detainees and prisoners from other states to inform state or local authorities in the event of an escape, a riot or other disturbance, or a death in custody. The American Friends Service Committee called for requiring all private prisons to disclose the same information as state prisons.

[solarhydrocan]

6. + at least 1500

But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

In a sane world that would be a crime

[woo me with science]

9. *Absolutely* it should be a crime. It is criminal.

It is mandating the imprisonment of human beings regardless of crime, in order to preserve someone's profit.

That is evil, by definition.

The US prison system is being aggressively privatized by corporatist politicians, including this Democratic administration.

Poor minorities are worthless to corporations on the street. In prison they can bring in $40,000/yr
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023368969

Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014158005

The Caging of America - Why do we lock up so many people
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002226110

The Obama administration is aggressively growing private prisons
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022568681

Obama's 2013 budget: One area of marked growth, the prison industrial complex
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/1002392306

Obama selects the owner of a private prison consulting firm as the new Director of the United States Marshals Service (USMS)
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/12/mars-d03.html

Private prison corporations move up on list on federal contractors, receiving BILLIONS
http://www.nationofchange.org/president-obama-s-incarcernation-1335274655

Prison Labor Booms As Unemployment Remains High; Companies Reap Benefits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/prison-labor_n_2272036.html

Private Prison Corporation's Letters to Shareholders Reveal Industry's Tactics: Profiting from Human Incarceration
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022665091

Financial growth of private prison industry...Profiting from caging humans.

http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/BshteP8i282pcaeH8pdUsA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTUyMA--/

[kysrsoze]

4. Then the same should go for pharmaceuticals. What an idiot.

[Eleanors38]

5. Something about that prosecutor's name seems fitting.

[frylock]

8. and then she went home and drank herself into a stupor

[woo me with science]

10. They need to imprison more and more of us.

The new oligarchs, and the new One Percent Economy they are building, profit not from our buying power, but from surveilling, controlling, and imprisoning us.

[Warren DeMontague]

11. Yeah, this will probably be another tack for the drug war holdouts.

It's insanity. Fat soluble THC can stay detectible for 3 weeks or more.. no way in hell is someone who smoked pot 3 weeks ago still impaired.

The point of DUI laws is to keep impaired drivers off the road. Not to punish potheads retroactively.

[ck4829]

12. "He smoked pot in the 70's, throw the book at him!"

If they had a way of finding out, they would do it in a heartbeat.

[Jesus Malverde]

13. States like Washington that criminalize metabolite levels are just shifting the persecution

from possession to DUI.