A Florida honor student who was expelled and faced possible felony charges for a science experiment gone awry has not only been cleared of charges, she’s heading to space camp thanks to a former NASA employee.

Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot combined household cleaner and aluminum foil in an eight-ounce water bottle on school grounds on April 22, curious to see what would happen. The chemical reaction “created a pop that sounds like a firecracker and smoke,” but no students were injured nor does there appear to have been property damage. At the suggestion of Florida Assistant State Attorney Tammy Glotfelty and after her science teacher said she had not sanctioned the experiment, the responding officer arrested Wilmot and charged her with possessing or discharging weapons or firearms at a school sponsored event or on school property and possessing any destructive devices — both felonies she would have been tried for as an adult. Pursuant to her school’s zero tolerance policy, Wilmot was also expelled at the time of the incident.

But last week the criminal charges against Wilmot were dropped following significant media coverage and an online petition that attracted nearly 200,000 signatures, upset that the arrest was the equivalent of criminalizing curiosity. She remains banned from her school, but her family is in discussions with the administration about a possible reinstatement.

Wilmot’s story caught the eye of Homer Hickam, an 18-year NASA veteran and author of the memoir “Rocket Boys,” later adapted into the film “October Sky.”  Hickman had his own brush with law enforcement during his teens. Hickman and several friends were led away from his high school in handcuffs for allegedly starting a forest fire, but his physics teacher and principal cleared him of wrongdoing.

Hickam said he “couldn’t let this go without doing something,” and while he’s not a lawyer, he could at least “give her something that would encourage her” and settled on purchasing her a scholarship to the United States Space Academy, a five-day college accredited course offered through the University of Alabama-Huntsville. After learning Wilmot has a twin sister, he raised additional funds so they could attend together in July.

While Hickam attended school long before the advent of zero tolerance policies, since then kids who make mistakes have increasingly faced criminal charges for what amount to disciplinary violations, particularly minority students like Wilmot.

Most people are aware of the ongoing conflict between federal and state laws on marijuana. While marijuana remains flatly prohibited and subject to criminal punishment under federal law, 19 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana, and two have legalized recreational marijuana. The most pressing and well-known issue for medical marijuana dispensaries and the customers who rely upon them for medical relief is threats of prosecution and asset forfeiture from federal officials. Many dispensaries, facing jail time, eviction, or seizure of real estate, have opted to shut down entirely.

But what is less known is that even those dispensaries that haven’t been targeted for federal prosecution or have thus far survived it are subject to fundamental legal obstacles to operating their business. These obstacles discourage potential marijuana distributors and growers from applying for licenses, and make it more likely that they will operate at least partially under the table and outside the legal system.

1. Medical marijuana businesses can’t open a bank account. Banks that do business with marijuana distributors are considered money launderers, so dispensaries cannot bank or access other bank services legally if they are open about their status as a marijuana dispensary. Even those who have skirted this by opening accounts in their personal names or being vague about the nature of the account have had their accounts terminated, often jumping from bank to bank. One Colorado state bank known for allowing dispensary clients terminated more than 300 accounts after the Department of Justice warned in 2011 that they would pursue money laundering charges. Without a bank account, dispensaries have no good means of even paying employees, let alone storing their money or paying their exorbitant taxes (see below). Washington State officials who contacted banks about their position said they are waiting from a statement from Attorney General Eric Holder on the federal government’s response to two ballot initiatives legalizing recreational marijuana before they reconsider their position. Some dispensaries are trying to form their own banking cooperative to skirt these restrictions.

2. Medical marijuana businesses have scant access to loans. Because of the same banking regulations that bar bank accounts, marijuana dispensaries that are open about their purpose typically can’t take out loans from traditional financial institutions or the Small Business Administration — eliminating the major sources of funding for most small businesses. But they may also have difficulty borrowing funds from nontraditional lenders, including the sorts of “angel investors” that have popped up in the industry. An Arizona ruling last year on an attempt to enforce a loan to a medical marijuana dispensary refused to enforce the loan contract, because the money was for an illegal purpose under federal law.

3. Medical marijuana entrepreneurs can’t open a credit card account, and many are blacklisted from any credit card use. “Over the past two years, Amex and other major credit card companies – including Visa and MasterCard – have distanced themselves from the medical marijuana industry, refusing to process transactions at dispensaries and closing merchant accounts for MMJ centers,” Medical Marijuana Business Daily reported last week. Now business owners are learning that they have been added to a “merchant match list,” which makes it almost impossible for that person to open an account for any other unrelated business, stifling many entrepreneurs who might want to dip their toe into the marijuana industry. This blacklist can even affect businesses in which one owner with a minority stake in the company is on the list. Without access to loans, dispensary owners who enter the business because of a passion or expertise about medical cannabis rather than financial means will be all-the-more reliant upon partners and investors, who may be deterred from entering a business that will tar their credit eligibility.

4. The IRS won’t let marijuana businesses deduct any of their business-related expenses. Although the IRS is happy to take marijuana dispensaries’ money, a tax code provision that bans any tax deductions related to “trafficking in controlled substances” has made their business very expensive. While some IRS rulings have held that expenses unrelated to marijuana distribution might be deducted, that ruling has been construed narrowly, and leaves most marijuana businesses with a hefty bill and few permissible deductions. After the owner of the largest U.S. dispensary lost his challenge to the 2011 IRS rule, he said, “I see only two outcomes here. Either this IRS assessment has to change or we go out of business. There really isn’t a middle ground for us.” Thus far, this dispensary and others continue to operate.

All of these obstacles stem from the same federal ban under the Controlled Substances Act that enables criminal prosecution or asset forfeiture against marijuana businesses, and even if federal officials stopped prosecuting dispensaries altogether, these issues would chill state attempts to make dispensation of medical and/or recreational marijuana above-board, regulated for health and safety, and taxable. All of these issues could be resolved by legislation that eliminates federal penalties for those actions that comply with state marijuana laws.

After an outcry from judges, professors, and other community leaders about the unjust and discriminatory imposition of the death penalty in Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) agreed to indefinitely grant reprieve to death row inmate Nathan Dunlap, citing his uncertainty about the death penalty generally, and not his opposition to this particular execution. His order reads:

It is a legitimate question whether we as a state should be taking lives. Because the question is about the use of the death penalty itself, and not about Offender No. 89148, I have opted to grant a reprieve and not clemency in this case.

Hickenlooper also said Colorado’s system is flawed, citing a study that showed the death penalty was applied inconsistently. Hickenlooper’s announcement comes several months after the failure of a bill to abolish the death penalty. Ironically, the bill died after Hickenlooper suggested he might veto it, but the movement to expose Colorado’s broken death penalty system did not. In letters imploring Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, members of the NAACP exposed statistics that the three individuals on Colorado’s death row are all black, all from the same one county, and all committed their crimes before they turned 21. A group of judges lamented that Dunlap’s trial was rife with error, with Dunlap’s lawyer never even raising his history of bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies.

Hickenlooper’s grant of a reprieve rather than clemency means that John Dunlap’s execution will be on hold until another executive order, according to the Denver Post. But Hickenlooper said it was “highly unlikely” he would revisit the decision, although another governor might. The decision means that Colorado is, in effect, not imposing the death penalty, and Hickenlooper’s public opposition may lead to a revival of legislation to officially abolish it. Eighteen other states have abolished the punishment, which data shows is disproportionately and arbitrarily applied and does not deter violent crime.

In March, Colorado came close to becoming the 19th state to abolish the death penalty, but the bill failed after Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) voiced opposition and suggested a possible veto. A few months later, Colorado’s death penalty is still firmly in place, and the state is poised to complete what would be only the second execution in 45 years (the last was in 1997). Few dispute that Nathan Dunlap committed a horrific crime and murdered several people at a Chuck E. Cheese. But judges, university professors, and other prominent state leaders are urging Gov. Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, both because crucial errors that defined his trial may have led him to get a harsher sentence than others, and because killing anyone under the perverted state system would be a miscarriage of justice. According to letters filed with Hickenlooper’s office:

• All three people on death row are black men. In a state that is only 4.3% African American, Colorado’s death row is 100% African American.
• All three men on death are from the same one county, out of Colorado’s 64.
• All three men committed their crime when they were under the age of 21.
• Two law professors who studied Colorado’s application of the death penalty concluded it was unconstitutional, after finding that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in less than one percent of the cases where it is an option, and that the state failed to set “clear statutory standards for distinguishing between the few who are executed and the many who commit murder.”

“It appears that race, geography and youth largely determines who gets the death penalty in Colorado,” wrote a group of NAACP leaders in a letter urging Gov. Hickenlooper to grant clemency. They note that not a single black juror served on the panel that sentenced Dunlap to death.

In addition to the injustices that define the Colorado system, a group of former Colorado judges also point out that Dunlap’s bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies were not even mentioned at trial. In fact, according to their letter, Dunlap’s lawyer told the jury that there was no explanation for his violence.

The judges add that “no clear evidence exists that the death penalty deters violent crime. What it does in our current system, as in this case, is to drain our judicial system of millions of dollars as mandatory appeals drag on for decades.” Studies have shown that the death penalty does not lower the homicide rate. In fact, the murder rate is lower in states without the death penalty. Hickenlooper says he continues to wrestle with the death penalty, and whether to commute Dunlap’s sentence.

After months of evidence from more than 100 witnesses suggesting the New York Police Department sets quotas on the number of stop-and-frisks, instructs officers to target black men, and taunts young teens, federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin ended the trial by expressing considerable alarm about the “high error rate” of the controversial stop-and-frisk program, and questioned whether police racially profile. The New York Times reports:

“A lot of people are being frisked or searched on suspicion of having a gun and nobody has a gun,” Judge Scheindlin, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said on Monday during closing arguments in the trial. “So the point is: the suspicion turns out to be wrong in most of the cases.” […]

Observing that only about 12 percent of police stops resulted in an arrest or summons, Judge Scheindlin, who is hearing the case without a jury, focused her remarks on Monday on the other 88 percent of stops, in which the police did not find evidence of criminality after a stop. She characterized that as “a high error rate” and remarked to a lawyer representing the city, “You reasonably suspect something and you’re wrong 90 percent of the time.”

“That is a lot of misjudgment of suspicion,” Judge Scheindlin said, suggesting officers were wrongly interpreting innocent behavior as suspicious.

Scheindlin was referring to the constitutional standard — “reasonable suspicion” —  required for a police stop. She also questioned whether NYPD officers who make the “worrisome” argument that a higher stop and frisk rate among blacks and Hispanics mirrors higher crime rates in those populations are therefore using race as a basis for making otherwise inexplicable stops.

Plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit now underway allege an expansive and racist use of police stops has been applied without legal justification, subjecting vast swaths of the city’s young African American and Hispanic men to invasive frisks, unwarranted searches, and detention at police centers for alleged minor crimes, often marijuana possession. Scheindlin has already ruled in another stop-and-frisk case that police stops in the Bronx are likely unconstitutional.

The aggressive stop-and-frisk program has been justified as reducing crime, but new figures show that the crime rate went down with a drop in the number of stop-and-frisks under public pressure.

In the wake of calls from several Latin American leaders to end the failed war on drugs, a new report by an international alliance of major Western Hemisphere nations flags the potential benefits of decriminalization and/or legalization. Although the 200-page Organization of American States report shies away from drawing conclusions, it definitively states that “a public health approach is needed to address drug use” and that “decriminalization of drug use needs to be considered as a core element in any public health strategy,” while incarceration “runs counter to this strategy.” In a cost/benefit analysis, the report also identifies the significant potential benefits of legalization, while noting that countries seem poised at this point only to legalize marijuana:

Legalization could substantially reduce the criminal justice costs of enforcement of prohibitions, which has dominated estimates of total spending on drug control in countries as different as the United States and the Netherlands. The costs of crime itself, generated primarily by illegal status and enforcement, dominate estimates of the social costs of drugs. Enforcement costs, however, would not disappear entirely. Ensuring that sellers comply with regulatory restrictions, for example of not selling to youth, requires law enforcement efforts, though these costs are likely to be smaller than amounts currently spent in many countries on drug enforcement.

Morbidity and mortality could also decline for legalized drugs. The illegal status of the drugs is a primary cause of overdoses, both because it creates uncertainty about the purity of what is being purchased and because it encourages use of adulterants that can themselves have dangerous effects. In a regulated legal regime, the drugs sold would be of known purity and ingredients would be listed on the label. HIV, long associated with heroin injecting, might be substantially reduced if heroin users no longer had to conceal their habits and share needles. Increased use and dependence would cut into these gains, as these drugs still present health risks even when purity is known and use does not have to be clandestine.

Additional consequences of legalization could include reductions in market-related disorder and criminal violence, as well as reductions in corruption of the criminal justice system and of political authority more generally. This assumes that countries are capable of putting into place and implementing effective regulatory regimes that do not result in a large parallel black market for drugs, an assumption that is somewhat doubtful in light of Chapters 6 and 8 of this Report, which note the linkage of violence in many countries in the region to weak institutions subject to penetration by drug trafficking organizations. […]

Negative consequences must also be taken into consideration. It is impossible to know with certainty how much drug use and dependence would increase in a legalized regime, but it is reasonable to assume that greater availability, under conditions of legality and especially if commercialized, would lead more people to use drugs.

The report goes on to explain why legalization is likely to lead to increased experimentation and possibly drug dependency. These issues, however, could be separately addressed through public health policies that would better address drug dependency whether or not a legalization regime is in place.

The group makes explicit that the report is not intended to be conclusory, but only to present information and options. But the objective tone makes all-the-more compelling the report’s identification of numerous potential benefits and significantly fewer costs. As Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Ethan Nadlemann points out, “it would have been inconceivable just two years ago that the OAS – or any multilateral organization – would publish a document that considers legalization, decriminalization and other alternatives to prohibitionist policies on an equal footing with status quo policies.” He cites evolving U.S. views, as well as strong calls from Latin American leaders to end the drug war that prompted plans for a United Nations summit, as key to this shift, and predicts that the report “is sure to have legs in a way that few reports by multilateral institutions ever do.” The report has already been endorsed by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and will be presented to the 35 member states in June.

Since Congress recognized the gaping racial disparity between mandatory minimum sentences for crack offenses and cocaine offenses and reduced the ratio from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1, courts have grappled with when and how to apply the statute to already-decided cases. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the reductions in the Fair Sentencing Act applied to at least those cases decided before the law was passed, but not yet sentenced. But questions remain about whether the statute applies retroactively to tens of thousands of other inmates who might seek reduced sentences.

On Friday, a federal appeals court panel issued a sweeping decision that held the reduced sentencing ratio should apply retroactively to all cases, not just because that was the intent of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, but because failure to do so would be unconstitutional. In a powerful statement about the troubling history of drug sentencing, Sixth Circuit Judges Gilbert Merritt and Boyce Martin write:

The old 100-to-1 crack cocaine ratio has led to the mass incarceration of thousands of nonviolent prisoners under a law widely acknowledged as racially discriminatory. There were approximately 30,000 federal prisoners (about 15 percent of all federal prisoners) serving crack cocaine sentences in 2011. Thousands of these prisoners are incarcerated for life or for 20, 10, or 5 years under mandatory minimum crack cocaine sentences imposed prior to the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act. More than 80 percent of federal prisoners serving crack cocaine sentences are black. In fiscal year 2010, before the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act, almost 4,000 defendants, mainly black, received mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine. […]

The Fair Sentencing Act was a step forward, but it did not finish the job. The racial discrimination continues by virtue of a web of statutes, sentencing guidelines, and court cases that maintain the harsh provisions for those defendants sentenced before the Fair Sentencing Act. If we continue now with a construction of the statute that perpetuates the discrimination, there is no longer any defense that the discrimination is unintentional. The discriminatory nature of the old sentencing regime is so obvious that it cannot seriously be argued that race does not play a role in the failure to retroactively apply the Fair Sentencing Act. A “disparate impact” case now becomes an intentional subjugation or discriminatory purpose case. Like slavery and Jim Crow laws, the intentional maintenance of discriminatory sentences is a denial of equal protection.

The two-judge majority opinion also suggests the court would be inclined to strike down other deeply discriminatory and draconian sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenders, which even the Congressional Research Service has flagged as a cause of the United States’ overwhelming prison population. Unfortunately, the dissenting Judge Ronald Lee Gilman’s opinion may better reflect the view of either a full Sixth Circuit panel or the Supreme Court justices who would review this case on appeal. Gilman puts the onus on Congress to make its law explicitly retroactive, and points to the failure of pre-Fair Sentencing Act constitutional challenges to the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity.

The Illinois legislature sent a medical marijuana bill to Gov. Pat Quinn Friday, after the Senate passed a measure 35-21 largely along party lines. The measure would permit marijuana use with a doctor’s prescription for 33 specified ailments, require users, growers, and dispensaries to undergo fingerprinting and criminal background checks, and limit the number of growers and dispensaries.

The news comes as several new studies are released suggesting that marijuana may aid in post-traumatic stress disorder, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, and as a possible weight control remedy. All of these studies, however, were either performed in other countries or based on surveys or self-reporting from marijuana users, because federal agencies have blocked access to a legal supply of marijuana even for academic studies.

Earlier this month, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signed Maryland’s much more limited marijuana law, which provides narrow access to medical marijuana for research purposes. If the bill is signed into law, Illinois would become the 20th state with a medical marijuana law, in addition to the District of Columbia. Gov. Quinn has said he is “open-minded” about the measure.

Several exonerated men whose innocence of murder was proven years after they were sentenced to death are imploring Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) not to sign a Florida bill that would set automatic timelines for imposing the death penalty, and likely would have resulted in the execution of these and other innocent people.

The bill, known as the “Timely Justice Act,” was passed last month amid legislator sentiments that “timely justice” is more important than “guilt or innocence,” with one legislator saying, “Only God can judge. But we can sure set up the meeting.”

Now, as the deadline approaches for Gov. Scott to sign the bill, former inmates who escaped the death penalty are coming forward to demonstrate the extraordinary costs of the law’s passage, in a state with the highest number of exonerations, and more people on death row than any state but California.

“If Governor Scott would just sit with me and others like me, I know he will veto this bill that, if it had been law, would have ended my life – I am innocent,” said Seth Penalver, who sat on death row for 18 years before exonerating evidence emerged. “If he signs this bill into law, I fear other people who are innocent like me, will be unjustly executed by the State of Florida.”

Exoneree Juan Melendez wrote in the Huffington Post:

The “Timely Justice Act” would speed up a system we know has already sent innocent men, like myself, to death row. Some of these prisoners may be men like me, who have exhausted their legal appeals, yet keep trying to find a way to prove their innocence.

In multiple cases of current death row prisoners, we don’t know exactly what the legal claims are. Some of the men on Florida’s death row ran out of legal options simply because their attorneys missed filing deadlines.

In those instances, no court had the opportunity to evaluate the claims and determine whether they have merit. How can we possibly justify speeding up the execution of prisoners in those cases?

According to logic of the “Timely Justice Act,” any prisoner who has exhausted his appeals and been through a clemency process has had every opportunity and is ready for an execution date, regardless of the specific questions and issues that surround his case.

I am living proof that each case is unique and that the system must allow ample time for the truth to emerge.
Given Florida’s troubling track record on wrongful convictions, this legislation ensures the unthinkable — the execution of an innocent person.

Although the final version of the bill eliminated timelines for filing appeals and post-conviction motions, it would require the governor to issue an execution warrant to those who have exhausted their legal remedies within 30 days, and require execution within 180 days of the warrant. The problem is that when it comes to the death penalty, cases are reopened years later when new evidence finally emerges or defendants obtain the resources to uncover new evidence. In several recent instances, crucial errors in FBI analysis were not revealed until years after hundreds of individuals’ cases had been completed and decided.

Just this week in Florida, a man who was sentenced to death in 2006 is just now requesting a retrial, after he obtained lawyers in 2011 that secured testing of crucial DNA evidence.

During a Wednesday House oversight hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder that overwhelmingly focused on the invasive government search of Associated Press phone logs and the IRS, one House member took the opportunity to grill Holder on another Department of Justice issue that has provoked criticism from the left. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) tore into Holder over his approach to marijuana, asking why his Justice Department is “continuing to put people in jail,” even as polling shows a majority of Americans believe the plant should not be illegal:

One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking people’s liberty for things that people are in favor of. The Pew Research Group shows that 52 percent of people do not think marijuana should be illegal. And yet there are people in jail, and your Justice Department is continuing to put people in jail, for sale, and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That’s something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag. And it’s been an injustice for 40 years in this country to take people’s liberty for something that was similar to alcohol. You have continued what is allowing the Mexican cartels power, and the power to make money, ruin Mexico, hurt our country by having a Prohibition in the late 20th and 21st century. We saw it didn’t work in this country in the 20s. We remedied it. This is the time to remedy this Prohibition, and I would hope you would do so.

WATCH IT:

In addition to the majority support for decriminalizing marijuana cited by Cohen, an even greater proportion of Americans say they think the United States is losing the so-called “War on Drugs” and that states should be allowed to decide whether marijuana is legal.

Holder said shortly after two states passed ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana that he would announce a DOJ policy on a federal response. But six months later, his only answer has been that he expects an announcement “relatively soon.” Regional federal officials, meanwhile, have re-upped crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries, sending threat letters to dispensaries in several cities in Washington and California. And what started as a Drug Enforcement Administration crackdown has now developed into new DOJ action by regional U.S. attorneys. Just this month, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag filed federal forfeiture actions to seize the real estate that houses two Bay Area medical marijuana dispensaries seemingly in compliance with state and local laws, including the largest dispensary in Berkeley and another dispensary that serves the Mission region of San Francisco. Haag has filed a similar action against the largest U.S. dispensary with locations in Oakland and San Jose, suggesting a strategy to hamper the industry by targeting the largest players.

Members of Congress have introduced several bills to square state laws with the federal marijuana prohibition.