In January, 2009, Andrew Carroll held a plant in his hand and government people arrested him. The plant was a marijuana bud, and the government people were (and are) violent. The law enforcement officers were not shouting or jumping or hitting – they were calm and relatively pleasant to talk to – but a calm and well-spoken thug is a thug nonetheless.
Instead of thinking for themselves – instead of showing anywhere near the amount of courage that Andrew showed in publicly announcing his protest in advance – the law enforcement officers arrested his because he did something that words-on-paper somewhere said was a bad thing to do. They could have thought to themselves, “This guy is not hurting anyone, not threatening anyone, not damaging any property, not stealing anything, not committing fraud, not lying – not a single person even complained that they had a negative opinion of him standing here holding this plant. He is causing no harm at all. This law is a pointless one. We should leave him alone.” Instead, they arrested him because they either can’t or won’t think for themselves, or their understanding of what makes a peaceful society is dangerously distorted.
Andrew was released a couple hours later, with the government people’s charges against him already dropped in severity. A month later Andrew attended their arraignment for his “crime.” It was during this trial that SamIAm and 6 others were arrested and/or cited for nonviolent “crimes” such as refusing to give their name while sitting in a public lobby. A month after that, Andrew attended the government people’s trial for him. He made constitutional and moral arguments for why drug laws should not be enforced, but the judge explicitly said he did not want to hear constitutional or moral arguments in his courtroom, only legal ones. He only wanted to hear whether words-on-paper were obeyed.
The judge sentenced Andrew to $350.00 in fines and a 20% “penalty assessment” (a penalty for having been force-fed a penalty?), for a total of $420.00. Andrew politely said he refused to pay, so the judge ordered him to report to jail by June 2 (which was the time limit to apply for an appeal) to “serve” off his sentence in jail at the rate of $50.00 per day.
Please read the first installment of The Adventures of Andrew Carroll: Drug War Protestor to find out what happened on June 2.
