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I have never been arrested or charged with any crime, nor have I ever been in any kind of legal trouble. Laws directed at the criminal element usually do not attract my attention, because they do not impact my life. My father was a law enforcement officer and a judge for 57 years. I just run my ranching business, pay my taxes, and keep my mouth shut. However, I am becoming increasingly concerned over the fate of some of our basic liberties I always believed if you were doing nothing wrong, you had nothing to fear from your government, but I wonder to what extent that is still true. Surely even the guiltless can take no pleasure in the thought of having their vehicles stopped without cause, their belongings ransacked, and being sniffed down by dogs. I own a number of ranch vehicles. A lot of people other than me drive those vehicles. What happens if someone who is driving one of them drops a marijuana cigarette between the seats, and later I get stopped in that vehicle at a drug search? Do you think the cops have ever heard, "I didn't know it was there," before? What happens if your son or daughter ends up with a friend in your car, and this passenger, who is completely unknown to you, loses an illegal pill on your floor board, and you get stopped? Are you and I going to be handcuffed, mugged, fingerprinted, and faced with the choice between an expensive jury trial with a high probability of conviction; or pleading guilty to a drug conviction which will be on our records forever? Under the Governor's proposed drug bill, are we going to the slammer for 30 days? While New York's idea for seizing the vehicles of drunks sounds good, it opens the door to some troubling questions. Are we about to make alcohol and tobacco controlled substances, not by the nature of what they are, but by how much of these drugs may be found in our bloodstream? The chemical tests to measure these drugs get more sophisticated each day. Remember that by a breath or blood test, the government decides whether to charge you with intoxication, and whether your car will be forfeited. If New York State can seize a million cars at a blood alcohol level of .10, how many can it seize at .05? Think it won't happen? Look at how the severity of substance abuse penalties increases every time the legislature or Congress convenes. Think that government is too honest to use forfeiture to generate revenue? Remember how a few years ago the government (except in Nevada) jailed you for gambling? Now the state is continually on TV promoting gambling to enhance the amount of its take. It says, after all, it needs the money. The danger in this prospect is the same as the danger in the proposed federal anti-drug trafficking law to monitor our bank accounts. Under this law, what happens to those of us who don't get paid a salary, but instead earn our livelihood by selling products or taking fees? I sell cattle only once a year. Realtors, lawyers, architects, farmers, brokers, and others also make infrequent large bank deposits. Are we all to be scrutinized, questioned, and investigated? Once set up, the government will have total access to our banking business 24 hours a day, and it will determine how "suspicious" we are. This reminds me of what my friends who served in Vietnam told me: "We had to destroy some of those villages in order to save them." How much are we going to destroy to win this drug war? How far is all this going to go? Have we completely forgotten that a free society must accept and rationally deal with some degree of law breaking? Is there no place left where left-wing liberals and right-wing conservatives can agree on a line in the sand, and tell their government "this far and no farther"? We all want dope pushers caught and punished, but think for one moment how easily you, a solid law-abiding citizen, could get caught up in this by virtue of events over which you had no control. The Journal editorial of December 15th which reprinted the Bill of Rights called them "our shield to protect the individual from government." That shield looks to me to be seriously eroding. Consider how far we have gone already: 1. Stop and search your vehicle at random, now OK. 2. Random dog searches in school, now OK. (What if your child is the target of a prank or juvenile revenge?) 3. Forfeiture of any property of one accused of a drug-related crime, now OK. 4. Federal government monitors your banking activity. Proposed, probably will pass. 5. Federally imposed DWI laws coming. (What happened to state legislatures as great individual experiments in democracy?) 6. Turn in your friends, neighbors, and acquaintances and earn $50 to $1000. (What protects you if a neighbor, angry because your dog relieves himself in her yard turns you in? Does your house get searched? Do you end up on a suspect list?) My uncles who fought in World War II condemned the Nazis for their "rat on your fellow citizens" tactics, as much as they condemned, them for the Holocaust. We are not only now encouraging this practice, but we are going to pay money to get people to do it, and to do it anonymously. Does that strike you as being right, no matter how justifiable the "ends"? 7. Under Janklow's plan, circumstances don't matter, everyone goes to jail. (Who pays for this expensive incarceration? Why do we need judges, cops, probation officers if they are denied the use of their judgment in lieu of this mandatory sentencing?) Two things really trouble me. First, are we inculcating in our children acceptance of a philosophy that has always been an anathema to us: the end justifies the means? How then can our children have the sense of fairness and decency or the perspective necessary to "protect themselves as individuals from the government"? Who will carry that torch forward into the future? The second is the difficulty of stopping the advances of the power of government into our private lives. If some version of Janklow's bill passes, how long will it be before politicians, for fear of being called " soft", increase the extent and severity of the penalties; abolish defenses to these charges; and pass laws to lock up more and more people for longer and longer periods of time for trivial offenses? That is what has happened in the federal system where we are now have 1.5 million of our black citizens in jail, mostly for non-violent offenses. Do we want that here in South Dakota? Do we want to secure full employment by putting half of our citizens in jail and hiring the other half to guard them? Both the South Dakota House and Senate have passed versions of this Bill. It now must go to conference and be passed again. It is not too late to put a stop to this first step down a foreboding road. I have dual hopes: I hope that our representatives at Pierre will show good sense and vote this measure down. I hope they will not compromise, but just say "no". If they cannot do that, they should at least offer an amendment. Add a provision to include nicotine (the Governor's addictive drug of choice) to the list of other drugs for which he wants to lock everybody up. We know, positively, how serious the use of tobacco is in human, monetary and social costs. If faced with the prospect of signing a Bill with such an amendment added onto it, we will see where in the Governor's value system hypocrisy ends and moral sincerity begins. My other hope is that the rock-solid, independent-minded, frontier-spirited people of South Dakota will call their representatives and encourage them to tell a popular governor that the line in the sand has been reached, and that we want these invasions into our private lives ended, or at the very least stopped where they are. |