It made headlines around the world late last month when 85-year-old Mireille Knoll was found dead in her Paris apartment.<\/p>\n
As a child in 1942, she had narrowly escaped the round-up of French Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps. Now, she had been stabbed to death, and her body partially burned when the attackers apparently tried to set her apartment aflame. The Paris prosecutor\u2019s office said on March 26 that Knoll had been killed because of the \u201cmembership, real or supposed, of the victim [in] a particular religion.\u201d The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0calls this<\/a> \u201ca roundabout way of saying she was killed because she was Jewish.\u201d<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first such case in Paris in recent months. In February, the judge hearing the case of the murder of an elderly Orthodox Jewish woman , allowing that more serious charge to move ahead.\u00a0Sarah Halimi, 65, was killed last April when her neighbor Kobili Traore threw her from the window of her third-story apartment. Traore, a Malian immigrant, was heard using anti-Semitic slurs against Halimi.<\/p>\n These cases are of course contributing to the current controversies in France<\/a> about immigration and the resurgence of anti-Semitism. But the Halimi case also touches on public perception of cannabis, even if few have commented on this aspect.<\/p>\n The Jewish Telegraphic Agency\u00a0informs us<\/a> that\u00a0Traore is pleading temporary insanity \u2014 despite the fact that he has no history of mental illness. The psychiatric report, issued in September, concluded that on the night of the murder Traore suffered an \u201cacute delirium\u201d after heavy cannabis use.<\/p>\n This supposed disorder did not exclude his criminal responsibility, the report found, and was \u201cnot incompatible with an anti-Semitic dimension,\u201d according to<\/a> the French language\u00a0Le Parisien\u00a0newspaper. Yet Traore is still using it as a defense.<\/p>\n This is a clear illustration of how persistent the irrational stigma against cannabis is. It\u2019s almost comical how this utterly spurious link between cannabis and violence can be invoked either to try to acquit (as in this case) on the basis that the \u201cevil cannabis\u201d made the accused do it, or to impugn the defendant on that same basis.<\/p>\n For example, cannabis stigma was used to posthumously tar the reputation of Trayvon Martin \u2014 and numerous other African Americans slain by police or vigilantes in the United States in recent years.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The\u00a0Trayvon Martin\u00a0case of course ended with the acquittal of his admitted killer, George Zimmerman, on the basis of self-defense \u2014 widely seen as implausible<\/a>. Zimmerman\u2019s defense team attempted to introduce as evidence that the youth\u2019s autopsy had shown trace amounts of THC in his bloodstream. The lawyers\u00a0won approval from the judge to admit this as evidence, and the lead attorney actually\u00a0told the media<\/a>\u00a0that even a small level of THC in the bloodstream could increase violent behavior. The toxicology report indicating cannabis use was ultimately not submitted to jurors \u2014 probably because the lawyers judged that it wouldn\u2019t fly, a small victory for common sense, at least.<\/p>\n This tactic was used again after\u00a0Michael Brown\u00a0was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. A copy of Brown\u2019s autopsy was leaked to<\/a> the\u00a0St. Louis Post Dispatch, which ran the following headline: \u201cOfficial autopsy shows Michael Brown had close-range wound to his hand, marijuana in system.\u201d<\/p>\n Then in 2015,\u00a0Freddie Gray\u00a0was killed by police in Baltimore. The conservative\u00a0Daily Caller\u00a0gloated in a headline<\/a>: \u201cFreddie Gray Had A Long Rap Sheet.\u201d But beyond the headline, the actual list of charges of Gray highlighted that he\u2019d been in possession of marijuana and possession of narcotics with an intent to distribute. The accuracy watchdogs at\u00a0Snopes, examining<\/a> the veracity of the claim, quoted the<\/a>\u00a0Associated Press: \u201cCourt records indicate that Gray\u2019s arrests were mostly for drug possession\/distribution charges and various minor crimes, many of which were not prosecuted.\u201d<\/p>\n Later in 2015,\u00a0Sandra Bland\u00a0was found hung to death in her Texas jail-cell after a traffic stop. Authorities made much of the fact that her\u00a0autopsy showed she\u2019d been using cannabis<\/a>.<\/p>\n And in 2016,\u00a0Philando Castile\u00a0was killed by a cop in a traffic stop in Minnesota\u2019s Twin Cities area. The cop won his acquittal partly on the basis of the claim that Castile had been high on cannabis at the time of the shooting. Again, it was touted that a blood test posthumously performed on Castile\u00a0came back positive for THC<\/a>. Again, the defense team succeeded in getting the judge to declare\u00a0evidence of Castile\u2019s past cannabis use<\/a>\u00a0as admissible. The accused cop\u00a0testified<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cI thought if he\u2019s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her second-hand smoke and the front-seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me?\u201d No cannabis had been found in the vehicle.<\/p>\n In all these cases, the supposed cannabis use is irrelevant. Arguably, the media can\u2019t be blamed for reporting what the police say, although touting the cannabis claims\u00a0as if\u00a0<\/em>they were relevant (as in the Post Dispatch headline about Michael Brown) is poor journalism. And it is an absurdity that cannabis use by the deceased can be admitted as evidence in court when the accused killers are on trial.<\/p>\n In the wake of these grim Paris cases, the French have got some serious grappling to do. Let\u2019s hope they won\u2019t emulate the American media and justice system in muddying the waters by making cannabis an issue. Use of the cannabis can neither justify deadly police violence, nor exculpate a killer in an anti-Semitic attack.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong> how have you seen cannabis use arise in the courtroom?<\/p>\n The post Anti-Cannabis Stigma Thrives in Hate Crime Trials<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
It made headlines around the world late last month when 85-year-old Mireille Knoll was found dead in her Paris apartment. As a child in 1942, she had narrowly escaped the round-up of French Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps. Now, she had been stabbed to death, and herContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,1852,2273,90,3860],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25037"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25038,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25037\/revisions\/25038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Anti-Cannabis Stigma Thrives in Hate Crime Trials<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"