Patrick Beadle was set up. Patrick Beadle had no chance. Patrick Beadle is proof that the United States still has a long way to go in order to come to terms with its drug problem and its race problem.<\/p>\n
Nobody has accused Beadle of being violent, or planning to sell drugs, or committing any other crime than driving through a county, where the sheriff\u2019s department is currently being sued for a long history of racial profiling<\/a>, in a state where marijuana is still highly illegal. Not the sheriff\u2019s deputy who arrested Beadle under the suspicious pretense of \u201ccrossing over a lane line\u201d while the 46-year-old musician and father was driving through Madison County, Mississippi. Not the prosecutors who charged him with drug trafficking for the 2.89 pounds of marijuana, bought legally at Beadle\u2019s home in Oregon, found in the car. Not the all-white jury, who took all of 25 minutes to convict him for drug trafficking, which carries a 40-year maximum prison term and not the judge\u00a0who sentenced Beadle to eight years in prison on Oct. 16<\/a>.<\/p>\n It should go without saying that Beadle, a practicing Rastafarian \u2014 who also uses cannabis to soothe pain in his knees, stemming from the days when he played college basketball \u2014 is a black man and that he disputes sheriff\u2019s deputies account. Beadle says he drove to Mississippi after visiting his son in Ohio to pay homage to that state\u2019s rich musical tradition and it\u2019s likely his dreadlocks, black skin, and out-of-state license plates are what triggered the traffic stop and subsequent search.<\/p>\n As the Clarion Ledger reported, there was absolutely no sign that Beadle obtained the cannabis illegally or planned to sell any of it. He did not have a scale. He did not have individual bags. He did not have any large sum of money, he did not have a weapon. Every indication was that he was doing exactly as he claimed \u2014 possessing marijuana, albeit an amount some of us would find significant, wholly for personal use.<\/p>\n The irony is that putting Beadle in prison for eight years is arguably lenient. \u201cTrafficking\u201d carries a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison. As the\u00a0Washington Post reported<\/a>, Madison County Circuit Court Judge William Chapman sentenced him to \u201conly\u201d eight years in prison.<\/p>\n Chapman also declined to punish Beadle for possession, which is what the evidence suggested he was doing and upheld the all-white jury\u2019s swift decision to convict for trafficking, based on \u2014 well, nothing aside from the amount of cannabis Beadle had purchased legally somewhere else. That is \u201cleniency,\u201d in an America where a majority of all citizens believe marijuana should be legal, and where a supermajority agree that adults should be allowed to use medical cannabis.<\/p>\n By now, someone will have argued that Beadle took an unnecessary risk, that it is inconceivable folly to try to drive cross-country, through the perils of the valley of flyover country, with dark skin and with that amount of marijuana. Maybe. But, nah \u2014 the ease and lack of legitimate probable cause with which Beadle was pulled over suggest that Deep South sheriff\u2019s deputies\u2019 ingenuity would have turned up some pretext to do Beadle ill. A broken taillight, if not a \u201cgreen leafy substance.\u201d If it were not blindingly obvious, if the constant deluge of astonishingly casually racist videos are not enough proof, Beadle\u2019s case makes it abundantly clear that we are still living in the era of, \u201cYou lost, boy?\u201d, if not slipping headlong back into the evils of Jim Crow or worse.<\/p>\n Beadle\u2019s attorneys will appeal their client\u2019s conviction. In the meantime, the country\u2019s drug laws appear poised to continue changing swiftly. In less than a week, voters in conservative\u00a0North Dakota<\/a>\u00a0may vote to legalize cannabis for adults 21 and over without possession limits. Had Beadle\u2019s trip taken place next spring, in another state, he would be at home and free. \u201cIn five years,\u201d attorney Cynthia Stewart\u00a0told Mississippi Today<\/a>, \u201cthis may not even be a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n She is half-right. What happened to Beadle\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0a crime \u2014 with all of the usual suspects.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b>\u00a0do you think this sentence goes too far?<\/p>\n The post Racist Set-Up & Outrageous Sentence in Mississippi Shows How Far U.S. Has to Go on Marijuana\u00a0<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Patrick Beadle was set up. Patrick Beadle had no chance. Patrick Beadle is proof that the United States still has a long way to go in order to come to terms with its drug problem and its race problem. Nobody has accused Beadle of being violent, or planning to sellContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,90,687,6350,185,6351,6352],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30328"}],"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\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30329,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30328\/revisions\/30329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: Racist Set-Up & Outrageous Sentence in Mississippi Shows How Far U.S. Has to Go on Marijuana\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"