Talk-Polywell.org

The issue before the Court, which heard the case in November, was whether Richter and Hrvol committed these abuses in their roles as prosecutors, in which case longstanding precedent would make them immune from lawsuits, or in their roles as investigators, in which case they could be held personally liable. The $12 million settlement by the prosecutors and the county suggests they feared the Court would reach the latter conclusion.

The lawyer was right: it was pure bullshit, but it was the kind of bullshit I had always been aware of. There's enormous career pressure on street agents to make as many Class One cases as they can, for a simple reason: Federal agencies justify their budgets with statistical reports to Congress and Congress loves to see Class Ones. The agents with the highest percentage of Class Ones are the guys who get money awards and promotions. And over the years the professional rats, who originate more than 95 percent of all drug cases, had learned that selling a Class One to the government was worth a much bigger "reward" payment. A lot of them knew the DEA Agents Manual criteria for a One better than a lot of the agents.

Unfortunately in DEA and other Federal agencies where agents are trained to be duplicitous to begin with and then exposed to deceitful, lying, scumbag politicians and bureaucrats who want results that make them look good and don't give a darn how you get them as long as you don't embarrass them by getting caught there were agents who would bend the facts in their own favor. They'd write up a mid-level doper, or sometimes a street dealer as a Class One based on "evidence supplied by a previously reliable informant," without corroborating the rat's information. If it got by the reviewing process the worst that happened was that some mid or low level doper was called a Class One.

To me that kind of bullshit was no different than all the Federal prosecutors with an eye on public office who exaggerated the importance of their cases to a media that will swallow just about anything, as long as it sold papers and got ratings, and downright harmless compared to some drug czar facing 20 million Americans on Larry King Live and saying "We've turned the corner on the drug war," to further his political career. If you put all the dopers whom the press had reported as "linked to the Medellin or Cali Cartels" hand-in-hand, they'd circle the f*cking earth.