Sunday, February 22, 2009

An Unfixable Law-Bug:

Please read the last two posts before this one.
Thanks.
New Jersey has a law that greatly increases the punishment for drug-related offenses, if they are committed within 1,000 feet of a public school. If you flee from police because you have a marijuana cigarette in your car, and they chase you and catch you; and if – during your flight – you passed just within 1,000 feet of a school at 3 a.m. on a Sunday night in July, when there's nary a student in sight, your penalties are increased.

Now obviously, it was not the intent of the people who wrote that law to apply it to such a silly situation, but that's how the law was written (and of course: not debugged). There have been calls to fix the wording of this law, to make it apply to schools that are open, with children around. But the law cannot be fixed. Anyone who votes to modify it will be seen as “soft on drugs.” Legislators have already resisted requests to fix the law for this very reason. No can do. They should have debugged the law in the first place, before passing it.

1 comment:

Martin Langeland said...

But why criminalize a health problem?
Wrong approach all together. No way to turn that into a feature.
--ml