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Or, of course, the US could overhaul it's ridiculous justice system. Start by eliminating the "War on Drugs". MJ should be legal. People addicted to hard drugs need help, not jail. If they could get their fixes under controlled conditions, you would the dealers and smugglers out of business, and the addicts themselves wouldn't need to steal to finance their habits. This would do more to eliminate crime than any thing else.

Second, stop trying to be "tough on crime". Mandatory, multi-year sentences for first-time offenders, for non-violent crimes. Everything is a felony, and far too many things are federal felonies. Just as an example: attempt to get some Marijuana across the Mexican border, any amount at all - even if it's your first offense, the minimum sentence is 10 years.

Then one could go after all of the other low-hanging fruit: other stuff that shouldn't be illegal. Lying to a federal officer (Martha Stewart).
Improperly packed lobster tails. Taking home an Indian arrowhead you find at a public camping ground. Picking up a feather you found on the ground. And on, and on...

Really, it's no wonder the jails are overcrowded.

If you want to take away the ability for the government to pursue the maximum possible penalty, you should also recommend taking away their discretion to pursue the minimum possible penalty as well.

Absolutely. There's no reason why the prosecutor should have any say in sentencing, that's for the judge. And to take that a step further - not only should the prosecutor be unable to pursue the minimum possible penalty, there should be no minimum sentencing in the first place. This is just interference by another route, and worse because the judge can't overrule it even when it's clearly unjust (warning: PDF).

Well, the first statute is the federal arson statute, and it specifically refers to using fire or explosive devices (as defined in the following section) to damage property involved in interstate commerce. The second statute is the federal gun mandatory minimum statute. It refers to using or carrying a gun during a crime of violence or drug trafficking crime (I'm assuming the first is relevant here) - see this nice little chart here.

My non-lawyer interpretation is that you would have to have maliciously burned down or tried to blow up a port-a-potty, while somebody was in it, and you were in possession of a firearm (or perhaps even brandished or discharged one) while committing this violent act, in order to qualify for these charges.

Doesn't necessarily mean somebody was injured or killed though - I'm guessing malicious arson might qualify in and of itself as a violent crime. And a port-a-potty just has to be involved in interstate commerce to qualify for federal prosecution - for example, having been rented across state lines is probably enough. It doesn't mean the port-a-potty was itself federal property, nor that the persons involved were federal employees.

But yeah, sounds like there's more to this story than a guy wrote a nasty message about his boss in red marker on the port-a-potty wall and some feds with a stick up their asses about his attitude toward piracy charged him. But we don't really have all the info here, so you never know.

I would agree that it makes sense for advocacy groups like the "Pirate Party" to limit themselves to the domain of IP law. However, I also think you should do some more reading about the war on drugs and its consequences. America isn't the global leader in incarcerating people for no reason. It's OK to oppose drugs -- there are different strategies of decriminalization -- but I hope you will agree that locking up thousands and thousands of people is not the way to deal with the drug problem. And let me not even go into the whole tobacco+alcohol vs. marijuana issue. There is no excuse for ignorance of the facts, however.

And a better alternative?
Be careful to criticize something without having a replacement handy to refer to.

Uhhh, how about we just fix it? Is that simple enough for you to understand?

Beleive it or not, buddy, there are some folks already trying to do this in other areas of law!

Be careful criticizing anyting around those "love it or leave it" types. They're notoriously closed minded.

Here's an actual case of exactly what you described.

An undercover agent drove by Terri White on the street and yelled out the window asking where he could buy drugs. Terri called over to someone around the corner who came out and sold $30 worth of drugs to the agent. The person who sold the drugs was a known drug dealer with a juvenile drug trafficking record. However, he was still five months away from his eighteenth birthday. Terri was charged with aggravated drug trafficking. In court the juvenile said that the drugs were Terri's.

Sentence: 12 years

Link to the article on FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums)

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
Feodor Dostoevski, Russian novelist, 1821-1881

By this standard, one might be better off in Russia, even with its huge incarceration rate and multi-drug resistant TB epidemic in its prisons, than in the US.

Here's why:

In 1994 there were 14,300 victims in the jails at any time and that 290,000 males were victimized in jail every year, 192,000 of them penetrated. Once "turned out," a victim is earmarked for constant further assaults. With a repeat rate very conservatively estimated at every other day, and counting gang-rapes as a single incident, this gives at least 7,150 sexual victimizations a day in jails.

Nine per cent of the hetersexuals had been raped; 7.8% of them had been anally and 5.7% orally penetrated, but white heterosexuals were 2 to 3 times as likely to have been penetrated than black heterosexuals.

In 1996, released prisoners made up 17% (39,000 cases) of the total number of US AIDS cases and 13.1% to 19.3% of all people with HIV infection (98,000 to 145,000).

Russia and the United States lead the world in their use of incarceration. Russia jails 690 people per 100,000 citizens, while the U.S. rate is 600 per 100,000. The U.S. rate is higher than at any previous time, and it is 6 to 10 times higher than the rate of Western European nations.

The US incarceration rate has more than tripled since 1980.

A THIRD of the Russian prison population, about 350,000 inmates, will be released this year.

An estimated 4 million Americans are infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV), with between 20 percent to 60 percent of the nation's 2 million prisoners infected.

This is different, this isn't just the sentencing of an already guilty person. This software is the replacement of a trial. Fortunately they are allegedly only using it for "straightforward" cases, but it is still a little scary to an American. The US constitution guarantees the accused a fair trial with a jury of their peers.

Furthermore, many people, some of whom are federal judges, believe the Federal Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Guidelines are a travesty of justice. They do not allow the judge much discretion, if any, because the sentence is determined by the charges. Prosecutors determine the charges, not the judges. Mandatory minimus effectively remove sentencing descions from judges, where they should be, and place them in the hands of the Proscutors.

Please see Families Against Mandatory Minimums

Burris

Repression never stops. The Spanish Inquisition comes back every few years. Right now it's the atheists and OSS zealots. In a few years it'll be the Blacks again.

Actually, right now it's drug users. As of a few days ago, the U.S. passed the two-million prisoner mark. According to the Department of Justice's own figures, one quarter of those, or one half million U.S. citizens are imprisoned for non-violent drug offences alone.

Mandatory minimum prison sentences were applied in 64 percent of drug cases in 1998. The average length of imprisonment for drug offenses was 76 months; for firearms violations it was 63 months; and for manslaughter, it was 45 months. -- The Washington Post

Even if you find yourself with incurable cancer, like Steve Kubby, and all that is keeping you alive is regular use of medical marijuana, you are subject to imprisonment and likely death in prison from deprivation of your medicine if you are caught using an illegal medicine, i.e. one that is not patented by a campaign-contributing pharmaceutical company. Many medical marijuana patients, once discovered, find themselves under a court order not to use the only medicine that will keep them alive, and are subject to drug tests, and risk imprisonment and death in prison if they dare to continue using their medicine.

Drug users in general are subject to abuse and murder by the police. Their property is subject to seizure without trial, thus bankrupting them and preventing them from defending themselves. They are sent to special "drug courts" where they find that their constitutional rights don't apply. They are subject to "mandatory minimum" sentencing rules that forbid the judge from using any discretion in sentencing, hence the 76 month average drug sentence.

Back to the original point, if you go back far enough, the origins of most religions are based on the teachings of individuals who have had mystical -- i.e. hallucinatory, drug-like experiences. During the inquisition, someone who accidently ate the wrong mushroom, had a "mystical" experience, and claimed to have seen God would be put to death. In the year 2000, someone attempting to replicate the experience would face years in prison if caught.

Atheists and blacks, by contrast, are protected by a host of federal and state laws.