Drug Crime May Not Equal Prison Time

A  in a whirl of blue and red lights after police find a quarter-pound of marijuana in his trunk during a traffic stop. It's only enough to fill a sandwich baggie to the brim, but it now has him facing a charge of fifth-degree possession of marijuana he could face as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. 

Harsh? Some might say so for what could be a "youthful indiscretion," but not all is as it meets the eye.

"The statute says zero to five (years), but nobody gets five," Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman told Patch. "They almost never do real time for low-level stuff."

That's because the state's criminal justice system doesn't think tossing someone in the cooler for petty drug use actually works, no matter what the statutes say.

"Small-time users simply shouldn't get time. It just doesn't make sense," Freeman said. "There are the users who need treatment, and then there the people who sell for money. I don’t think there’s a treatment program for greed."

Instead, nearly anyone facing a drug charge for their first time is typically charged with a fifth-degree offense, and gets routed into one of many possible treatment or "pre-trial diversion" programs, state Sen. Ron Latz (DFL-St. Louis Park) told Patch. Before his career as a state senator serving on the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, Latz was a state Assistant Attorney General for Public Safety. 

"It's a way for people who make one-time mistakes to redeem themselves, and not get a mark on their record," Latz said. 

But this doesn't mean that a judge just winks at the brand-new offender from the bench and shows them the door, Latz said. Depending on each case—Freeman called the decisions his attorneys make on requesting sentencing "very subjective"—the authorities have the option of keeping offenders on a short leash with probation or special deals where a plea is entered but conviction is never carried out unless the offender gets caught again.

The potential of five years in prison and $10,000 in fines is more of a stick to the carrot of treatment and pre-trial diversion programs that are dangled in front of new and small-time offenders.