Creative Commons License
Super Friends by Whitney Holwadel Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at whit-superfriends.blogspot.com. Super Friends: No Method To The Madness

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

No Method To The Madness

Now that I've been accepted into the jungle habitat of cell A-203 and have finally gotten comfortable, I'm starting to get a good idea of who else is on A-Upper range. Turns out that SpongeBob SquarePants is right next door to me! Obviously SpongeBob SquarePants isn't his real name, but it's so commonly used that even most of the guards know him only as SpongeBob. It's cool to call him SpongeBob for short, or Sponge. Or Bob. Don't ever call him SquarePants, though. Don't ask why, just avoid doing so at all costs. There are quite a few odd individuals around here, but besides his nickname, SpongeBob SquarePants is a pretty normal guy by society's standards. 5'6", slight build with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard which gives him an unfortunate Charles Manson-ish appearance. Rather than orchestrating the murders of upstanding Californians, though, SpongeBob wouldn't hurt a fly. A graduate school dropout, Bob's actually a surprisingly rational and intelligent guy. Just an unfortunate victim of the new American scourge called methamphetamine. His addiction to this horrible drug, he explained, was precisely what gave him the life sentence he's serving.

Sponge, you got a life sentence? I asked him. Yep, he said. What'd you do, kill somebody for it? No. Rape somebody? No. Did you try to kill somebody? No. Did you know someone who killed somebody? No. Did you know someone who thought about killing somebody? No. Did you get the judge's daughter pregnant? Yes... I'm just kidding, no. SpongeBob SquarePants finally explained that to be sentenced to life in prison, all he had to do was tell his ex-girlfriend he'd sell her 3.5 grams of meth.

The story according to him is that the ex-girlfriend who had actually introduced SpongeBob to the drug several years before called him up one day and asked him to sell her 3.5 grams, an 8-ball in druggie vernacular. Bob tells me that he was a regular user at this point in his life but had no ambition or desire to become a dealer at all. He did have to meet his own dealer later on that day, and to pick up an extra 8-ball for a woman he knows was no big deal, so he tells her on the phone that she should stop by his place the next day to pick it up.

Sponge says the next day his ex-girlfriend never showed up. Calls to her phone only got a recording. No big deal. Until about a month later when Federal agents arrested Bob in his workplace, charging him with conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. The court transcripts I've seen tell how Bob's ex-girlfriend, apparently a woman with a grudge, was arrested in a neighboring state several months back with a small amount of meth. As she's being interrogated about whom she bought the drug from, guess where she points the finger. "Oh yeah?" her interrogators say, "tell us about some other times you've bought from this guy." Ex-girlfriend gets booked and eventually some "concerned citizen" contacts the police and says that he wants to come clean about buying dope from this guy Bob. SpongeBob tells me that he later discovered that Concerned Citizen is actually ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend. Concerned Citizen lists another dozen drug purchases from Bob and all of a sudden the D.E.A. hears about this meth kingpin SpongeBob SquarePants. In exchange for sentence leniency, ex-girlfriend agrees to assist in bringing down this druggie menace to society. The call was made, the Feds were recording, SpongeBob dug his own hole and didn't even know it.

After SpongeBob's arrest and arraignment, his court-appointed lawyer came to discuss the case. The lawyer tells Bob that he's toast. He's being charged not only with the 8-ball he without a doubt agreed to distribute in the recording, but also with every grain of the "ghost dope," more Federal lingo for the drugs people are charged with which exist only on the word of other druggies, which ex-girlfriend and Concerned Citizen claimed they bought. Lawyer explains that the grand total is just under a kilogram of methamphetamine and the maximum penalty for SpongeBob's charge is life. Life in Federal prison isn't translated as 20 or 30 years; there is no parole for lifers. When a person is given a life sentence in Federal court, s/he will die in prison. Lawyer-guy advises SpongeBob to work with Federal investigators and plead guilty for a 10-year sentence because losing at trial would be flirting with a life sentence and Bob would lose. Now wishing he hadn't, SpongeBob SquarePants took his case to trial, unable to stomach the injustice of the whole situation, lost the trial, and was sentenced to a slow, miserable death in prison.

There are many things SpongeBob is ... short, stingy, funny, religious. But a drug dealer SpongeBob is not. Selling drugs takes a criminal intuition, self-discipline, personality, and at least a modicum of salesmanship. Because SpongeBob lacks every one of those qualities in spades, I tend to believe him when he tells me that he really wasn't a drug dealer. But so what if he was? What does it matter if he sold 350 keys instead of 3.5 grams? How is it justifiable to sentence a person to spend every day until they die in prison, at taxpayer expense, no less! Last I checked, people like you are paying $25,000 dollars a year (most recent figure) to make sure this petite man doesn't corrupt society with his highly-addictive wares.

The idiot Nazis back on B-Upper range were so concerned with Obama being some sort of Islamic terrorist sleeper agent. Man, did they have it wrong. It was fucking Reagan (or should I say Bin Reagan) whose War on Drugs turned the American justice system into nothing more than a glorified Sharia court. We're only one step away from taking Michael Phelps out in back of the nearest McDonald's and stoning him to death for getting photographed smoking pot. Might as well if we're going to allow decent men to be given a protracted death sentence for drugs which may or may not exist.

The new administration in Washington is going through the budget line by line to discover and eliminate the programs that don't work. Hey Obama, here's an idea! -- Go through the damn Federal sentencing procedures line by line to eliminate what doesn't work. Sentencing people to life in prison for drug offenses is not only unjust, it doesn't work!



11 comments:

Ninoushka said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ninoushka said...

WOW
And what do you get if you happen to abandon cardboard boxes in the street? do you get whipped?
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, wait until my next letter :-D

~ felonette

Anonymous said...

It is a real shame that non violent offenders are getting sentenced to more time in prison than non violent offenders anymore. I know someone who killed two people and is serving 15 years in prison. I know a non violent offender (drug related) who was sentenced to 20 on a set up put together by the feds. This is how intelligent our government is. I would feel confident in saying there are probably a lot of prisoners that are far more intelligent than a lot of the people participating in the decisions of this country. I believe all criminals should serve time for their actions, but who is to say how much time is really deserved? Maybe we should start asking those senators, congressman, and other loyal government employees of the fine country of the United States who are committing the exact same crimes what they feel they deserve for their crimes committed. I bet if the decision was made that way the percentage of the population of inmates would greatly decrease. So send my condolences to Mr. Square Pants because he got screwed and I bet there wasn’t even a steak dinner involved.

cieldequimper said...

Makes me soooo mad, but then I'm not American so who am I to judge? Whit, tell your Dad to go look at my post for March 1 because I don't believe he's had time to do so... :-)

Anonymous said...

It is definately scary when you can have murderers, rapists, etc roaming the streets and being rehabilitated but drug offenders are serving life sentences ... Doesnt' give alot of confindence in our justice system as a whole. Change is coming ? Time will tell ..

Anonymous said...

I would like to be that optimistic, but you have to keep in mind that anybody in the situation where their position is determined by voters is going to tell those voters what they want to hear in order to win. We can only hope the " motivational speeches" being stated are honest, but when it comes to the government I think it would be safe to say their is very little honesty involved. So is change coming? I believe it is, but will it be the change we are looking for?

Whit Smith said...

Nina, I can't believe you so carelessly discarded those boxes wherever was most convenient - do you care nothing for the children who could have gotten papercuts?

Whit Smith said...

Anonymous: You're absolutely right - all criminals do deserve to do time for their felonies. I plead guilty to robbing 3 banks and deserve every single one of the 78 months I was sentenced to. But was that justice? Depends on who you ask. Justice is indefinable when it comes to criminal matters, it is only when justice separates from practicality that true injustice occurs. The federal court system in my opinion has for a long time abandoned all sense of practicality. More than anything else, federal courts rely on guidelines to make their sentencing decisions. A guideline mandating a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of life for most drug offenders isn't necessarily unjust, but it is certainly non-sensible. Screw the worthless Senators and screw the bickering congressmen/women - Fen phen made the guidelines "advisory,", it's time the judges start using their damn noodles and start giving sentences which are practical.

Whit Smith said...

cieldequimper: Americans are the ones who constructed the justice system so we NEED you to judge. I got copies of the dedicated pictures ... THANK YOU! They are great! I've asked to have a few other examples of your work printed out and sent to me.

Ninoushka said...

Damn... I was sitting calmly in front of my computer when I received a little notification on the bottom-right corner of my screen saying (basically) "Whit just sent you a new email"
I was like whaaaaaat now he can send me emails??? This man is so awesome, he will never cease to surprise me.
Well, it was """"just"""" your answer to the comment I made about the cardboard boxes, haha.
It was such a shock though... adrenalin butterflies everything :-D

~ Dumbette

cieldequimper said...

It was a pleasure Whit! I'm sure you'll get plenty of pictures!