Sunday Speaker: ACLU-AZ - K.M. Bell: Defelonizing Drug Possession & Coercive Plea Bargaining

ACLU-AZ - K.M. Bell: Defelonizing Drug Possession & Coercive Plea Bargaining Our criminal justice system coerces innocent people into plea bargains and treats individuals with substance use disorder as felons. Learn more about how the system can be improved to protect vulnerable people and everyone’s constitutional rights. Despite what you’ve seen on television, almost no one accused of a crime gets to go to trial. Instead, 95% of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargain. In the plea bargaining process, prosecutors often use coercive tactics to extract waivers of important constitutional rights – sometimes even intimidating people into pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit. The Maricopa County Attorneys’ Office is using particularly problematic tactics in the name of processing cases quickly, through so-called “Early Disposition Courts.” This helps fuel mass incarceration in Arizona, which has the eighth-highest incarceration rate in the world. This high incarceration rate is also fueled by Arizona’s incredibly harsh drug laws. Public health professionals stress the importance of destigmatizing substance use disorder in order to address our opioid overdose crisis, but the current system marginalizes people in possession of drugs by charging them with a felony. In addition to the potential for prison time, this leads to the loss of their civil rights, causes discrimination in the housing and employment markets, and makes them seven times more likely to experience homelessness. There is a better approach that would reduce the harms associated with substance use disorder, and it includes making drug possession a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Bio: K. M. Bell, Esq. is the Campaign Strategist for the Smart Justice Campaign and works to reform Arizona's criminal justice system by focusing on prosecutorial accountability. Prior to joining the ACLU, they served as General Counsel of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). In supporting MPP's efforts to legalize cannabis, they worked to eliminate a common way people are drawn into the criminal justice system, as well as focusing on expanding the availability of expungement so that people are no longer saddled with the burden of a criminal record for something that should never have been a crime. K. M. also has several years of experience as a criminal defense attorney and civil litigator in Baltimore, Maryland. They graduated magna cum laude from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law, hold a B. A. in Art History from the College of William and Mary, and began their career as a judicial clerk for Judge Alexander Wright, Jr. and Judge Timothy E. Meredith of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. https://hsgp.org/   / hsgp     / humanistphoenix     / humanistsocietyofgreaterphoenix