Positive Liberty

A common charge against libertarians is that in our heart of hearts, we’re nothing more than libertines: Libertarians, the argument runs, want a drastic reduction in state power — but that’s only part of the story. What we also want, we are told, is a drastic reduction in moral suasion, social stricture, and even morality itself. The state is only a first step, say many conservatives, and what libertarians really want is moral degradation. This notion has contributed powerfully to mistrust between the two camps (notoriously through the writings of Russell Kirk).

The trouble with all of this, to my mind, is that the state enforcement of private moral conduct almost inevitably produces an even greater moral evil than the conduct we aim to repress. Far from leading to a more moral society, the use of force to police the private conduct of adults achieves just the opposite; in the name of opposing libertinism, the prohibitionists run squarely into something far worse. What follows is a horrifying example.

I refer to the case of Kathryn Johnston, which Radley Balko has done much to publicize. Johnston was a 92-year-old woman who shot back at some intruders who were trying to enter her home. The intruders turned out to be narcotics officers with a so-called “no knock” warrant, one which did not require them to announce themselves before trying to break down the door. Altogether understandably, Johnston shot through that door before they had finished.

Now the police had acted on a tip — one which turned out to be bogus, and which was offered under duress. But they did not realize that there weren’t any drugs in Johnston’s home until after she had been fatally shot. The cops, ever with an eye toward producing moral virtue, decided that the best way to fix things up would be to plant some drugs in Johnston’s home, which they did while she bled to death:

Three narcotics agents were trolling the streets near the Bluffs in northwest Atlanta, a known market for drugs, midday on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Eventually they set their sights on some apartments on Lanier Street, usually fertile when narcotics agents are looking for arrests and seizures.

Gregg Junnier and another narcotics officer went inside the apartments around 2 p.m. while Jason Smith checked the woods. Smith found dozens of bags of marijuana — in baggies that were clear, blue or various other colors and packaged to sell. With no one connected to the pot, Smith stashed the bags in the trunk of the patrol car. A use was found for Smith’s stash 90 minutes later: A phone tip led the three officers to a man in a “gold-colored jacket” who might be dealing. The man, identified as X in the documents but known as Fabian Sheats, spotted the cops and put something in his mouth. They found no drugs on Sheats, but came up with a use for the pot they found earlier.

They wanted information or they would arrest Sheats for dealing.

While Junnier called for a drug-sniffing dog, Smith planted some bags under a rock, which the K-9 unit found.

But if Sheats gave them something, he could walk.

Sheats pointed out 933 Neal St., the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. That, he claimed, is where he spotted a kilogram of cocaine when he was there to buy crack from a man named “Sam.”

They needed someone to go inside, but Sheats would not do for their purposes because he was not a certified confidential informant.

So about 5:05 p.m. they reached out by telephone to Alex White to make an undercover buy for them. They had experience with White and he had proved to be a reliable snitch.

But White had no transportation and could not help.

Still, Smith, Junnier and the other officer, Arthur Tesler, according to the state’s case, ran with the information. They fabricated all the right answers to persuade a magistrate to give them a no-knock search warrant.

By 6 p.m., they had the legal document they needed to break into Kathryn Johnston’s house, and within 40 minutes they were prying off the burglar bars and using a ram to burst through the elderly woman’s front door. It took about two minutes to get inside, which gave Johnston time to retrieve her rusty .38 revolver.

Tesler was at the back door when Junnier, Smith and the other narcotics officers crashed through the front.

Johnston got off one shot, the bullet missing her target and hitting a porch roof. The three narcotics officers answered with 39 bullets.

Five or six bullets hit the terrified woman. Authorities never figured out who fired the fatal bullet, the one that hit Johnston in the chest. Some pieces of the other bullets — friendly fire — hit Junnier and two other cops.

The officers handcuffed the mortally wounded woman and searched the house.

There was no Sam.

There were no drugs.

There were no cameras that the officers had claimed was the reason for the no-knock warrant.

Just Johnston, handcuffed and bleeding on her living room floor.

That is when the officers took it to another level. Three baggies of marijuana were retrieved from the trunk of the car and planted in Johnston’s basement. The rest of the pot from the trunk was dropped down a sewage drain and disappeared.

The three began getting their stories straight.

I’m totally sure, by the way, that the cops just dropped the rest of the marijuana down a sewage drain. Like, totally.

Let’s imagine an alternate universe for a moment. Suppose that the cops found a drug dealer’s cache in the woods, exactly as in the real world on the afternoon that Johnston was shot.

“Hey look, it’s marijuana,” says a cop.

“Sure enough, it is,” says another.

“You know, we’re wasting our time out here. Let’s go find some shoplifters.”

“Okay.”

Which society — this, or ours — is the better one? No wait — I’ve got another alternate universe:

“Hey Mr. Informant, where can we get some pot?” asks a cop.

“Old lady Johnston sells it at her place,” says the informant.

“Really? I’ll tell ya what, you’ve been a real help to us in catching [car thieves, stalkers, vandals, even litterers], so when we get off of work, what do you say we head over there? We’ll pass the bong around, have a few brownies, and listen to Pink Floyd.”

“Are you paying?”

“Sure thing.”

Really, I can’t help but think that if every single person connected to this story had instead just smoked a whole bunch of marijuana, things would still have been infinitely better than how they turned out in the real world. Instead, we have:

– blackmail (the cops telling the informant that if he comes up with a tip he can walk);

–lying (the informant making up a story);

–lying again (the cops couldn’t use their original informant, bizarrely, because he wasn’t “certified,” so they got a new one, who knew nothing about the case, but who was “certified”);

–breaking and entering (the cops busting down Mrs. Johnston’s door);

–killing (I’ll leave subtler minds to decide the precise degree of culpability);

–faking evidence;

–neglecting a shooting victim;

–lying a third time (on the incident report);

–faking even more evidence (the crack they claimed they found at Johnston’s home);

–Finally one of the cops decided to tell the truth. If it weren’t for him, we might never have known.

Meanwhile, I picture the entire neighborhood smoking marijuana whenever they feel like it, year after year (the adults, anyway). No one stops them. No one blackmails anyone. No one lies. No one gets shot. No one plants any evidence while an old woman bleeds to death.

Call me a libertine. Call me a degenerate. I can’t seriously imagine this scenario as the greater moral evil. Even on the conservatives’ own terms, a neighborhood of peaceful pot smokers — and honest cops — is both the safer and the morally better place to live. When the law does not entice people into brutality, they’re less likely to be brutal, yet we tend to forget all this precisely when we are most concerned with protecting public morals.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS