Weed and Awards

My Workspace

                Friday was one of my favorite days I’ve spent at the Marshal’s office. In the morning, I watched a sentencing hearing since it was a drug trafficker and I had yet to see one of those. The offender was a forty-five year old white man who had been bringing drugs (between 700 and 1000 kilograms of marijuana) from Honolulu, Hawaii to Cleveland. He had also created fake businesses and employees in order to funnel the drug money back to Hawaii. At the beginning of the sentencing things were not looking so good for him. His offender level was six; this is the highest and worst level. He had multiple past felony convictions for drug trafficking. The higher your offender level the longer your sentence. In addition to this the individual offence level was 32. Offence levels start at one and the higher they are the more serious the crime is. Also the longer the sentence is. The one thing this criminal had going for himself was that he appeared extremely wealthy. He was wearing a nice suit and appeared well groomed. He wasn’t in an orange jumpsuit, which meant that he could afford to be out on bail. In addition to all this, he had a hired defense attorney, not a public defender. His attorney was probably one of the best I’ve ever seen. He argued that the criminal should get below the recommended sentence because numerous states have legalized marijuana. This argument worked and the criminal got six and a half years when he was looking at probably fifteen.

                I was upset with this sentencing. It’s not that I think marijuana traffickers should get harsh sentences; I actually think it should be federally legalized. I’m upset because I know that if this criminal wasn’t white and rich, if he had a public defender, he probably would have gotten the maximum sentence.

Also My Workspace

                After the sentencing, I was assigned a new job at the office. Every year the government give out a number of awards to its federal employees. There are awards for districts, court security officers, taskforce officers, and a variety of other people and groups. Since Peter Elliot, our district’s Marshal, is one of the longest standing Marshals, he decides who receives the awards. But there are hundreds of applications for all of the awards, and each application mush be read through. So my job was to read through the applications and rank them.

                The applications were actually very interesting since they were all stories of what the Marshal’s across the country had done in the past year. In Southern California, they had busted a Mexican drug cartel and arrested over eighty-five members. In Maryland, the Marshal’s deputies provided security for the judge who ruled against Trump’s immigration ban. I think the most interesting applications by far though were those for the Court Security Officer. One officer had tackled a man who was using a metal statue to break the bullet-proof glass in front of the US Attorney’s office. The man spit in the officer’s eye and it turned out that he was HIV positive. In NYC, two other officers got off work and headed down into the subway to get home. A women had a medical emergency, passed out, and fell into the active subway tracks. The men jumped onto the tracks, not knowing if a train was coming, and saved the women’s life.