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Showing posts with the label mandatory minimums

USCG v. Solomon: New Accusations on Appeal

The US Coast Guard has filed an appeal brief in the matter of USCG v. Solomon.  In this case at the Trial, the expert witness of the USCG- Dr. Hani Khella- stated that urinary creatinine would only decrease in "volcano" and that a week in the desert would not alter urinary creatinine. The USCG expert, Khella, further stated that there is no way that creatinine would degrees in temperatures less than 300 degrees Celsius. Dr. Khella, apparently getting his information from Wikipedia  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatinine  testified in opposition to the number.  Why he made such a miscalculation of truth, we will never know. At the trial on the matter, it was admitted that the urine sample was in the desert for over a week.  Simone Solomon presented two experts who testified at trial that urinary creatinine would degrade at temperatures that were natrually occurring in the desert, temperatures of 115 degrees or less. The USCG has now, upon appeal, introduce...

How Drug Possession Weight is Calculated in Florida

Mike Riggs  recently commented regarding Florida's drug possession laws reporting about a person in Florida who was fired from his job due to what he, and one person in possession of LSD , deem to be a mandatory minimum within the drug law.  The "inordinate mandatory minimum" within the drug law that he wrote upon, dealt with the medium in which the LSD was fixed.  In this case, he had or roughly 25 doses of LSD fixed to paper, which would weigh, without the paper, 4-5 milligrams.  I do not know how the e-mailer exactly got away with his claim that this was just a small quantity of LSD, however because it was fixed in a medium, he qualified for a mandatory minimum sentence under the guidelines.  Even though 25 doses isn't necessarily a "small" amount of LSD in the eyes of an average jury, it had a devastating effect on his life which was out of proportion to his crime. This raised an interesting comment made by Greg Newburn of FAMM (Families Against Man...