[420 Girl]

Wow, this shocks me just because it's so rare. The officer who shot a student at Grand Valley State University here in Michigan is going to be arrested, as my colleague Eartha Melzer writes at the Michigan Messenger:

An arrest warrant has been issued for an Ottawa County sheriff's deputy who shot an unarmed Grand Valley State University student in the chest while approaching his apartment to execute a search warrant.

Deputy Ryan Huizenga was charged with a misdemeanor count of "careless discharge of a weapon causing injury or death" after an investigation by the state police determined that his finger was on the trigger -- rather than the safety guard -- of his department issued .40 caliber hand gun as he approached the home of 20 year-old Derek Copp as part of a drug raid last month.

This is good news. But let's go a lot further than that. What happened here is a symptom of a much deeper problem. They sent 5 officers to serve an arrest warrant purely for possession of marijuana of a college student without any history of violence and they had their guns drawn even though there was no confrontation at the scene. That makes this sort of result inevitable from time to time.

Ultimately, it's ridiculous to arrest anyone for smoking pot, which should be entirely legal. But even if it's going to be illegal, at the very least we need to distinguish between possession and distribution and treat the latter more seriously than the former. Unfortunately, as Radley Balko has documented time and again, the militarization of law enforcement inevitably leads to using swat teams to serve warrants on non-violent offenders for possession only, especially in smaller towns. And that leads to situations like this one.


http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...-shooting.html