Friday Night Lights, a Filthy Rotten System,

and bullshit gun charges

Imagine you are a twenty years old.

You have a good heart, a brilliant smile, a sweetie-pie girlfriend.

You played football in high school. Your coaches loved you.

After high school, you lose your footing a bit.

It’s understandable. Who doesn’t go through a period of struggle as a young adult? Especially when high school football was important to you, and now it’s … poof. Gone.

Isn’t this the fodder of most Bruce Springsteen or John Mellencamp songs? And several seasons of Friday Night Lights?

You consider going to community college, but academics aren’t your strong suit. You have learning disabilities and besides, the economy is a nightmare. You need money. You have a job but you want a better job, benefits, start earning real money.

One day, you get yourself in a bad situation - wrong place, wrong time.

Very wrong place. Very wrong time.

You know how, sometimes, you have a bad feeling about something, but you do it anyway?

Out of loyalty to a friend, or stubbornness, or needing to keep a promise?

Any number of reasons.

Of course you do. Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, me, you, we’ve all been there.

You, you have a friend who you know is kind of shady, but you go way back. He asks you for a favor. You agree. You go along with him on an errand. You didn’t know he was planning to rob someone. No wonder you had a bad feeling.

But not knowing his intentions, well, it doesn’t change the fact that you were there.

Things go sideways. What happens is horrible. People are hurt. Lives are irreparably changed. You would take it back if you could. You would turn the clock back. But you can’t. You don’t lie about it - you admit what happened. You come clean. You are charged anyway because that’s how it works. You were there.

But you do your best to do what’s right. You make the amends that you can make. You go to cognitive therapy where you learn some life skills and you learn about making better choices.

You also go to counseling, therapy.

You do everything you can, and that you are asked to do, to turn your life around.

Sure, you make a couple of mistakes, stumble along the way.

Who’s perfect?

But when you mess up, you do what you can to make amends.

Gradually, with support and a LOT of hard work, things start getting better.

You get a good job. You do well there. You get promoted. You even get your own office. Your family is happy. Things are good with your girlfriend.

But you are still on the cops’ radar.

They know who you are, they know you have been convicted of a felony in your past.

They know you, and they know your car.

The cops follow you and pull you over every couple of months.

You’re already a worrier. But this constant surveillance, being pulled over so often, makes you even more anxious. One wrong move and you could end up in jail.

You continue therapy.

Your therapist diagnoses you with anxiety disorder and PTSD from what you’ve been through. Totally understandable. You try some medications, but honestly you find that smoking marijuana is the most helpful treatment for you.

This would be fine if you lived in any 44 states of the U.S.

But you live in North Carolina. You happen to live in a state where weed is still completely illegal.

Ok. So it’s illegal. But you need to be able to function. You need to be able to deal with your anxiety and PTSD enough to go to your job, earn money, be in a family.

You try to be very careful.

But one day, some (undercover) cops see you doing something that looks like it might be a drug deal.

They say they see you shake hands with someone and that your hand “came away with nothing in it.”

The undercover agents follow you, pull you over. Finding nothing on you, they let you go.

But the next day, they pull you over again, this time in the parking lot of your girlfriend’s apartment.

The police say your car “smells like marijuana.”

They demand to search you and your car. They find a small amount of pot on you.

They arrest you.

They aren’t tender or gentle when they handcuff you. You’re cuffed behind your back. Almost immediately, your shoulders start to ache. Soon, pins and needles. Those old football injuries.

To them, you’re not a young person with a good job and a good family, a good kid who used to play really good football.

To them, you are a criminal. A felon with a record.

They have a search warrant for your girlfriend’s apartment.

When she doesn’t answer as quickly as they want, they kick down the door. (She will lose her apartment because of this.)

They search the place.

In your girlfriend’s closet, locked in a lockbox, they find your girlfriend’s handgun. It is registered to your girlfriend. She purchased it legally. You were nowhere near it. (You were already handcuffed and in the backseat of the police car.)

The police charge you with possession of a firearm by a felon.

They charge you with everything they can. They throw the kitchen sink at you.

Remember how the cops said they saw your hand come away empty from that handshake?

It’s their reason for charging you with:

DELIVER SCH VI CS. This means “delivering a schedule VI controlled substance.” Schedule VI substances are “drugs that have no accepted medical use [remember NC is one of only 6 states that still do not allow medical marijuana use] but an insignificant probability of abuse or dependence, such as marijuana (cannabis) and its derivatives.”

PWISD MARIJUANA. This means “possession with intent to sell or deliver” marijuana. [Literally anyone taking pot brownies to a friend’s house could be charged with this. Want to guess who gets charged with this most often?]

MAINTN VEH/DWELL/PLACE CS (M). This means “Maintaining a Vehicle or Dwelling for Use of a Controlled Substance (Marijuana).” [Basically this means the cops think you were keeping pot in your car or apartment. And they want to charge you with as breaking as many laws as possible. That seems ridiculous, right? Like it’s just an extra charge to put on someone? Well, yeah. And it’s for real.]

POSSESSION OF FIREARM BY FELON. [This is a law that your Quaker friend Jen used to think was a no-brainer because she’s a pacifist and doesn’t like guns. But lately your Quaker friend Jen realizes this law is just another way to lock up folks with a record.]

Now you are in jail.

You are being held with NO BOND.

NO BOND because your girlfriend had a registered gun and the police charged you with possession of firearm by a felon.

No bond means you can not get out of jail.

Not until:

— a judge decides to set a bond — and your family can afford it. You were hoping that might happen today, but it didn’t. Your case is going from district court to superior court. So you are stuck in jail for probably another two or three months until a bond hearing. Or

— you agree to a plea deal, which, again, could take months upon months. Or

— you go to trial, which could take years. Or

— your lawyer argues effectively for the ADA to drop the gun charge. Which, again, could take a couple of months.

You are stuck in jail, which is a certain kind of hell.

You’ve lost your job.

You have no medicine or treatment for your PTSD and anxiety.

Your family is sick with worry about you.

And your family has to pay for a lawyer.

You know that weed is illegal, but it’s not illegal in other states. If this had happened in 44 other states, you would not be in jail.

You know that possession of a firearm by a felon is illegal, but you were not in possession of a firearm.

You can get as mad as you want about how many people you know who smoke and possess and deliver weed all the time and are never charged with a crime.

You can get as mad as you want about the firearm charge.

Guess how jail staff, judges, and ADAs respond to your anger?

If you think this story is enraging and unfair, you’re correct.

And all of this is being done in our collective name.

This scenario?

It is happening, right now, to my friend.

I am keeping him anonymous.

But he and his family need help.

And we can help.

Please, can you chip in $10 or $20 to help my friend and his family get through this?

You can Venmo me https://www.venmo.com/u/jjjohnsonauthor

You can PayPal me paypal.me/jjjohnsonauthor

Add an emoji or note “For your friend.”

I will give all the money you contribute straight to his mom (who I just saw today) to use for court fees, lawyer, commissary, jail phone cards, rent, and all the income they are losing from him not having a job.

I pinky-promise all the money will go to this family.

As Dorothy Day says, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

It is a filthy, rotten system.

So filthy and rotten that sometime it’s hard for me to believe, raised as I was to be a nice, polite, rule-following gal.

But this is real.

It’s happening to my friend.

It is the reality of so many people in our communities.

Please, chip in to help my friend on a personal level.

And more broadly, participate in systems change: volunteer for restorative justice. Advocate for legalizing / decriminalizing marijuana and drug possession. Show up for court-reform protests and rallies. Be anti-racist in all your endeavors. Contact your reps. Contact your D.A. and ask them not to prosecute marijuana possession. Talk to your friends and community groups. Resist the narratives that say that all these laws are meant to “protect us.”

Protect whom? Who is “us”?

Protect “us” from … what?

Protect us from whom?

Thanks, friends.

Love to all y’all.

XOXO

P.S. Those links again:

You can Venmo me https://www.venmo.com/u/jjjohnsonauthor

You can PayPal me paypal.me/jjjohnsonauthor

Add an emoji or note “For your friend.”