August 10, 2020

A Military Veteran Sentenced to Life in Prison for Selling $30 of Weed Will Finally Be Freed

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After spending nine years in prison for selling $30 of weed—0.69 grams—to an officer in Louisiana 12 years ago, Derek Harris will be released. He’d initially faced 15 years for the sale, but a life sentence came down under a habitual offender law that allows judges to impose even harsher sentences. Harris was recently resentenced to time served. Whether you count this as encouraging news of a kind or just another page in a perniciously unjust, cruel criminal justice system, a wave of national attention is increasingly focused on the need for course corrections like Harris’, and the celebration of his release is spreading. His lawyer says Harris will move closer to his family in Kentucky and looks forward to spending time with his brother. The broader movement to improve the scales of justice is growing, including in Nevada and Los Angeles, where 66,000 cannabis convictions were scheduled to be dismissed earlier this year. If you have personal stories of progress, broadly defined, drop a line to recharge@motherjones.com.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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