The World Around You

Never say that it doesn’t pay to have friends (or in this case, relatives) in high places. The Birmingham News reports this morning:

An Irondale City Councilman’s son was neither arrested nor charged with a crime because he led investigators to a man they believe is a significant drug dealer, Irondale’s acting police chief said Wednesday.

Irondale police found Matthew Chandler Jackson on April 28 with several gallon-size bags of marijuana in his car, Acting Chief Norman Stapp said, but the 19-year-old Jackson avoided arrest because he provided information that led to the arrest of Mario Bustos, 37, who is suspected of drug dealing.

The reporter, Anita Debro, does a good job of getting differing professional opinions on what the normal procedure would be in such a case:

Don Cochran, a Cumberland School of Law professor and former state and federal prosecutor, said the standard procedure is to arrest a suspect even if he is willing to cooperate.

But a former Jefferson County narcotics investigator and current instructor at the county Law Enforcement Academy said it is not unusual for drug investigators to hold off on arresting a suspect if he is willing to provide information that would lead to the arrest of a higher-up.

Lost at the bottom of the column however, is the additional circumstance that Jackson is still going to prison, without the arrest on the drug charges.

Jackson reported to St. Clair Correction Facility earlier this week to serve three years of a 20-year sentence on armed robbery convictions unrelated to the drug case.

It would seem that a plausible explanation is that, since he was going to prison for three years anyway, they didn’t want to waste the resources to try to tack some more years on, when they could move up the chain and get the bigger fish. I am adamant about taking drug arrests seriously, and this case merits further investigation, but the portrayal up to this point may not be entirely fair. There are good reasons not to prosecute certain cases, but let it not be because of who your relatives are.