From [HERE] and [HERE] A Black Iraq war veteran was sentenced to five years in prison by a white judge after a white police officer arrested him for bringing medical marijuana into Alabama and liquor into a partly dry county.

Officer Carl Abramo arrested Sean Worsley and his wife in 2016 at a gas station in Gordo, Alabama, where he was playing loud music, playing air guitar and laughing while looking at his wife, according to the Washington Post, the Alabama Political Reporter and the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.

According to an arrest report filed five days after the incident, he heard loud music coming from a vehicle and “observed a Black male get out of the passenger side vehicle. They were pulled up at a pump and the Black male began playing air guitar, dancing, and shaking his head. He was laughing and joking around and looking at the driver while doing all this.”

According to the arrest report, he smelled marijuana and asked the couple about it. Sean told him he was a disabled veteran and tried to give him his medical marijuana card. Worsley agreed to turn down his music and allowed the officer to search his vehicle.

The officer found medical marijuana that Worsley had legally purchased in Arizona, along with pain pills prescribed to Worsley’s wife, a bottle of vodka and a six-pack of beer. “I explained to him that Alabama did not have medical marijuana. I then placed the suspect in hand cuffs,” the report reads. 

Even though Sean’s marijuana was legally obtained via a prescription and packaged in a prescription bottle, Abramo booked him in for possession for other than personal use, a Class C felony. Eboni received the same charge, though it was later dropped.

The white cop Abramo, who no longer works for the Gordo Police Department, appears to be a racist. His Facebook page is a mishmash of pro-law enforcement videos and memes that demean Muslims, Mexicans, and Democrats. Nearly all the pro-law enforcement posts feature Black people taking up for the police, a common tactic among conservatives seeking to demonstrate that they are not racist. Many of the rest of his Facebook posts promote racist birther conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama and villainize non-white people and ethnic or religious non-whites. [MORE]

The Worsleys spent six days in jail and were released pending trial. Their lives would never be the same.

Medical marijuana is legal in 33 jurisdictions, but not in Alabama. When Worsley was arrested in 2016, Black people in Alabama were more than four times as likely as white people to be arrested for marijuana, according to the Appleseed.

Worsley had service-connected disabilities, including a traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and back and shoulder pain, according to a letter from the Veteran’s Health administration. He used medical marijuana to calm his nightmares and soothe his back pain. The VA determined that he was “totally and permanently disabled due solely to [his] service-connected disabilities,” according to a February 2015 benefits summary letter included in his Veteran’s Health Administration (VHA) records.

Altogether, Sean spent five years in the military. His deployment to Iraq spanned 14 months, and he was honorably discharged September 22, 2008. Even after his injuries, he served in the Army Reserve until late 2010.  

Neither his service, nor the Purple Heart award he received, nor his prescription mattered in Pickens County, Alabama.

For a state so eager to honor veterans, Alabama’s justice system produces some confounding results. This system’s determination to punish Sean set off a spiral of job loss, homelessness, additional criminal charges, and eventually incarceration in the country’s most violent prison system — all for a substance that’s legal in states where half of Americans live. 

But first, Sean and Eboni drove back home to Arizona. They found the charges made it difficult for them to maintain housing and stability, so they moved to Nevada, where they acquired a home and lived peacefully while their case progressed.  

Worsley agreed to a plea deal to prevent his wife from also being charged, his wife told an Appleseed researcher. When they got to court, the Worsleys were taken to separate rooms. Eboni was horrified. She explained that Sean was disabled with serious cognitive issues, that he had PTSD, that he needed a guardian to help him understand the process and ensure he made an informed decision. If a legal guardian couldn’t be appointed, she offered to serve as his advocate in court as she served as his caregiver at home.

“They said no, and they literally locked me in a room separate from him. And his conversation with me is that they told him that if he didn’t sign the plea agreement that we would have to stay incarcerated until December and that they would charge me with the same charges as they charged him,” Eboni said. “He said because of that, he just signed it.”

Sean’s plea agreement included 60 months of probation, plus drug treatment and thousands of dollars in fines, fees, and court costs. Because the Worsleys had lived in Arizona at the time of their arrest, his probation was transferred to Arizona, instead of Nevada, where they lived. Transferring it again would mean another lengthy delay and more jail time while the paperwork was sorted out, they were told. 

When they arrived in Arizona, the only housing they could find on short notice was a costly month-to-month rental. Their funds were depleted, but at least they had a place to stay. 

The Worsleys were ready to start rebuilding their lives. But when they checked in with the Arizona probation officer, she told them that their month-to-month rental did not constitute a permanent address. She would not approve it for purposes of supervision and told them to contact probation in Alabama. They did, and the Alabama probation officer told them they would have to return to Pickens County to sign paperwork to redo the transfer. They didn’t have the money to do that, so they asked their Alabama lawyer if it could be done by proxy and proceeded with attempting to comply with the other terms of Sean’s probation.

Among those was drug treatment. Had he been an Alabama resident, Sean would have participated in mandatory programming through Alabama’s Court Referral, one of several diversion programs operating across the state. The terms of his probation required him to seek similar services where he lived, so in February 2018, Sean went to the VA to take an assessment for placement in drug treatment. 

The VA rejected him. A letter from VA Mental Health Integrated Specialty Services reads in part, “Mr. Worsley reports smoking Cannabis for medical purposes and has legal documentation to support his use and therefore does not meet criteria for a substance use disorder or meet need for substance abuse treatment.”

The Worsleys maintained contact with their Alabama lawyer and probation officer as best they could, but things were difficult. Eboni, a certified nursing assistant who works with traumatized children, had a job offer rescinded due to the felony charge in Alabama. She also lost her clearance to work with sensitive information to which she needed access to do her job. For a while, the Worsleys slept in their car or lived with family.

In January 2019, they again found themselves homeless. They requested assistance from a program that helps homeless veterans. Just as they completed the six-month program, the VA notified Sean that his benefits would be stopped because Alabama had issued a fugitive warrant for his arrest. Unknown to Sean, he had missed a February court date in Pickens County and the Pickens County Supervision Program had terminated his supervision, citing “failure to attend” and “failure to pay court-ordered moneys.” The case was referred to the district attorney’s office in March 2019.

The Worsleys were in a terrible situation. Eboni needed heart surgery, and Sean had to stop taking on extra gigs so he could help her recover. Rent was expensive, anywhere from $1,200-$1,500 a month, and they had a car loan as well. To cover costs, the couple took out a title loan, but they were unable to keep up with it. They lost Eboni’s truck. They lost their home and again had to move into a temporary rental, paying $400 a week to live in a suburb about an hour from the hospital where Eboni still had frequent appointments.

Sean was able to get his check started up again around August 2019, but the financial hole they were in was so deep that he didn’t have the $250 to renew his medical marijuana card. It expired.

In early 2020, Sean was pulled over on his way to Eboni’s sister’s home, where he was going to help with a minor repair. He had some marijuana with him. The officers who pulled him over noticed he was terrified. They asked him why. According to Eboni, he told them everything: about this PTSD, his traumatic brain injury, the expired card, the outstanding warrant from Alabama. The officers told him not to worry; Alabama would never extradite him over a little marijuana. It would be OK.

But when they called to make sure, Alabama said it wanted to bring Sean back to Pickens County. When the Arizona police told him, he ran. He fell. He was taken to jail, and eventually, he was transported to Pickens County at a cost to the state of Alabama of $4,345. The state moved to make Sean pay that money himself, on top of the $3,833.40 he already owed in fines, fees, and court costs.

Pickens County District Judge Lance Bailey [racist suspect in photo] revoked Worsley’s probation in April and sentenced him to five years in prison.

Worsley remains in jail as he appeals his sentence.

“I feel like I’m being thrown away by a country I went and served for,” Worsley wrote in a letter from the Pickens County Jail to Alabama Appleseed, a criminal justice organization that recently published a detailed account of his case. “I feel like I lost parts of me in Iraq, parts of my spirit and soul that I can’t ever get back.” [MORE]

BLIND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY IS NOT A VIRTUE

The first error this Black man made was answering this Jack-officer’s questions about marijuana. Due to recent Supreme Court rulings eroding the so-called 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination, remaining silent or asserting the 5th could be harmful because it actually could be used against you at trial. [MORE] Additionally, in the system of racism white supremacy you should presume that most white people are racist [this especially includes white cops]. Nevertheless, it is hard for non-whites to determine which racist suspects are racist because racism is carried out by deception. If you are dealing with a psychopathic racist cop it would be stupid to expect him to treat you humanely. Robotic compliance with a cop’s incriminating questions and orders would be mindless. What to do? One approach is to assert your so-called 6th Amendment right to an attorney. “I will not answer any more of your questions without a lawyer” or “I want an attorney.” Would the racist cop who legally stopped Sean still have made the search? Probably, but Sean would at least may have had a defense to possibly get the non-consensually obtained evidence suppressed [the 6th Amendment can’t be used against you] or to negotiate a better plea.

The second thing was consenting to the search of his vehicle. Sean’s marijuana was legally prescribed. They thought they had nothing to hide. They were wrong. And now Sean has been sentenced to five years in Alabama’s violent, drug-filled, corrupt prison system because of it.

The 3rd mistake was running his mouth when he was pulled over in Arizona. Cops are not your friend and you are not in a benign environment. FUNKTIONARY explains, “People who are awake see cops as mercenary security guards that remind us daily, through acts of force, that we are simultaneously both enemies and slaves of the Corporate state - colonized, surveilled and patrolled by the desensitized and lobotomized drones of the colonizers.” [MORE]. Legal scholar James Duane explains that, ‘far too many ignorant American citizens naturally assume that there must be some kind of legal oversight of police interactions. . . people frequently assume, that there must be some similar rules restricting the ability of the police to trick you into giving up your most precious constitutional rights. I would not blame you for thinking such a thing, but you would be dead wrong.’

The use of dishonesty and deception by cops is rampant and the resulting products (evidence from searches, coerced confessions etc) from such exchanges is energetically used by white prosecutors and ratified by white judges. Nothing per se happened to Sean that was harmful during his stream of consciousness explanation of everything to the Arizona cops but he prolonged the traffic stop, during which anything else could happen leading him to being placed into greater confinement.

The problem here for Sean and many non-whites is not automatic compliance or automatic non-compliance or the automatic assertion of rights - nothing should be automatic. Having some set pre-made plan or code and legal script ready to go could get you killed or placed into greater confinement. Understanding rights or lack thereof and acquiring knowledge has its value but there can be no robotic application of rules to life. If your car is on fire do you think about exiting or just get out? There also can be no set plans for dealing with a maniac cop - that’s like making a plan to deal with falling out of a tree. Legal truths give way to reality on the street, so the only rule for dealing with cops is awareness. You must be consciously present in the here-now moment, completely aware of what is going on internally and externally. You must be able to see things as they really are and not be reacting out of the past or react from your knowledge. If you are aware, present in the right-now, you can spontaneously respond in the moment and whatever you do will probably be right. Awareness can only be cultivated through meditation which enables you to be "the center of a cyclone," remaining centered even in chaos. [MORE]