War on Drugs

US Marshals Shoot Unarmed Man Who's Been Under State Supervision for Eight Years Over 20 Oxycodone Pills

He admitted to selling the oxys for $80 to a police informant in 2007.

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In 2007 Casey McDonald pleaded guilty to selling 20 oxycodone pills for $80 to a police informant, receiving a sentence of up to two years in prison followed by probation. McDonald failed to meet regularly with his probation officer so he was sent back to jail.

He was later paroled into a halfway house but went missing after a few months, leading US Marshal's to put a man on their most wanted list who was convicted of selling 20 (twenty!) oxy pills to a police informant. Today they got their man, and shot him.

Triblive.com reports:

A Westmoreland County man didn't have a firearm when he was shot in the shoulder as a fugitive task force attempted to serve him with an arrest warrant in Uniontown, police said Tuesday.

Police said Casey McDonald, 30, was shot as he tried to flee out a second-story window from a U.S. Marshals Service task force team just after 8 a.m. Monday.

Officers found a knife in the bedroom from which McDonald attempted to escape at 9 Nutt Ave., but no firearms or illicit drugs, said Lt. Tom Kolencik of Uniontown police.

Perhaps President Obama was half right. Maybe legalization of marijuana is the wrong priority for young people to focus on, since it marginalizes the rest of the deadly drug war and the ghoulish jobs programs that have flourished like so many weeds in an untended lawn.

Why are U.S. Marshals prioritizing the capture of people like McDonald, the kind of "nonviolent drug offender" the president says law enforcement shouldn't waste resources on? And at what point will the risks all kinds of people are exposed to because of the violence the government introduces to combat drug use, an inherently nonviolent activity, be too much for those who claim that all lives matter?