Colorado Bar Association President's Message to Members
| Publication year | 1990 |
| Pages | 1297 |
| Citation | Vol. 19 No. 7 Pg. 1297 |
1990, July, Pg. 1297. Colorado Bar Association President's Message to Members
In the coming Colorado Bar Association administrative year (July 1990 to June 1991), I intend to dramatize two areas of concern which I believe need critical attention if our system of justice is to survive. My first concern is the condition of our criminal justice system and, particularly, the impact that drug offenses and the War of Drugs are having on that system. My second concern involves improved methods for lawyers to use in resolving disputes. As the year progresses, I shall announce a number of CBA-sponsored programs which will emphasize work in these two areas.
The operation of the criminal justice system in Colorado and throughout the United States is at peril, primarily as a result of the impact of increased drug usage. The criminal courts are now becoming bogged down in a morass of drug-related case filings. As a result of the priority given to criminal filings, the civil courts soon will also be overloaded. The following are examples of what I see as the components of the criminal justice system crisis.
---Our prisons are overcrowded. We are spending unprecedented amounts of money on new prisons to lock up increasing numbers of our citizens. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of incarceration of any country in the world.
---Mandatory minimum sentences and guidelines at both the federal and state levels have removed sentencing discretion from the judiciary, causing a serious shift in our traditional balance of powers. This, in turn, is fueling the overcrowding of the prison population.
---U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh is telling his employees that they can ignore state codes of ethics which forbid attorneys to speak to adversarial parties represented by counsel. This is being done in the name of the War on Drugs.
---The traditional representation of criminal defendants is being interfered with by the government's seizure of so-called "tainted monies." Citizens are losing valuable property under the "relation back" doctrine of a government seizure policy.
---The education and rehabilitation components of the War on Drugs are underfunded. This is the result of allocating 70 percent of all funds for...
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