PUNISHMENT MAY NOT FIT THE CRIME

It's funny how society's attitudes have changed.For example,these days in
Orange County you can get in more trouble for smoking a cigarette than for
smoking marijuana.

If you don't believe it, just ask Harold Wood.

This story began one afternoon last November, when Harold, 72, a retired
electrician, was enjoying a drink and a cigarette at Godfatfer's, a dark,
narrow neighborhood bar on First Street in Tustin. Like many, perhaps most,
small bars in Orange County, Godfather's had treated the 1998 law against
smoking in bars as more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule; the vast
majority of the customers continued to smoke, and nobody seemed to care.

But on this afternoon three cops walked in and started hanging tickets on
everyone who was smoking - which was just about everybody in the joint.

"The cops were nice about it," Harold says. "They said they didn't want to
do it, but they'd gotten a complaint."

Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on your point of view - bar
smoking citations are so rare (about 20 in Tustin in the past two years)
that neither the police nor the courts seem sure how to handle them. For
example, Harold's ticket initially was for a traffic violation - go figure
- - but then he got a letter saying it was a mere infraction. He was pretty
confused.

Now, you'd think that on such a minor beef he could have just mailed in his
fine and not clogged up the court calendar. But no. Monday morning Harold
had to appear at the county courthouse in Santa Ana, where he waited in
line for an hour - not an easy task for a senior citizen with a bum hip -
before he was sent upstairs to Department C-59. He waited for another hour,
surrounded by fellow miscreants - marijuana users, an abusive husband, a
park trespasser - before he finally was called before Judge Robert Keefe.

Harold pleaded guilty - heck, he was guilty - and the judge set the fine a
$103. Then Harold had to go back downstairs and wait in line again for more
than an hour and a half to pay the fine. And justice was done.

Harold wasn't happy; $103 isn't chump change on a fixed income, and his
entire day was shot.

But what really got his goat was this: As he waited in the courtroom, he
noticed that the guys charged with simple marijuana possession were
routinely allowed to pay $65 and sign up for a one-day drug diversion
class, after which the offense would be erased from their records.
Meanwhile he, Harold Wood, bar smoker, who'd never been in trouble with the
law, had to pay a bigger fine and go down on record as a male-factor!

"It's not fair," Harold says. "They were smoking drugs; all I smoked was a
cigarette."

Well, I don't know how you feel about marijuana, or bar smoking;
personally, I don't think either one is any of the government's business.
But to a guy of Harold's generation, it's astonishing that something that
once was a felony is now less of a crime than something that until recently
wasn't even a crime at all - and to a lot of people still doesn't feel like
a crime.

But like I said, society's attitudes change.

And I'll leave it to you to decide if it's always for the better.