Cheers rose from the groundswell of support for Washington State’s legalizing marijuana.  But not everyone in Washington went, “like, you know, yay, man.”  And they, too, got a little something out of the deal.

The Lewiston Tribune in Idaho reports the teens ages 14, 15 and 17 have been charged in nearby Asotin County with felonies that could net them up to five years in prison. The offense was previously a misdemeanor with a maximum 90-day jail sentence.
 
Asotin County Prosecutor Ben Nichols said Senate Bill 5052, which the Legislature passed and Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law this year, contains the new language.
 
“If you are a minor, a person under 21, it’s a felony no matter what,” Nichols said.

Wait, what?  Apparently there was a side-effect to legalization that somehow flew under the radar.  It’s purpose was clear, the sort of rationalization that flows through the minds of legislators who act with the certainty that their purposes will work.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center, said the tougher penalty was designed to deter minors from trying an adult drug.
 
“We have to send a message to our kids: This will hurt you in more ways than one if you decide to participate,” Rivers said.

If one believes that deterrence can be so easily legislated, then Rivers’ purpose makes perfect sense.  After all, by elevating possession of personal use quantities of pot from misdemeanor (whereas elsewhere it’s largely decriminalized) to felony for people under the age of 18, it will assuredly send the message that adults can use pot, but youths should be ruined for life.

Of course, this simplistic effort at deterrence won’t work. It hasn’t before, and it won’t going forward.  And to add salt to the legislative wound, it won’t work when personal use of marijuana by adults has been legalized.

Some theories, beloved by government officials, often with the support of academics in search of something to write about, make sense only in the abstract.  Deterrence is such a theory. It relies on a pair of false assumptions, that people think about the consequences of actions before engaging in them, and that people believe those consequences are going to happen to them.

To take it to an extreme example, everyone knows that murder will result in severe punishment, from decades in prison to execution based on how much the local jurisdiction likes to kill.  And yet, murders happen. If the theory of deterrence held, they wouldn’t.

Sure, there are explanations, such as heat of passion, mental illness, possession of a shield, but these fail to come anywhere near explaining the vast majority of murders.  For those of us who have had the opportunity to talk to people who committed murders, to discuss the details and understand how a person made the decision to take another person’s life, we realize that deterrence is a grand theory that has little practical application.

Will it prevent some people from murdering?  We can assume so, though it’s impossible to test since we can never quite know whether anyone who might have committed a murder pondered its consequences and, upon reflection, thought better of it.  But would those people have chosen differently had the penalty been ten years in prison rather than execution?  People who make a rational risk assessment before committing a crime aren’t really dedicated criminals. Chances are slim that they would do so no matter how severe the punishment.

But kids?  Do youngsters tend to reflect on the consequences of their actions, particularly conduct that causes no apparent harm to anyone else, conduct that is lawful for adults, conduct that is more aligned with youthful experimentation than criminality?  They never did before.  Will they start now?

Despite the fact that Rivers’ elevation of the offense for youth was enacted into law, and signed by Governor Jay Inslee, it appears that he didn’t bother to read it, or give any thought to what it meant.

An Inslee spokeswoman told The Tribune, however, the felony charge for minors is not what he intended in a law focused on regulating the state’s medical marijuana system.
 
“I can only tell you that this was not the intention that the governor had when working with legislators on this bill,” Inslee spokeswoman Jaime Smith said.
 
Smith said parties had agreed at the time that keeping marijuana out of the hands of minors was a priority, “but there are other ways to do that without charging them with felonies.”

Whether there are other ways to do that is dubious. Kids smoked weed before, and even if they can’t buy it legally, there is nothing to prevent them from using the tried and true method of finding someone on the playground from whom to score some weed.  Sorry, grownups, but nobody has figured out a good way to prevent kids from smoking dope.  Because they’re kids.

The governor can’t change the law himself, but lawmakers could when they meet for the 2016 legislative session.

Well, the governor could have changed the law by refusing to sign it, forcing an override to his veto, had he now been high signing bills without reading them.  Yes, he’s now powerless to undo his screw up, and it will be left to the next legislative session to fix.  If, of course, legislators want to fix it.

Rick Laws, an Asotin County public defender who represents one of the juveniles, said that doesn’t help his client in the meantime.
 
“That’s an awfully high price for a few people to have to pay for faulty legislative work,” he said.

Until such time as Washington State lawmakers decide that they really don’t want a bunch of kids getting felony records that will destroy the rest of their lives to “send a message” of saving the youth by destroying the youth, there is little to be done given the current state of the law.

But then, Gov. Inslee has the power to pardon anyone who gets caught up in this ill-conceived “send a message” nonsense, so that they aren’t saddled with a felony conviction in perpetuity for behaving like children.  And he can learn a lesson and pay attention to what he’s signing in the future.

H/T Mike Paar