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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 5, 2003)
Newsroom: (541) 346-5511 Suite 300, Erb Memorial Union P.O. Box 3159, Eugene, OR 97403 E-mail: editor@dailyemerald.com Online: www.dailyemerald.com Oregon Daily Emerald COMMENTARY Editor in Chief: Brad Schmidt Managing Editor: Ian Tobias Montry Editorial Editor: Travis Willse Friday, December 5, 2003 Crimes mean prison time; violations lead to paying fines Editor's note: This commentary is part of the Emerald's and ASUO Legal Services' ongoing efforts to assist students through education as well as representation. ASUO Legal Services' at torneys are licensed to practice in the state of Oregon. Informa tion disseminated in this article does not constitute legal ad vice and does not create an attorney/client relationship. For legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your state. You should not make legal hiring decisions ^ased uPon brochures, advertising or KZ, «!□* I other promotional materials. COMMENTARY s , f , _ Students often ask me about the difference between a crime and a vio lation. The answer is best understood by examining the pun ishment imposed for each: Violations result in fines and are similar to speeding tickets, while crimes carry the possibility of jail or prison. Being found guilty of a crime means you have a criminal conviction on your record until it is ex punged, and not all crimes can be expunged. Why should a University student care about this distinction? First and foremost, obtaining a drug-related criminal convic tion means you lose eligibility for federally funded student loans. Per the 1998 Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965, P.L. 105-244, a student convicted of any state or feder al drug offense is ineligible to receive any grant, loan or work assistance for one year on a first offense, two years on a second offense and indefinitely on a third offense. A student may re sume eligibility before the end of the ineligibility period by completing a drug rehabilitation program that complies with certain federal criteria. Because the State of Oregon decriminalized possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, such possession is charged as a vio lation and does not result in a criminal conviction. Student loan ineligibility applies to students who are "convicted" of drug of fenses. Therefore, it appears that ineligibility is not triggered by pleading guilty to a violation. If you have a less than an ounce of marijuana charge in Eu gene Municipal Court, you can resolve your case through a one year diversion program if, on the date you received the ticket, you had no other marijuana charge pending, no prior drug convictions and had not previously done the drug diversion program. You must file a diversion petition within 30 days of your first court appearance and pay a $212 fee. Once admitted to diversion, you must pay for and complete a drug evaluation and treatment program. Treatment costs can run in the thou sands of dollars, although some less expensive programs exist. Upon successful completion of the diversion program, the charge is dismissed. Be aware that a violation can quickly escalate to a crime, de pending on the circumstances. For example, sharing some mar ijuana with a friend, in an amount of five grams or more, ele vates a simple possession of less than an ounce violation to the crime of Delivery of Controlled Substances. If the delivery is purely gratuitous, the charge is a Class A misdemeanor which carries a maximum penalty of up to a year in jail and up to a $5,000 fine. But if the exchange of marijuana is for anything of value (a slice of pizza, a beer, a dollar), it can be charged as the crime of Delivery for Consideration, which is a Class B felony carrying significant consequences, including incarceration in jail or prison, huge fines, supervised probation for up to five years, prohibition on owning firearms, and drug evaluation and treatment costs. Another concern about criminal convictions arises for students who are not U S. citizens, for whom a drug conviction may curtail the ability to remain on a student visa or to obtain or maintain legal resident status. Immigration authorities apply shifting defi nitions to what constitutes a serious drug offense and any drug arrest becomes fair game for their scrutiny. Whether a crime or violation, any citation issued by the po lice carries significant and potentially life-altering conse quences. Your best bet is to avoid police contact. If you are cited by police, seek legal counsel so that you understand your rights and choices. Laura A. Fine is an attorney with ASUO Legal Services. Eric Layton Illustrator Imprisoned by politeness Heard the whirring drone of a hard drive lately? Or maybe you've depressed the brake pedal on a recent Albertson's run? As it turns out, culturally insensi tive language has weaseled its way into both, crossing the ever-advancing chalk line of political correctness. In May, a particular employee of Los An geles County's Probation Department di vision spotted "master" and "slave" labels on electronic equipment. (Far from being an ill-placed sociological or historical com ment or worse, a racially divisive and dis tinctly uncreative prank, the terms are in dustry-standard, and elegantly describe similar parts of a mechanical or electrical system wherein one part unidirectionally controls another. To wit master and slave cylinders in a braking system, or master and slave drives — say hard drives — on an IDE controller in your computer.) Regrettably, this employee didn't appre ciate the distinction between innocuous technical terms and imaginarily divisive and subversive racial attack, and filed a dis crimination complaint with the Office of Affirmative Action. After the request snaked its way through the usual bureaucracy for six months, Joe Sandoval — the division manager of Purchasing and Contract Ser vices of the county's Internal Services De partment — sent out an e-mail to the coun ty's equipment vendors. "Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los An geles County," the e-mail read, the master and slave labels are "not acceptable" The e-mail went on to request that "each manufacturer, supplier and contractor re view, identify and remove/change any iden tification or labeling of equipment or com ponents thereof that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature be fore such equipment is sold or otherwise Travis Willse Rivalless wit provided to any County department." Fortunately, Sandoval keenly recog nized the absurdity of the situation: "1 do understand that this term has been an in dustry standard for years and years," he told Reuters. "It appears that some folks have taken this a little too literally." Indeed: In a separate memo, the di rector of the Office of Affirmative Ac tion said that the county was conduct ing an "exhaustive search" to find all such labels and replace them. Forms were sent to all departments in the county, asking them to identify equip ment labeled "master," "slave," or any other "offensive" terms. As most hard drives bear "master" and "slave" labels, the process should be long, tedious and ultimately, a miserable waste of taxpayer money in an already cash strapped state. The Internal Services Department e mail and messages that promote the same ideas perpetuate a dangerous un dercurrent that threatens reasonable dis course, fiscal prudence, and the robust ness of language itself. By censoring terminology on the basis of what"could be interpreted as discriminatory or offen sive" (emphasis added), this letter pro motes a policy essentially imprisoning Los Angeles County government officials in the skewed interpretations of the most nonsensical and hypersensitive members of the community. Clearly, such a metric guides public pol icy to senselessness rather than sanity. If master and slave are offensive because of some imagined historical allusion, surely other computer terms are suspect, too. Should county officials refrain from using terms like "a system hang," or "a burned CD" or "spam" because they might offend death penalty activists, bum victims or veg etarians? Should officials request that any future copies of a Macintosh Operating System purchased by the county use alter nate names for "enabled" and "disabled" folders to avoid offending people with dis abilities? Should government techies es chew the term "server" because it alludes to social stratification? Should manufac turers print manuals giving different names to the conveniently named male and female cable connectors because they promote a traditional binary constructions of gender, prescribing a polarity in the same way that gendered pronouns do, po tentially offending transsexuals, or simply because they mention gender at all? Of course not! None of these terms are actually offensive, their technical connota tions don't encompass a wide historical context, and crying foul in response to them says more about the complainer's le gitimacy than that of the supposedly offen sive word. Words can hurt a lot but undue political correctness — including cynically pretending that harmless technical jargon is 'discriminatory' — evidently wastes lim ited temporal, fiscal and human resources. Contact the editorial editor at traviswillse@dailyemerald.com. His opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Emerald. LETTER TO THE EDITOR Travis Willse adds yet another dron ing, boring voice to the cacophony of self-righteous critics of the PETA Cam paign comparing slaughterhouses with concentration camps ("Preposterous PETA," ODE, Nov. 14). The compar isons are pretty obvious. This is Ameri ca, folks — the cradle of free speech and the "marketplace of ideas." PETA cer tainly didn't fabricate any of the infor mation or photos. The purpose of the campaign is to enlighten people as to the horrors of factory farming and the slaughterhouses. One must remember that people of ten protest loudly when they don't want to accept the truth. For every an gry person who resents the comparison of dead slaughterhouse victims to dead concentration camp victims, there are probably three people who angrily in sist that the Holocaust never happened at all. Until Willse personally inspects the slaughterhouses, factory farms and ani mal testing laboratories which he de fends so vigorously, he has no case. And I'm betting he hasn't the guts to look face-to-face at that cruelty and misery and write a first-hand account. Mary Jo Brooks Ridgeland, Miss.
