Trash search led to deadly police raid

What prompted Pembroke Pines police to conduct a dawn paramilitary raid that ended with the June 12 shooting death of homeowner Vincent Hodgkiss?

In its application for a narcotics search warrant, police cited an anonymous complaint of drug dealing, surveillance of high-turnover visitors and two searches of Hodgkiss' trash by detectives, who found scraps of paper with handwritten numbers and trace amounts of "green, leafy substance" that tested positive for marijuana.

Police conducted the raid with its Special Response Team (similar to SWAT) two days after Broward Circuit Judge Dale Cohen approved the search warrant.

As a result of the investigation, police recovered about an ounce and a half of pot — and a 46-year-old father ended up dead.

The totality of the evidence could add up to a small-time pot dealer. Was an early morning raid with a mini-battalion really the best way to go about serving the warrant?

This wasn't some violent gang that moved into the neighborhood three months ago. Hodgkiss spent 14 years in the house, raising his family there. He had no previous felonies or history of violence. I bet two detectives approaching him when he made a trip to the corner store might have been more effective, and certainly less confrontational.

The attorney for Officer Javier Diaz, who fatally wounded Hodgkiss, said Diaz shot Hodgkiss twice after Hodgkiss pumped his loaded shotgun and carried it into his bathroom. The attorney said Diaz fired in "justified self-defense."

I'm not saying the shooting was unjustified. I'm sure Diaz felt threatened and compelled to shoot. The bigger point: Tragic outcomes like these are inevitable given our nation's drug policies and police procedures.

I've been practicing law now for a lot of years. I've handled literally thousands of pounds worth of drug cases. I've handled little possession cases, and cases involving hundreds of pounds at a time. I don't know how many defendants I've represented charged with drug crimes, but it has to be several hundred. I've had several meth cases, a bunch of cocaine cases, pot cases, cases involving every kind of pill, but guess how many heroin cases? I've had one, and these were people stopped on the highway who wouldn't have stopped in my county at all if the State Trooper had not pulled them over. Heroin is pretty much nonexistent in my area. The police almost never find any here. My clients will tell me sometimes they've heard about it being around, someone bringing in a little from a distant big city, but that's about it. You would be extremely hard pressed to find any heroin here. Why would I want that to change? Why would I want heroin to be legal and easily available to anyone who wants it here when it's basically not here at all now?

When it comes to the hard stuff for which there isn't a great demand, our drug laws do actually have some positive effect. Mostly it's probably just the fact that no stores are allowed to sell the drugs that does the most good. You can't find heroin in my town. You could probably find meth, but if you weren't from around here it wouldn't be that easy to find meth, and if you did, even if you were from here, chances are you'd have to deal with creepy people who might rip you off and God knows what would be in the powder you would buy. Oh, and it would be fairly expensive too. All that probably discourages some people who would try these drugs, a certain percentage of which would end up becoming addicts.

Cocaine is a fun drug. I did it myself several times back in the eighties. I liked it. If it wasn't a hundred bucks a gram and often cut way too much, I would have done a lot more of it I think and may very well have become addicted. Instead though I'd think about the $50 or $100 or whatever I'd blown the night before. I'd think about how many cheeseburgers I could have bought with that money. I'd think about what I could have done with that money and feel sick about wasting it. What if it was ten bucks a gram and guaranteed pure, sold from a nice clean store by a friendly clerk no more likely to rip me off than a liquor store clerk? I'd have done lots more coke, and I wouldn't be alone. Others with a taste for it would have done a lot more too, and a lot more people would have become addicted.

Most people who experiment with drugs grow out of that phase in their lives and move on. I knew cocaine was addictive when I messed with it, but I was young and invincible. I wasn't going to get caught because I wasn't stupid, and I wasn't going to get addicted because I wasn't weak, or so I thought. I think these are common notions shared by young people who fool around with drugs. Looking back, I count myself as lucky I didn't get caught or addicted. Would I have been so lucky had I have done a lot more coke? The more people do and the longer they do it, the greater the likelihood they'll become addicted.

The high cost of cocaine has a real limiting effect for the average person. Most of us couldn't afford to do lots of coke, especially at the young age we tend to be at when we so those wild oats and mess around with things like cocaine. And besides p[rice, other factors caused by the legal status of the drug come into play and contribute to us doing less of a drug like cocaine and finally just giving up on using it. There may be “dry” periods when the drug is not around, and people might come to their senses during one of those periods and conclude that they didn't need to be messing with that substance anyway. Or they'll get ripped off one time too many and decide it's just not worth it to continue to purchase this product when the sellers are so unreliable and untrustworthy. Or the guy they deal with that they trust will get busted, or maybe just be out, and they'll have to go on wild goose chases looking to score and end up in a bad neighborhood in a creepy person's home and after they are done with that very unnerving experience they'll decide that they never want to go through that again and they'll conclude that the on;y way to insure that they'll never have to go through that again is to leave cocaine or whichever drug it was alone from then on. I think most people who mess with drugs go through one or more of these experiences and these experiences really help them decide that it's time to grow up and put this nonsense behind them.

All I've really talked about are people who experiment with these drugs anyway, not those who probably wouldn't experiment with these drugs unless they were legal. Most people would not do it, because they wouldn't want to take the risk, but there are plenty out there who do experiment with these drugs despite the risks and others who would if they didn't perceive the risks to be so great, or if they just had the opportunity. The risks would be lower. The product wouldn't be cut with poison. The seller wouldn't be likely to rip them off. Many of the risks that a barriers to entry into the world of drug use would be gone. And they'd have a lot more opportunities to try these drugs. Right now a drug like cocaine is illegal and people who use it have to be discrete. They don't generally just break it out in front of anyone. If it was legal they'd be more likely to break it out in front of non cocaine users. That would result in more non cocaine users being offered cocaine, especially since it would be a lot cheaper. Aside from not wanting to be reported for illegal drug use, people that use drugs like cocaine wouldn't necessarily want to break their cocaine out at a party because they don't want to have to share it with everybody because it's incredibly expensive.

Make drugs like heroin and cocaine legal and more people will try these drugs and more who try them will use them enough to become addicted. Most people would leave these drugs alone even if they were legal because there are so many other good reasons not to take them. Only a very tiny percent of our population use these drugs. The government estimates that a good bit less than 1% of Americans use heroin and not much more than 2% use cocaine. It wouldn't take many new addicts to double or triple the number of addicts we have now, and the addicts we already have cause us enough problems. Even if only one or two percent of our population started using these substances who wouldn't have used them, it would be a really big deal.

Things are different when it comes to marijuana though. More people use that drug than all others combined. It doesn't kill people. It's not particularly addictive and even when people do have heavy marijuana smoking habits they are not prone to do things like steal or sell their bodies to pay for their pot. It's actually pretty darned cheap. You can get high for pennies. More than half of all adults under 60 have tried it, so it would be impossible for us to see the number of people who try marijuana double. It's already so widely available everywhere. Odds are you wouldn't have to deal with scary people to get it, because there are so many out there who would supply it to you that you could choose from. It's easy to find suppliers that are not scary people who will rip you off. You don't really have to worry so much about dangerous adulterants or cut. You can look at what you are getting and smell it and tell whether you are getting buds or bathroom cleaning powder like you might get when you think you are buying cocaine. A lot of these barriers to use that exist for the hard stuff because it is illegal aren't really there when it comes to marijuana. I really don't think there are many out there today who really want to smoke marijuana but don't because it is illegal, and if a few percent more do pick it up after it becomes illegal it won't double or triple or quadruple the number of users like it would if a few percent more picked up heroin or cocaine. And while I know a lot of people think the sky would fall in if a few percent more people picked up marijuana smoking, I don't think it would be that big of a deal. They're not going to be stealing to get their pot, smoking it and beating their wives like drunks so often do when they drink. It's just not that darned bad. And in the end, I think while use may go up some at first before the novelty wears off, it will probably end up going down after that just like we're seeing with cigarette use. It's an unhealthy habit that isn't that fun for most of us. There are plenty of good reasons not to smoke pot and thopse are the reasons so few who try it continue to smoke it. The laws against marijuana have very little to do with how many people use it.

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