SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 C3
John
Kelly's
WashingtonHe is away. His column will resume
when he returns.early Saturday inside an
aerospace company plant in
Hampton.
Hampton police said officers
responded to a call for a shooting
at Howmet Aerospace shortly
after midnight Saturday. A man
was declared dead at the scene,
police said in a news release.
Police said they are
investigating the shooting as a
homicide. The man’s name was
not immediately released.
“All parties involved have been
identified and are cooperating,”
the release said.
The Virginian-Pilot reported
that Howmet Aerospace said in a
statement that the shooting was
“a tremendous shock” to its
employees and “appears to be
the result of an outside of work
dispute.” The company said it
has canceled all Saturday and
Sunday shifts.
“We have asked all employees
not to report for work unless they
have been specifically instructed
to do so by management,” the
statement said. “To assist
employees in dealing with this
tragedy, counseling will be
available to employees as they
return to work.”
“Our thoughts go out to the
employees and families of this
unfortunate tragedy,” the
statement said.
— Associated PressTHE DISTRICT
Two people killed
i n separate shootings
A man and woman were killed
in separate shootings late Friday,
D.C. police said.
Officials are investigating a
shooting that occurred about 5:30
p.m. Friday in the 200 block of
Upshur Street NW, near the
Armed Forces Retirement Home,
police spokeswoman Makhetha
Watson said. The victim, identified
by officials as 48-year-old Renard
Thornton of Northwest, died of a
gunshot wound after walking to a
nearby hospital.
Later, just before 11 p.m., a
woman was shot in the 1200
block of Raum Street NE, Watson
said. Police later identified her as
Christine Chase, 48, of no fixed
address. She died at the scene.
The two shootings add to a
spate of violence across the
District in recent days; two men
were killed in separate shootings
Thursday night and early Friday.
— Michael Brice-Saddler
VIRGINIA
Man fatally shot
i n Hampton plant
Police in Virginia are
investigating a fatal shooting
LOCAL DIGESTResults from May 14
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washingtonpost.com/local/lotteryLOTTERIESsystem that means those with the
proper licensing in the right state
can make millions of dollars off
the booming industry, while oth-
ers, like Jonathan Wall, face pris-
on time.
“Black-market cannabis, me-
dicinal cannabis and recreational
cannabis — the difference be-
tween them all is a stamp by
bureaucracy,” he said.
But the Walls never got to make
that argument in court. Instead,
the jury heard testimony from a
sheriff’s corporal and Jonathan
Wall’s alleged co-conspirators:
friends, acquaintances and cus-
tomers who prosecutors said
were in on an expansive enter-
prise to ship hundreds of pounds
of weed from California to Balti-
more.
“This is not a case about mari-
juana possession,” Assistant U.S.
Attorney Anatoly Smolkin said
during closing arguments. “This
is a case about a drug conspiracy
to distribute massive amounts of
marijuana around the country.”
Downstairs afterward, Mitzi
Wall leaned on the window and
looked out onto the rainy city
street. She worried the jury would
rush to wrap the trial before
Mother’s Day weekend.
An hour and a half later, the
news came in.
A stifled strategy
White and upper-middle-class,
Jonathan Wall doesn’t reflect the
communities most impacted by
the war on drugs, and he knows it.
Black Americans have been ar-
rested at 3.64 times the rate of
White people for having marijua-
na, even though they use it at
similar rates, according to an
American Civil Liberties Union
review of charges between 2010
and 2018.
“I’m just an example of what
has happened to so many other
Americans, the majority of whom
have not gotten the attention I’ve
gotten, primarily because of their
skin color,” Wall, 27, said.
He had grown up with his
mother, father and sister in the
suburbs of Baltimore before
dropping out of high school in
Harford County, getting his GED
and moving to California to get
into the cannabis industry. Ac-
cording to witnesses and pros-
CONVICT FROM C1
ecutors, he had been selling pot in
Baltimore before he moved, too.
As more states have begun
legalizing cannabis, federal mari-
juana trafficking cases like Wall’s
have been declining. In 2021, the
United States Sentencing Com-
mission reported just under 1,000
such cases, less than a third of the
total reported in 2016. Overall,
only about 2 percent of federal
criminal defendants actually go
to trial; of those, 17 percent are
acquitted.
But Wall told his mother he
“was not going to prison for a
plant.”
Indicted in 2019 for conspiring
to distribute more than 1,000
kilograms of marijuana, he fled to
Guatemala. Wall says it wasn’t a
permanent move: If he waited, he
thought, maybe the political cli-
mate would change; maybe mari-
juana would be federally legal by
the time he came back.
He returned and turned him-
self in in June 2020, the same year
that four more states legalized
recreational weed. Another four
did it in 2021, as he awaited trial.
The month before opening state-
ments, the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives passed a bill that
would federally decriminalize
marijuana, which remains cate-
gorized as a schedule I drug
alongside LSD and heroin.
Wall and his attorney, Jason
Flores-Williams, hoped to ride
that momentum and secure an
acquittal by “jury nullification.”
The practice, which was common
in D.C. drug cases in the 1990s,
allows jurors to send a message
about what they think of the law,
or take a stand against disparate
enforcement, explained Paul But-ler, a professor at the Georgetown
University Law Center.
If the jury acquitted Wall, “it
would just prove the point that
the vast majority of Americans
believe that marijuana should be
legal,” said Maritza Perez, direc-
tor of the Office of National Af-
fairs at the Drug Policy Alliance.
But prosecutors undercut the
attempt.
“The fact that other jurisdic-
tions have legalized marijuana,
decriminalized marijuana, are
considering decriminalization of
certain quantities of marijuana,
or have declined to prosecute
individuals for crimes involving
marijuana, is not relevant to the
issues at this trial,” they argued in
a pretrial motion.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie
Gallagher, appointed by Presi-
dent Donald Trump, agreed. Men-
tions of the cannabis legalization
movement at Wall’s trial were
barred.‘You can’t unknow that’
The ruling left much unsaid
about marijuana and criminal
justice that Mitzi Wall had come
to learn. A retired federal govern-ment employee, she had started
working after the indictment
with a nonprofit that provides
resources to those charged with
marijuana offenses and to their
families. She facilitated Christ-
mas shopping sprees for inmates’
children.
“It started with Jonathan, but
now it’s for everybody,” she said of
her advocacy, “because once you
know these things, you can’t un-
know that.”
That makes her a part of her
son’s argument, too.
“Seeing how strong of an advo-
cate she’s become, obviously with
what’s happened to her son, kind
of shows where I think a lot of
middle America stands on the
same issue,” Jonathan Wall said.
Drug policy experts say the
number of people serving prison
time for simple possession alone
is likely very small. But many with
heavier charges, such as distribu-
tion, remain in prison even in
states that have legalized it.
“A lot of people think that when
legalization passes, the prison
doors open for people that are
serving for marijuana,” said Gra-
cie Burger, the state policy direc-
tor for the nonprofit Last Prison-
er Project. “And that’s not true.”
During the trial this month,
with friends and family behind
him, Wall spent five days listen-
ing to childhood friends and
roommates tell the jury about
their days selling marijuana to-
gether in Baltimore. Prosecutors
displayed photos of wads of cash
in stash houses, showed Excel
sheets of the inventory for dozens
of strains of the plant.
Flores-Williams argued that
the government had no hard evi-
dence: no DNA, no photos of Wall.
But because it was a conspiracy
case, prosecutors said, they didn’t
need it. They just had to prove
that Wall had entered an “agree-
ment to distribute or possess with
the intent to distribute marijua-
na,” and they argued that’s exactly
what Wall had done.
Deputies had seized $860,000
from one stash house in the Balti-
more area alone, and the enter-
prise was worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars more, pros-
ecutors said. Wall alone had
$98,000 in cash seized at an
airport in San Francisco.
“They took it from him because
it was drug money,” Special Assis-tant U.S. Attorney Christopher
Romano said.The verdict lands
In closing arguments, Flores-
Williams hazarded that it was
unreasonable for law enforce-
ment to still be using resources to
“break down doors in a raid to
charge people for marijuana.”
Prosecutors quickly objected. It
was as close to discussing the
legalization movement as Wall’s
team got.
Mitzi Wall joined their family
afterward in the lobby, where
they waited for the call to come
back upstairs. When it came, she
got into the elevator and took a
deep breath before the doors to
the seventh floor opened.
Minutes later, the jury deliv-
ered its verdict: It had found
Jonathan guilty.
Mitzi Wall’s head fell, and her
eyes filled with tears. Jonathan
was taken back into custody.
Flores-Williams quietly slung his
bag over his shoulder and made
his way out of the courthouse.
“Ultimately, this was a referen-
dum on whether or not Ameri-
cans would still incarcerate peo-
ple for pot,” he said. “The answer
is: Yes, they will.”
Flores-Williams moved to
withdraw from the case immedi-
ately after the verdict, leaving
Wall without legal representation
while he awaits sentencing. Wall
had turned down a plea deal of six
years, he said. The minimum sen-
tencing guideline for his convic-
tion is 10 years to life.
“I don’t know,” Wall said, when
asked whether he regretted going
to trial. “Maybe ask me after
sentencing. If they hit me with 20
years, yeah, I’m probably going to
regret it.”
Mitzi Wall already did.
Her Mother’s Day weekend
ended up quiet, much of it spent
reflecting on the case and all that
had gone wrong. She wished her
son had taken the plea.
“I knew it was going to be hard
to fight them, but I didn’t know it
was going to be that hard,” she
said. “I guess I had hoped I was
the one living in a bubble, not
everyone else.”
She plans to get back to helping
those with marijuana convic-
tions, she said, but not right away.
She needs to process her son’s
first.As U.S. pot acceptance grows, what of one man’s jury?
KARINA ELWOOD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Mitzi Wall stands outside the Baltimore courthouse where her son, Jonathan Wall, was on trial in a
marijuana trafficking case.“I thought we werea just and moralcountry whoprosecuted peoplefor violent crimes.”
Jonathan Wall, charged in a
marijuana trafficking
conspiracy caseness.
The temperature could in no
way be blamed for any sensations
of impending oppressiveness we
might have felt.
Days with afternoons in the
70s, such as Saturday, seldom
serve as scapegoats for our mete-
orological resentments.
But m any of us may wish for
our 7 0-degree days without the
leaden skies above.
O n Saturday, they seemed to
subdue springtime high spirits,
and suggest a world w ith much of
its spark and sparkle s uppressed,
leaving a landscape without its
bright May colors.
Such skies seemed appropriate
to a day of robust relative humidi-
ty and a dew point t hat headed
toward the realms of discomfort.
By sunset, however, the tight
ranks of clouds seemed to relent;
some drifted apart, and s tretches
of w ater-washed blue s et off the
oranges tinting t he western skies.BY MARTIN WEILBy Saturday, in the midst of
spring, many of us experienced
our initial intimations of summer.
A hint of humidity — a s uggestion
of the stickiness of the season to
come — seemed to be in the air.
From gray and cloudy skies,
occasional drops of rain descend-
ed, enough to prompt the wary to
unfurl u mbrellas. Often the spat-
ter of drops did no more than
leave dark spots on pavement.
S aturday seemed a day rich in
atmospheric possibilities, provid-
ed that these expressed them-
selves in the dimensions of damp-
THE REGION
Dollop of early
humidity hints at
sticky summer
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