ality. the majority of these stop and frisks occurred in high crime neighborhoods including certain precincts in the bronx. on the ground ok. in september two thousand and eleven michael torres was stopped by the police on the way to a job interview. so tell me what happened yeah like i was saying i was coming down for dome. one ninety seven and they kind of turned a corner there this way and as soon as they saw me. writing for and when they came out from both ends of the call. they didn't show me their bad. can i help you and he was a police officer i asked him why did he stop and he just said oh we just saw you walking too fast and we saw that suspicious he said come here and he grabbed me dragged me over here me against the wall and the pockets. fell shook my past so checked my paperwork that's what i'm going to an interview.

but then he grabbed my sweater and shook it. in the back of my sleeve i go back a week and i asked him am i going to be arrested for the and he said what do you think. it sounds like an open and shut case but the marijuana possession law in new york mandates that the drugs must be in plain view it's my understanding that you didn't actually have the marijuana out by not only was it a small amount but it was it wasn't open and was you know open it was in my hands it was in my pockets so you just agree with that charge yes i do. so the marijuana arrests project began in the summer of two thousand and eleven scott levy is an attorney for the bronx defender's office and represents michael torres he says the circumstances surrounding torres's arrest fit a familiar profile we essentially did a survey of the. every person charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession in

a particular courtroom in the bronx for six months and we saw that really a huge number of these cases the police were manufacturing crime the police were arresting people for misdemeanor marijuana possession which is possessing marijuana in public view when our clients never possessed the marijuana public view they were just in fact had it in their pocket or in a purse or in a backpack or something like that armed with all of this data the bronx defender's office decided to push back in identified fifty four individuals whose civil rights were allegedly violated during a stop and frisk procedure they filed suit against the city of new york over time we started calling them the fighters and we had fifty plus clients who were really just dedicated to challenging the police conduct in their cases and wanted to have their day in court but in the bronx the backlog of marijuana misdemeanor cases was so immense that a case that should have been handled within sixty days was stretching out for as long as two years the fighters began to lose their fight fifty three of them gave

up and accepted their fate michael torres is the last man standing. to try to get the person tired of going back and forth to coit so they can see just anything so they take a plea they hope that you will eventually santa just take it just take a plea deal and then. you know but you know. everything in the system is built to create an incentive for him to plead guilty to accept what's being offered by the people and to just go on his way and forget that this ever happened the open case is disrupted michael tourism is life he's lost time at work and with it much needed money for his young family despite those pressures tours has chosen to fight the system after two years of bureaucratic delays his court date is on the docket again. another community that embrace. the broken windows theory is new haven connecticut

the city might be known as the home of yale university but it's also ranked as the second most dangerous mid-size city in the country in an effort to combine a growing drug trafficking problem city and state officials created so-called drug free zones which are geographic sanctuaries around schools the premise behind the law was that selling drugs near schools posed a danger to kids anyone caught with drugs inside one of these drug free school zones would get mandatory additional jail time added to their sentence an additional year for using drug paraphernalia two years for possession and three for drug sales drug free school zones became so popular that their radius increased from a thousand to fifteen hundred feet then daycare center and finally public housing. because of the geography of new haven it means basically virtually all of new haven with the except.