al have a history of being unable to afford adequate council. Two examples of these discrimination cases are those of Marvin Green (who barely had a traffic violation) and a young man by the name of Christopher Armstrong. In the first case, Green was the passenger in a car that had been stopped by police. The driver of the car abandoned Green leaving him to take the blame for five grams of cocaine that were found in the car. Facing up to forty years in the federal penitentiary, Green with his family's aid was able to hire a respectable attorney and beat an absurd charge. He was reported to have become the first black acquitted of any crime in the Kansas Federal Courts jurisdiction. The Armstrong case argued that although Armstrong and his co-defendants were not angels by any means, they were selected for federal prosecution because they were black and no other reason. This came during a period of time when the only defendants of federal narcotics charges in California Federal Courts had been minorities. At the same time drug abuse had been relatively parallel in white communities.
             Policing of the nation's streets is commendable; abusing the power that comes along with it is not. Local prosecutors claim that the high arrest rates are higher in black communities because of a reported "lack of secrecy " or a so-called "open air drug market." Despite the general public's belief, minority convictions relate directly to the fact that they are usually poorly represented by underpaid, understaffed and overworked public defenders. Recent studies have shown that while drug use by whites is at about the same rate as blacks, blacks are five times more likely to be arres
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