Great coverage of the success of "The Mother Teresa of Pot Prisoners"

In years past, I have tended to dislike the uptick in marijuana media coverage around 4/20 because a range of serious issues, and especially serious criminal justice issues, often seemed not to get the serious coverage that they deserved.  But with marijuana reform continuing to pick up momentum, I think the 4/20 media mania is getting a little better.  And I will always be grateful for whatever leads to media coverage of my favorite advocate of criminal justice reform in the marijuana space.  She is the focal point of this lengthy new Input piece with this great full title: "How ‘The Mother Teresa of Pot Prisoners’ saved her brother from dying behind bars: Beth Curtis’ LifeforPot.com may look janky, but it’s been amazingly effective in getting nonviolent marijuana offenders out of prison."  I recommend the piece in full, and here are snippets:

On 4/20, Craig [Cesal] will be on a fishing trip in West Palm Beach with a group of other marijuana offenders who’ve managed to have their sentences reduced. “There’s a cannabis company that’s paying to fly a bunch of us former pot lifers down,” Cesal says. “Of course, Beth is going down, because we all have ties to her.”

The “Beth” he’s referring to is 79-year-old Beth Curtis from Zanesville, Ohio, the founder of LifeforPot.com, an amateurish little site she built in 2009 to raise awareness about people like Craig — or more specifically, people like her brother, John Knock, who was sentenced to two life terms plus 20 years for a first-time nonviolent marijuana-only offense. Beth has spent more than a decade aggressively advocating for federal clemency on Knock’s and others’ behalf, earning her the nickname the Mother Teresa of Pot Prisoners.

Curtis hoped that by giving people like her brother a presence on the internet, her website would help to raise public awareness about an aspect of criminal justice sentencing most people didn’t seem to know about. “When I talked about somebody serving life for marijuana, honestly people didn’t believe it,” she says. “They’d think, ‘There has to be a dead body somewhere.’ Indeed, there do not have to be any dead bodies, or even a gun.”...

When I ask Curtis if she built the site herself, she laughs out loud. “Yes, can’t you tell?” she replies. Clunky as it is, the current version is much improved from the original, which she built using “CafePress or something” and became a running joke among her friends. When an article in the Miami New Times mentioned her “scrappy-looking site,” fellow clemency advocate Dennis Cauchon called her and said “You know, ‘scrappy’ rhymes with something,” she relates. “And that’s indeed true,” she adds.

Crappiness aside, the site’s been effective. Of the 39 people featured on Life for Pot, 24 have been granted clemency or compassionate release — including, most recently, Knock, who was granted clemency by President Trump in January.

“She did it,” Knock, 73, says of his sister. “One little lady, barely five feet tall, and she just kept pushing and pushing and pushing.” For someone as driven as Curtis, failure was not an option: “I couldn’t imagine that I would die while he was still confined behind bars. The thought sickened me.”