More news on Anthony Diotaiuto

More from the Sun-Sentinel.

An ounce of pot, 10 bullets and one failed drug war:

In the annals of drug takedowns, this wasn't much. Three quarter-ounce bags of marijuana in a bedroom refrigerator, a joint and another loose gram on top. Four grams scattered on a dresser. Six pipes with pot residue, three ashtrays with less than a gram each, three packs of rolling paper and a digital scale.

Thanks to the efforts of the Sunrise Police Department, today a pothead in west Broward might have to go an extra 10 blocks to score some smoke.

And Anthony Diotaiuto is dead. All for 30.2 grams of weed, a little more than an ounce.

The drug inventory above is what Sunrise police said they found in Diotaiuto's home the morning a SWAT unit shot him with 10 bullets in a pre-dawn raid.

No coke. No heroin. No ecstasy or meth.

'What in the hell were they doing with a SWAT team?' asked Eleanor Shockett, a retired Miami-Dade circuit judge who advocates a sweeping overhaul of drug laws. 'To break into someone's home at six in the morning, possibly awaken someone from a deep sleep, someone who has a concealed weapons permit? What did they expect to happen?'

This is a tragedy that never should have happened.

Even if Diotaiuto, 23, was a small-time pot dealer, which his friends and family deny, the methods used show the madness of our country's war on drugs.

No discretion. No proportionality. No sense.

'Using SWAT in this case is like using a sledgehammer on a fly,' said Jack Cole, a former narcotics detective for the New Jersey State Police who heads Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a drug-law reform group. 'I'd much rather use a little bit of stealth.'

Cole spent 14 years as an undercover agent and nearly three decades as a cop. He doesn't understand why such a huge show of force was necessary, why it needed to be done at 6:15 a.m., or why detectives couldn't detain Diotaiuto when he left his house for work.

'When you kick in a door, all it does is alert them that someone is coming that they don't want to see,' Cole said.

If this is the "war on drugs," I want no part of it. My original opinion, that a bigger pusher turned in his name as part of a plea bargain, seems supported by this paragraph:

Broward Circuit Judge John Frusciante on Aug. 3 granted the search warrant for Diotaiuto's home. According to warrant details released Monday, Diotaiuto didn't even have to be home during the search. The warrant affidavit said a confidential informant bought an ounce of marijuana from Diotaiuto there last month. That came two weeks after an anonymous tipster told Sunrise narcotics officers that "cannabis and cocaine were being sold at all hours" at the house.

Either that, or a real drug "kingpin" used this method to eliminate some small-time competition.