Pubdate: Wed, 11 Mar 2015
Source: Stranger, The (Seattle, WA)
Copyright: 2015 The Stranger
Contact:  http://www.thestranger.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2241
Author: Heidi Groover

EASTERN WASHINGTON JURORS SEE THROUGH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S 
ANTI-POT HYSTERIA

A Family of Medical Marijuana Growers, Facing 10 Years in Prison, Was 
Recently Acquitted on Almost All Charges Against Them

"You're not a cog in the machine of the federal government," attorney 
Phil Telfeyan told a jury drawn from self-reliant Eastern Washington 
on March 2. "You can stand up and say, 'No. The evidence isn't 
there.'" And that's exactly what they did.

The 12 jurors had been charged with weighing the case of the "Kettle 
Falls Five," a family of Eastern Washington medical marijuana growers 
we wrote about in last week's paper.

The case had become a widely watched referendum on federal versus 
state law, making it extra consequential that the family was 
acquitted on four of the five charges leveled against them. (The 
original five defendants were whittled down to three shortly before 
the trial, when the Feds cut a deal with one of them and dropped the 
charges against another who's now battling late-stage cancer.) "It's 
not a complete win," said defense attorney Jeffrey Niesen after a 
court clerk read the verdict and the family was released until 
sentencing in June. "But it's as good as we could have hoped for and 
still suffered a conviction."

The backstory: Larry and Rhonda Harvey, Rhonda's son Rolland Gregg 
and his wife Michelle, and their family friend Jason Zucker grew 74 
marijuana plants on the Harveys' property two hours north of Spokane 
until they were raided in 2012, first by county officials and then by 
the DEA. Near a stash of dried marijuana in the house, authorities 
found three guns the Harveys say they used for hunting and protection 
from wild animals.

That landed them in trouble, facing charges of growing and selling 
marijuana and owning guns "in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime."

While the defendants hadn't strictly followed Washington's medical 
marijuana law, the federal government's response reflected the 
strange age we're in, where, despite state movements to legalize pot, 
the Feds still consider the drug more dangerous than cocaine and 
meth. On top of that, pot cases become especially urgent to federal 
prosecutors if guns are involved, and in Eastern Washington that's 
almost inevitable. On top of that, because any amount of marijuana is 
federally illegal, regardless of its use, defense attorneys couldn't 
argue their case based on the family's medical conditions or the fact 
that they each had a doctor's recommendation for medical cannabis. 
That led to a strange sequence of events in the courtroom, in which 
attorneys couldn't even say the words "medical marijuana" and the 
judge asked audience members wearing pins and shirts advocating for 
medical marijuana to remove them.

It remains unclear whether the jury was simply unconvinced by the 
government's argument or was relaying some sort of protest-perhaps 
feeling, like an increasingly large portion of voters do, that 
marijuana is no longer worth such federal enforcement. But the 
medical marijuana activists who've been working to bring attention to 
the case saw it as a win bigger than just this one family.

"This sends the hugest message ever to [US Attorney for Eastern 
Washington] Michael Ormsby, and I hope he's listening right now," 
said Kari Boiter, of the national group Americans for Safe Access. 
What kind of message? "It's legal, and in Washington it has been for 17 years.

Can we please stop wasting taxpayer dollars on these types of cases?"
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom