Freedom Fighter Eddy Lepp found guilty by feds

Lake County pot grower Lepp guilty | PressDemocrat.com | The Press Democrat | Santa Rosa, CA

Eddy Lepp, 56, was convicted Tuesday by a U.S. District Court jury of conspiracy to possess marijuana with the intent to distribute more than 1,000 marijuana plants and of cultivating more than 1,000 marijuana plants, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

He faces between 10 years and life in prison and a maximum fine of $4 million when he’s sentenced Dec. 1, said U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Joshua Eaton.

Lepp, who said he is Rastafarian as well as a minister of the Universal Life Church, claimed the marijuana was grown for spiritual and religious reasons.

But Patel said the number of plants being grown created too great a risk that some of them were being diverted for nonreligious uses, he said.

When federal and Lake County Sheriff’s officials raided the garden in 2004, they estimated there were more than 32,000 plants of varying sizes growing in neatly tilled rows near Highway 20 next door to a commercial strawberry patch.

Lepp and High Times magazine, a publication focused on marijuana production and laws, said it was the largest single crop of medical pot seized in the United States.

The subsequent legal battle earned Lepp a High Times 2004 Freedom Fighter of the Year Award.

Lepp said Thursday and at trial the plants weren’t his. The marijuana was being grown cooperatively by members of his church, said Lepp, founder of Eddy’s Medicinal Gardens.

“All I did was make (the land) available to the ministry,” he said.

Eddy appeared at our Portland Hempstalk this weekend and gave a very moving speech in which he intoned somberly that it may be the last hemp festival he’s ever able to attend.  I’ve got the video and I’ll have that online later this week.

There’s really something wrong with the world when a kind gentleman like Eddy Lepp, who only helped people who knowingly wished to consume cannabis, gets ten or more years, but the guy who cooked Enron’s books, the company that defrauded thousands of employees of the 401k retirement plans, that fleeced the state of California with fraudulent energy speculation, that is responsible for the rolling blackouts that endangered people’s lives and property, that guy, Andrew Fastow, only got a six-year sentence.

There’s really something unjust about our society when a sincerely devout man like Eddy Lepp, who alleviated the suffering of so many California medical marijuana patients, is guaranteed to serve at least ten years, but the “prophet” of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who used his religious influence to pander 14-year-old and younger girls for polygamist marriage to their first cousins for over three decades, that guy, Warren Jeffs, may be eligible for parole before serving his ten year sentence.