In an unpublished opinion, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the 10-year mandatory minimum sentence of Bryan Epis on charges of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana. Epis’ attorney, Brenda Grantland, says she will appeal for an en banc rehearing of the ruling by the full Ninth Circuit.
Epis was the first California medical marijuana patient to be prosecuted on federal charges. He was arrested in 1997, shortly after the passage of Prop. 215, while growing for a Chico patients’ group. He was sentenced to 10 years for conspiring to grow over 1,000 plants (from a succession of grows, some of them never planted) in his Chico home.
Epis’s attorney, Brenda Grantland, appealed his sentence to the Ninth Circuit on various grounds, including egregious prosecutorial misconduct, improper cross examination, improper denial of safety-valve relief from the mandatory minimum, and the unclarity of the law at the time of his arrest. The panel did not bother to hold an oral hearing, but issued an 11-page ruling denying the appeal. The panel included the infamous Judge Jay Bybee, recently indicted as an international war criminal by Spain for having authored the DOJ’s notorious torture memos. Bybee was appointed before knowledge of his advocacy of illegal conduct by government agents became public.
Other judges on the panel were Hawkins (a former federal prosecutor), and Rawlinson. Epis’ supporters expressed shock at the opinion. “This is as
an egregious miscarriage of justice with no conceivable benefit to the public,” said California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer, “Bryan Epis believed he was acting lawfully. To imprison him for 10 years is the kind of sentence one might expect only from judges who countenance torture.”The opinion, dated April 08, 2009, may be viewed at: http://www.canorml.org/temp/Epis_opinion.pdf
Judge Bybee, just curious, in your opinion are prisoners captured in the war on drugs considered “illegal enemy combatants”? Do they get the protections of US law and the Geneva Convention? I know, it should be obvious, since he’s an American citizen on American soil in the American justice system, but after having read your infamous “torture memos”, I know you can create looking-glass legal fictions as exceptions to our Constitution, allowing us to torture humans in time of war. Not only should you be impeached from the bench and disbarred for your assault on our Constitution, you should be tried as a war criminal and locked up in Gitmo under the sadistic interrogative regime your memos helped construct.
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We need to all send money to the Courage Campaign in California to impeach Judge Bybee. He is a young APPEALS judge sitting on the 9th District court FOR LIFE. He turned down the right for a talented, but penniless prisoner to appeal a torture lawsuit of abuses that took place at Lancaster which were well-documented. This happened a few weeks ago, more evidence that Bybee continues to support torture. He is a Bush Republican, and he needs to be impeached. We must all participate and hopefully deliver a strong message to these crazy right wingnuts. There may never be another opportunity like right now.
Fallibilist, if it bothers you so much, go start your own blog. If you can’t see the parallels between our government twisting the definition of torture in order to fight a war on a tactic and our government twisting the definition of medicine in order to fight a war on a plant, both for reasons that have more to do with politics than science and hysteria than reason, then this isn’t the blog for you.
The original post is Dale Gieringer’s of California NORML, so perhaps you need to be complaining to him, too. Oddly enough, you’ll find that most of us in marijuana law reform activism do like to examine other facets of society and law and comment on their similarity to or involvement with the war on marijuana.
Here we have a judge deciding that 10 years is a reasonable sentence for a gardener growing medicine for his intractable pain. This same judge as an Administration lawyer asserted that only pain similar to that of organ failure or death really counts as torture, and that America was free to do to its prisoners what it executed others for doing to American prisoners. I think not mentioning Bybee’s previous legal reasoning would be rather obvious in its absence.
Besides, the idea that drowning people, beating people, forcing people into “stress positions” for hours, dragging people naked on leashes, forcing naked people into human pyramids, standing people on boxes and attaching electrodes to their fingers and genitals, smearing people with feces, subjecting people to long periods of sleep deprivation and extreme cold, and other techniques we picked up from Pol Pot, Soviet gulags, and the Nazis is, in fact, torture, is only considered “controversial” by those who think a “war on terrorism” is justified to prevent “radical Islamists” (thank you for not using the far sillier and self-contradictory “Islamofascists”) from “kill[ing] and [maim]ing Americans”. The kind of people who are more than willing to trade essential liberty for the false illusion of more security.
Are you willing, like Bybee, to countenance torture, because 19 “radical Islamists” went kamikaze with four jumbo jets seven years ago? Only about 3,000 Americans were killed then. Close to three times that number of Mexicans have been killed because Bryan Epis’ medicine is illegal. Should the Mexican government be allowed to water torture any drug cartel leaders they happen to capture? By your logic, don’t they have as much right to torture to prevent radical potdealer’s efforts to kill and maim Mexicans?
Radical Russ, you just can’t help yourself from getting off the subject of marijuana. What? Isn’t cannabis interesting enough? Do we have to bring in unrelated controversies that have to do with the War on Terrorism and Radical Islamism’s efforts to kill and maim Americans?