Morro Bay pot dispensary owner found guilty of federal charges

Morro Bay pot dispensary owner found guilty of federal charges – Los Angeles Times
In a closely watched trial involving conflicting marijuana laws, a jury on Tuesday convicted the owner of a Morro Bay medical marijuana dispensary on five counts of violating federal drug laws.

[Charles] Lynch, flanked by his defense attorneys, hung his head and grimaced as the verdicts were read in a Los Angeles courtroom. He could be sentenced to a minimum of five years in federal prison or as many as 85.

Kitty Meese, the jury forewoman, said … jurors had a clear sense that Lynch was not an ordinary street-corner drug dealer, but the fact that he was dispensing medical marijuana didn’t matter under federal law.

“We all felt Mr. Lynch intended well,” Meese said. “But under the parameters we were given for the federal law, we didn’t have a choice.”

She added, “it was a tough decision for all of us because the state law and the federal law are at odds.”

Deputy Federal Public Defender John Littrell, one of Lynch’s lawyers, said the case was tough to defend because the judge ruled that Lynch’s reliance on state laws that permitted medical marijuana was irrelevant.

At one point, Littrell and co-counsel Reuven Cohen attempted to elicit testimony from Owen Beck, who was a teenager when he was diagnosed with bone cancer and began visiting Lynch with his parents to receive marijuana prescribed by his oncologist at Stanford University.

Beck was supposedly going to testify about Lynch’s character, but as soon as his illness came up he was cut short by U.S. District Judge George Wu.

“Virtually none of the evidence we wanted to present was presented,” Littrell said. “In that sense, it’s not that surprising that the jury came to the decision it did.”

Once again, the federal government secures a pot conviction through lying and suppression of fact.  The jury rejected the notion that a DEA official told Lynch he’d be free from prosecution if he obeyed state laws.  The jury forewoman even remarked, “I think all of us sometimes choose to hear what we want to hear,” considering that it would make no sense for the DEA to tell Lynch such a thing.

I guess it is touching that our citizens believe the agents of the DEA would never lie in order to rack up another raid and conviction.  Incredibly naive, though, when you figure that the entire federal argument against medical marijuana is composed of lies.

Nobody must vote to convict anybody for violating federal drug laws.  The judge and prosecutors will intimidate a jury, instructing them they must make a determination of fact, that they must adhere to the narrowly-drawn federal language, that regardless of what they think about a law, it is their duty to uphold it.

Nonsense.  Juries are the last bastion against bad law.  A jury can decide on the merits of the law itself.  The problem is that people like us who know these things often get kicked off of juries during selection – no prosecutor wants to see me sitting there in the jury box.

So if you get called for jury duty, keep your views on marijuana private or at least neutral.  They’ll ask you questions about it; try to give non-committal answers that lead them to believe you’re neutral on the subject.  Don’t lie in court, that’s never good, but be selective in how much truth you want to tell.  They won’t let us mention medical marijuana in court?  Then there’s no need to mention our support of medical marijuana in jury selection.

I think what disappoints me the most is that the jury forewoman is a registered nurse.  A nurse just voted to imprison a man for helping treat patients with cannabis, following the law of the state of California, the same entity which registers her as a nurse to treat patients under California law.