It all starts out with reading a brief article on the State of America’s War on Drugs. Then one little phrase, “The campaign raised eyebrows from some election-law specialists � the decades-old Hatch Act forbids federal employees to campaign in state and municipal elections,” causes the rest of the writing that follows.
The Trial:
Ed Rosenthal, a medical marijuana activist from Oakland, was convicted in January on three felony counts of violating federal drug and conspiracy laws. Throughout the trial, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer refused to allow jurors to know that Rosenthal was warehousing medical marijuana, intended to treat sick Bay Area residents … and legally permissible under California’s Proposition 215. The jurors, left willfully ignorant of Mr. Rosenthal’s legal activities, convicted the 58-year-old on all three counts. He faces up to 85 years in jail.
More than two dozen House members have introduced a bill which might prevent future Ed Rosenthal-style prosecutions. If the so-called Truth in Trials Act (H.R. 1717) passes both houses of Congress, future Ed Rosenthals will have a fighting chance in court. The bill would amend federal law to allow defendants arrested on marijuana charges to introduce evidence that their activities “were performed in compliance with state law regarding the medical use of marijuana.”
Excuse me, but why does it take an Act of Congress (as the saying goes) to allow evidence to be admitted in a trial?
The jurors were also outraged: Five of them called a press conference to apologize and call for a new trial after learning of the withheld evidence.
The Election:
This information popped up during a search for information on either a lawsuit or criminal charges (or the lack either) concerning violations of the Hatch Act by the Office of National Drug Control Policy and its director, drug czar John Walters. The Hatch Act, originally enacted in 1887, bars federal employees from carrying out certain campaign-related activities. Walters crisscrossed the country in the months leading up to the November 2002 elections, making stops in many states to campaign against marijuana reform efforts.
The Marijuana Policy Project, which initiated the one of the ballot questions that Walters opposed, filed a complaint in December with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigator and prosecutor. And now it seems that any news on it has gone silent. Not a single item on the Web about anything other than the initial filing.
This opinion piece on Hutchinson and Walters gives some background about their extreme anti-drug stances. (Hutchinson was also named as a violator of the Hatch Act, but doesn’t not seem to be included in the suit.) One item that jumped out was that in 1999 Hutchinson “proposed Congress amend the Hatch Act … so that federal monies could be used specifically to influence voters to reject state drug-law-reform initiatives.” No plausible denial about ignorance of the law there.
