Feds Manipulate Medical Marijuana Trial

On Friday January 31, a 12-member federal jury unanimously found marijuana advocate Ed Rosenthal guilty of cultivation and other serious drug crimes.

During the trial, the government depicted Rosenthal as a major drug manufacturer.

However, the jury was not told the full truth about the case -- and now they are shocked and furious. Some are now publicly repudiating their verdict.

Rosenthal is a world-renowned marijuana expert, and the 100-plus plants he was growing were for the city of Oakland's medical marijuana program. That program resulted from the 1996 medical marijuana initiative approved by California's voters.

The jury was told none of this. The judge denied requests by

Rosenthal's lawyers to call witnesses to testify that Rosenthal was growing medical marijuana, on the grounds that federal law does not allow the growing of marijuana for medical reasons.

Now jurors say they would have acquitted him had they been told all the facts.

"I feel like I made the biggest mistake in my life," juror Marney Craig told reporters. "We convicted a man who is not a criminal. We unfortunately had no idea of who he was or what he did. It was like a kangaroo court.”

"If we'd known he was hired by the city, I would have said this guy didn't deserve any of this," said juror Pamela Klarkowski. "I feel used. It's horrible. We didn't get the whole picture. I feel the jury was railroaded into making this decision. Had I known that information, there is no way I could have found that man guilty."

"I'm hearing all of these things after the fact," another juror said.

"That sheds a whole new light on it."

"Some of us jurors are upset about the way the trial was conducted in that we feel Mr. Rosenthal didn't have a chance and therefore neither did state's rights or patient's rights," jury foreman Charles Sackett said. "I would have liked to have been given the opportunity to decide with all the evidence."

Sackett and other jurors say they hope the case is overturned on

appeal.

In fact, several jurors are taking the extraordinary step of writing

Rosenthal to apologize.

Rosenthal, 58, faces up to an 85-year prison term when sentenced June 4 --for the “crime” of growing marijuana for sick people in a state whose voters legalized that practice.

How bad was this guys lawyer?

Unfortunatly this is the result of a blind spot in american justice. The same thing happened in the OJ trial when several jurors said they would have voted him guilty had they known all of the facts that were not allowed in the trial.

It's very simple, folks: there is no "medical marijuana exception" to the federal laws prohibiting cultivation of marijuana, and this means that you can't use this excuse to defend the fact that you were growing pot in amounts indicating by law that you meant to distribute it.

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The fact that the State of California has passed a medical marijuana law, or that a city has passed such a law is likewise irrelevant: state law can't override federal law. I seem to recall we fought a civil war over that . . .

The court applied the law correctly, and the jury came to the legally correct conclusion.

This will be challenged on appeal because the real issue isn't so much whether the law was correctly applied - it was - but rather whether there should indeed be an exception to the law for medical marijuana. I doubt they'll make much headway here (at least after the ultra-liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules for the defendant ) because Congress has chosen not to allow it, and it's clearly Congress' arena here.

How dumb. How much money is wasting chasing after people involved with Pot?

Gateway drug my ***. How about focusing on the hardest stuff and working your way down if you're still convinced that its worse that cigs or booze.

Originally posted by Bandit

How dumb. How much money is wasting chasing after people involved with Pot?

Gateway drug my ***. How about focusing on the hardest stuff and working your way down if you're still convinced that its worse that cigs or booze.

That may all be true. But the point is the court correctly applied the law and didn't impose it's own interpretation here, which many here have criticized courts of doing in other contexts.