Here is the statement of Ed Rosenthal on his federal marijuana growing conviction today, for which he will be sentenced June 4. He is subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of five years, and possibly up to 40 years.

Statement of Ed Rosenthal on the Medical Marijuana Trial Verdict
January 31, 2003

"I am disappointed in this verdict for several reasons.

"This was an unconstitutional prosecution. It should never have come to trial.

"Once it did, I was not afforded a jury of my peers. They had to bring in 80 people to come up with 12 who would agree to set aside their beliefs on this issue.

"Even so, they would have acquitted me if they had been permitted to hear my story. But I did not get the chance in this trial to defend myself and explain my actions.

"Federal prosecutors made extraordinary efforts to block the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Because the truth is that I was deputized by the City of Oakland to legally grow marijuana for medicinal use by sick or dying patients under California's Prop 215, the Compassionate Use Act, the law that is supposed to guarantee safe and legal access to medicinal marijuana.

"The City of Oakland showed courage in working to come up with a safe, open, and legal system to harmonize California's medical marijuana law with federal law. And I was acting as an official of the city, implementing their program to help patients.

"Had the jury known about the City's attempts to give immunity to their people, including me, it would have acquitted me today.

"The other victims of today's decision are patients -- people who are extremely ill or dying and who are soothed by medicinal marijuana -- because I am only one of many people that they are trying to put in jail for helping sick people, as allowed under our laws.

"For these reasons, we will be asking for a new trial. This verdict will not be allowed to stand.

"The federal government silenced my courtroom defense, but it can't silence the court of public opinion. The opinion of the American public is one of overwhelming support of medicinal uses of marijuana.

"The federal government needs to get this message.

"My case clearly demonstrates that it is time for a national debate on the issue of medical marijuana. California voted to make medical marijuana legal, but the federal government is trying to block that law. The federal government is choosing to prosecute and imprison individuals instead of working directly with the State of California and local cities to resolve the conflicts in medical marijuana law.

"Our elected officials must have the courage to discuss this issue publicly, and then resolve this conflict.

"Because helping sick people should never be a crime.

"For my entire family, thank you all for your support."

--Ed Rosenthal

(Received from DrugSense.Org)

The two Dallas detectives involved in the fake drug scandal also worked federal cases. The federal cases may now be tainted.

The scandal involved the officers' use of informants who were paid more than $200,000. to distribute fake drugs while passing them off as real.

"The officers' work through the Police Department led state prosecutors to dismiss more than 85 state felony drug cases.... The latest disclosure raises questions about whether federal cases may have been tainted and if so, how many."

Paul Rubens, aka Peewee Herman, is charged with a misdemeanor count of possession of child pornography in California. His lawyer, Blair Berk, has filed a motion seeking dismissal of the charges.

Attorney Blair Berk confirmed that the motion, filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, said the sexually provocative images found in his home were made years before California deemed child pornography ownership illegal.

Sexually explicit images of children made up a very small portion of a "vast" vintage porn, kitsch and erotica collection owned by Reubens, who is best known for entertaining young TV viewers as the nerdy man-child Pee-Wee Herman, the motion said. The images -- in a book, a film and 24 magazines -- were "produced decades before [child pornography] possession was ever proscribed," the motion said.

Some of the images were produced at the turn of the 20th century, the motion said. In addition, a statute of limitations had expired before Reubens was charged, it said."

The San Francisco Chronicle has a welcome editorial today criticizing the feds for putting noted marijuana expert, activist and author Ed Rosenthal on trial for growing pot. Some quotes:

... Ed Rosenthal agreed to grow Oakland's medical marijuana -- in compliance with city law and with the blessing of local officials -- But in a trial now under way in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the 58-year-old Rosenthal has become a focal point for the federal government's "war on drugs." He is charged with felony marijuana cultivation and conspiracy, which could bring him 10 years-to-life imprisonment if convicted.

Rosenthal had been deputized by the city of Oakland as "an officer" in the city's program to distribute medical marijuana. Proposition 215, passed by California voters in Nov. 1996, was designed to allow patients -- with a doctor's approval -- to grow and use marijuana to, among other things, relieve the effects of cancer, AIDS and glaucoma.

The trouble is, despite substantial anecdotal evidence, the federal government never has recognized the medicinal potential of marijuana. Drug Enforcement Administration official Asa Hutchinson points out that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not approve "medicine by popular referendum. " He made that comment in response to a letter by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer calling for "a proper sense of balance, proportion and respect for states' rights."

WHEN Ed Rosenthal agreed to grow Oakland's medical marijuana -- in compliance with city law and with the blessing of local officials -- he had no idea he was about to become the target of federal authorities who would try to send him to prison.

The war on drugs should not be about Rosenthal. He represents one city's noble effort to distribute medical marijuana in a controlled, responsible way. Without Rosenthal, many patients would be forced to turn to dealers in the streets, enriching the enterprises that should be the real focus of a war on drugs.

There's more so go read the whole thing.

Last week the federal court refused to gag Rosenthal during the trial. For updates, go to NORML.

Bumped with Update:

On Christmas Eve in Uniontown, PA, near Pittsburgh, 12 year old Michael Ellerbe, an African American boy, was shot in the back by police and killed during a police chase. Prominent lawyer Jeffrey Feiger is representing the family and has promised a federal civil rights lawsuit.

Ellerbe "was shot through the heart from behind while being pursued on foot by two state troopers. He was allegedly running from a stolen, wrecked sport-utility vehicle. "To shoot someone in the back requires as deliberate an act as I can possibly imagine," said Fieger, who has also represented Jack Kevorkian. "There is no excuse for shooting a 12-year-old in the back...."

Ellerbe's family has said that the boy was neither armed nor driving the vehicle.

The inquest hearing was today. Our source tells us there appears to be a "white-washing" of the incident. We don't know, but we're bringing it up in case someone wants to look into it further.

Update: The coronor's inquest jury has ruled that the police shooting was justified. One of Ellerbe's lawyers, Joel Sansone, says there's a coverup and that a ten year old witness said three shots were fired, not two--and that both troopers fired at Ellerbe. However, during the inquest, the youth was not asked about how many shots were fired.

Update: More news coverage, including CNN:

And the Guardian:

Here and here are some local reports, and not press pool clippings:

And this perhaps telling quote :
No cameras or recording equipment will be permitted into a Monday inquest set to investigate the death of 12-year-old Michael Ellerbe.

The NAACP is also speaking up, see here and here.

For anyone not watching football festivities at 5:35 EST, stop by Fox News where we'll be opining about recent events in the Houston trial of dentist Clara Harris, on trial for murder after running over and killing her orthodontist husband in a hotel parking lot (after a physical altercation with his lover in the hotel lobby)-- and in the disappearance of Laci Peterson, who has been missing since December 24 - turns out her husband Scott had been having an affair which the "other woman" has now come forward and acknowledged on national tv. Amber (the "other woman") also said Scott lied to to her and told her he wasn't married.

The Hartford Advocate has a spirited attack on what writer Alan Bisbort calls the witch hunt against Peter Townsend[link via Hamster]

Talk about getting egg on your face, how's this from the Chicago Sun-Times: Big 'pot' stash was only hay

What Chicago police thought was more than $660,000 worth of dope in a pickup truck last month turned out to be hay from a Roman Catholic church's nativity scene. Prosecutors dropped felony drug charges Thursday against Jose Galvan, 43, and his co-worker, Juan Luna, 21, after crime lab tests confirmed the mistake, said Jerry Lawrence, spokesman for the Cook County state's attorney's office. The two remained at Cook County Jail as federal immigration officials checked to see if they are in the country legally."

Their criminal defense attorney, Peter Vilkelis, says:

"Somebody must have seen these two big bales, saw the men were Mexican and made an assumption. These guys were treated like they were cartel drug traffickers. Once we finally secure their release, we will be talking to a civil rights lawyer."

The "egg on their face" aspect is amusing. What's not amusing is that these men spent weeks in jail while the cops, at their leisure, tested the non-drugs. And that one of them is still in jail pending a check on his immigration status--it doesn't take three weeks to do that.

Should Ashcroft be going for the death penalty for an attempted crime that was never completed?

That's what's happening in the trial of "Brian Regan, the former Air Force sergeant accused of attempted espionage on behalf of Iraq, Libya and China, and of mishandling national defense information." ABC Reporter Beverly Lumpkin notes,

Here are the two most significant facts about this case:

Regan is charged only with attempted espionage; and yet

The government is seeking the death penalty if he is convicted.

This, despite the fact that since the death penalty was reinstated for espionage in 1994, there have been 10 people convicted of completed acts of espionage, some gravely serious, for whom nevertheless the government did not seek death. "

The defense argues:

Why is the government so adamant that a man whose letters were so replete with spelling errors that they can't be read with a straight face, a man only charged with attempted espionage, should nevertheless face death if convicted? The defense team has made many impassioned arguments about this point. In one pleading, the defense wrote, "If the government has its way, Regan will be the first of scores of persons convicted of espionage even to be considered for execution since 1953, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death. … [T]he damage Regan is alleged to have caused is dramatically less than the harm caused by recent spies Robert Hanssen, Harold Nicholson and Ana Montes, and significantly less than that caused by every other person charged with espionage since enactment of the federal death penalty."

The case is in the jury selection (voir dire) stage now.

Update: Digby agrees this is overkill (sorry for the pun) and asks, what's next, the death penalty for double parking? He also points out, if the espionage was never committed, how can there be any victims?

We found this tonight over at the Toronto Star which has been covering the trial of the American Air Force Pilots who accidentally killed Canadians in Afganistan last year while on a flight mission--a mission for which the Air Force doctors gave them dexadrine (speed, called "go pills") to fight fatigue.

It turns out that the Air Force also gives the pilots Ambien, sleeping pills, to come down from the dexadrine and then repeats the cycle the next day.

What will we learn next? That the pilots were routinely given morphine in case they got a headache? We can just hear them singing now, as they flew around Afganistan, "And I won't forget to put flowers on your grave."

Who needs a draft--when this gets out, there should be no shortages of enlistees.

The lead prosecutor in the Michael Skakel/Martha Moxley murder trial had this to say about Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s recent war-and-peace-length attack on Skakel's trial and conviction in the new issue of Atlantic Monthly:

[Benedict called] Kennedy's long-winded defense "a series of distortions, facts taken wholly out of context, half-truths, untruths and . . . Skakel family revisionism."

"I find it surprising that a publication of Atlantic Monthly's repute would stray so far from its journalistic traditions," said prosecutor Jonathan Benedict, whose brilliant summation Kennedy credits for the jury's guilty verdict.

"It is hard to conceive of a more biased writer using more biased sources. . . . Except for its length, Mr. Kennedy's tale would be a better fit for a grocery-store tabloid."

Defense attorney Mickey Sherman, firing back against Kennedy's unfounded accusations against him, said:

he has "no regrets" about the way he handled the case except that "the jury came back with the wrong verdict."

He also zinged Kennedy for not coming to his cousin's defense sooner, pointing out the family were virtual no-shows during the trial.

"I only wish that Bobby had been there to see it," he said. "I think he would have had a different opinion." [Source: Jan. 14, 2003 Boston Herald]

Sherman's right. Bobby Kennedy, Jr. attended one day of the trial--closing arguments. Prior to the trial he attended one day of a pre-trial hearing. Kennedy, Jr. complains about Sherman's concern for and play to the media. Yet that's one the reasons Skakel hired Mickey--he is certainly a media savvy attorney and this was a high profile case, being played out in the news and in books by high profile authors Dominick Dunne and ex-OJ cop Mark Fuhrman before Skakel even got indicted. While Sherman was all over the airwaves before the trial, he didn't appear on a single television talk show from the day jury selection began until the trial was over.

During the trial, the news media camped out at the Norwalk courthouse. At the end of each day, and sometimes at the lunch recess, the Prosecutor, then Mickey and even the lawyer for non-appearing brother and former suspect Tommy Skakel answered media questions in the parking lot of the courthouse. Nothing unusual about that.

We have to wonder why, if the family now is so opposed to trying the case in the media, Bobby, Jr. wrote this article in the first place--and even more so, why the family has hired a public relations consultant for the appeal. And why, at Skakel family patriarch Rushton Skakel's funeral service last week, Duane Schenck, the P.R. consultant introduced himself to reporters "saying the family wanted to be more involved in the media."

We still believe the jury wrongly convicted Skakel for the reasons we set out here, and as to Kennedy's article, we only can point out that in this instance, hindsight is not 20/20.

Avedon Carol of Sideshow, who resides in Britain has some thoughts on the Pete Townsend arrest.

Since the Home Office has just announced that they will no longer bother investigating "minor" crimes like burglary and assault because they "don't have enough manpower", I'd like to hear the explanation the Bill has for sending 16 cops to bust a guitar player.

Our prior post on this is here.