A<\/span> 77-year-old Missouri man will serve a decade in prison, despite the presiding judge\u2019s wishes, due to mandatory minimum sentencing on a marijuana cultivation charge.<\/p>\n In 2012, Polk County detectives came up empty in a search for an address linked to credit card fraud. They made their way onto the property of the next closest address, the home of Charles Frederick White. White approached them with a headlamp and the cops knew they smelt pot growing behind him. Not long after, they came back with a search warrant. The ensuing raid netted over 1,700 indoor marijuana plants.<\/p>\n Last week, White stepped into a courtroom to receive his sentence for his third marijuana cultivation offense and the biggest of the three by a significant margin. Judge Douglas Harpool could have sent White away for life on his third strike, but things quickly went in the opposite direction, as much as they could.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a sentence I feel particularly good about,\u201d Harpool said, after explaining his hands were tied<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Even if he didn\u2019t think the punishment fit the crime, he was mandated by federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws to give White a decade behind bars.<\/p>\n While this may look like a case of wrong-place wrong-time for White, his attorney argued it was far more calculated. He believed White had been a target of law enforcement dating back to a run-in with police outside a hydroponic store where they saw White loading up cultivation gear into his truck. Law enforcement claimed their record bust was just luck and that they didn\u2019t open a gate with a no-trespassing sign and illegally enter the property.<\/p>\n Despite the major progress cannabis policy has seen in the last decade, sentencing reform just hasn\u2019t entered the public conversation the way things like legalization, CBD, or even Cookies have. We reached out to the experts to get their take on what might make the general public more aware and find out how stalled progress is in a Department of Justice run by Jeff Sessions. <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThere is an active marijuana caucus in Congress and they introduce numerous bills to scale back or remove sentencing rules. You see a number of different takes on it,\u201d said Molly Gill, Vice President of Policy at Families Against Mandatory Minimums.<\/a><\/p>\n Gill noted the most common approach reform legislation takes is to block Jeff Sessions, unless certain parameters are met<\/a> in a case. Other efforts include attempts to reschedule marijuana and full federal decriminalization bills. \u201cThe truth is none of these really go anywhere,\u201d said Gill. She then noted on Rep. Maxine Waters\u2019 bill \u2014 which she introduces every congressional session \u2014would end the federal guidelines, but it\u2019s been in the same failing boat as the other efforts.<\/p>\n A bill by Congressmen Bobby Scott and Thomas Massie titled the Justice Safety Valve Act <\/a>would have played directly into Judge Harpool\u2019s favor in sentencing White. According to Gill,\u00a0 that bill would allow judges to avoid the mandatory minimum whenever they feel it is appropriate. \u201cIf the Justice Safety Valve Act passed, Judge Harpool wouldn\u2019t have had to give that ten-year sentence,\u201d Gill said. \u201cHe could\u2019ve given two years, he could\u2019ve given five years or probation for that matter. Whatever he thought was appropriate\u201d<\/p>\n Senator Chuck Grassley announced last week he plans to reintroduce the Sentencing Reform in Corrections Act. Gill says that Grassley\u2019s comprehensive bill would impact people getting mandatory minimums for marijuana and reform prisons because it would allow \u201cquite a few\u201d marijuana offenders to get time credit for doing programs. The bill stalled with over twenty sponsors last Congress due to election-year politics.<\/p>\n \u201cThe bills are very complicated, they\u2019re not perfect. They don\u2019t go far enough in our opinion, though they do some good things,\u201d said Gill.<\/p>\n \u201cSince the Trump administration began, I think the real question now is anything going to even be possible,\u201d said Gill. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of work that\u2019s going to have to be done to move this administration.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Gill noted that in some ways White got lucky for not getting the life sentence that could have come with his third strike. \u201cThat says something right there, the fact he didn\u2019t even get the harshest punishment possible under the current federal law,\u201d said Gill. \u201cLife without parole for 1,700 plants is insane. Ten years for 1,700 marijuana plants for a 77 year-old-man who seems to pose very little public safety threat \u2014 that shows how extreme and outdated these sentencing laws are.\u201d<\/p>\n Former Pennsylvania prosecutor Patrick Nightingale has experienced mandatory minimums from both sides of the law. After six years at the Allegheny County District Attorney\u2019s Office where he helped start the Domestic Violence Unit, Nightingale went into private practice in Pittsburgh as a defense attorney. He spoke with us on behalf of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership<\/a>, which has been pushing for sentencing reform since its founding in 2002.<\/p>\n We asked Nightingale, who also serves as Executive Director of Pittsburgh NORML<\/a>, when he believes sentencing issues will be addressed in the fast-moving world of pot policy.<\/p>\n \u201cMy concern is right now the attitude at the Department of Justice seems to be contrary to criminal justice reform,\u201d said Nightingale. \u201cAttorney General Sessions has made it clear he thinks federal sentencing is actually too lenient, as opposed to being far too draconian, which is the position of LEAP.\u201d<\/p>\n Nightingale said it was rather dismaying to hear the Attorney General suggest somehow the federal sentencing guidelines and the federal mandatory minimum sentencing provisions are inadequate \u201cfor this failed war on drugs.\u201d Nightingale believes Sessions is attempting to turn the clock back to the 1980s when we were \u201crushing forward with mandatory minimum sentences, completely ignorant of the devastating effects these sentences have.\u201d<\/p>\n Nightingale concurred with Harpool saying that a judge\u2019s hands are tied in White\u2019s predicament because \u201conce the indictment is filed with those quantities, there is nothing a judge can do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Nightingale says the current sentencing structure puts all the power in the hands of the prosecutor and not the judge. \u201cIt isn\u2019t fair, and it results in now another man being locked in a cage for a decade over a plant that\u2019s legal in eight states for recreational use and 29 for medical.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Nightingale, activists like himself must continue to show the public in general that these types of sentences for nonviolent drug offenses have absolutely no impact whatsoever on public safety or drug prevalence and use.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cAll that we\u2019re doing is continuing to contribute to the world\u2019s highest rate of incarceration without taking a look at whether or not we\u2019re having any success,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Morgan Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project<\/a> said it is really tough to tell when sentencing reform will catch up to marijuana policy reform.<\/p>\n \u201cFor a time it seemed like the former was actually leading the latter and progressing much faster. Politicians who would not go so far as to support legalization were more than willing to talk about, even champion, criminal justice issues like reducing sentencing and incarceration,\u201d said Fox.<\/p>\n Fox believes given that the current administration seems fine with rolling back criminal justice reforms in this area and reinstating mandatory minimums that been decreased or eliminated recently, he\u2019s not optimistic that reform will happen soon.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m worried that people who are perhaps only slightly violating laws in legal or medical states will be subject to particularly draconian sentences since the old prohibition laws often apply outside of the narrow allowances of the new laws, and in many cases would trigger a mandatory minimum sentence depending on the state or whether federal law enforcement was involved,\u201d said Fox.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b> do you think mandatory minimums should be removed?<\/p>\n The post Little Hope For Marijuana Sentencing Reform Any Time Soon<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A cultivator\u2019s case in Missouri reveals the lengths left to go before harmful prohibition drug laws are repealed. A 77-year-old Missouri man will serve a decade in prison, despite the presiding judge\u2019s wishes, due to mandatory minimum sentencing on a marijuana cultivation charge. In 2012, Polk County detectives came upContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,1852,80,90,1853,1576],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19876"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19877,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19876\/revisions\/19877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Little Hope For Marijuana Sentencing Reform Any Time Soon<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"