CMN TV – Michigan Town Hall Live – Medical Marijuana Revisited
Host:
Charlie Langton
Panelists:
Rick Thompson – MM Magazine editor 4mmagazine.com
Michael Komorn – Defense Attorney
Gerald Fisher – Professor of Law at Cooley Law
Neil Rockind – Criminal Defense Attorney
Chuck Semchena – Royal Oak City Commissioner
Bill Dwyer – Oakland County City Commissioner
Ginnifer Hency says that police raid led investigators to seize a couple of guns, a small amount of cash and cell phones with a lot of medical marijuana.
And also something very personal.
“My medicine for my patients, why a ladder, why my vibrator, I don’t know either,” Hency said during a Michigan House Committee meeting.
And that last part is creating quite the buzz – a story now gone viral and raising questions about Michigan’s civil asset forfeiture laws
“They’ve had my stuff for 10 months now,” she said.
Ginnifer and her husband Dean Hency say it all happened when their home was raided last July. They both are licensed medical marijuana patients and caregivers. They claim to be targeted by St. Clair County’s drug task force.
It began when Ginnifer says she walked into a medical marijuana licensing facility as it was being raided.
“They asked me how much medicine I had in my backpack,” she said. “I said six ounces then they said to get a warrant for our house.”
The havoc they wreaked,” Dean said, “they just threw stuff around. Just dirt dumped all over the place.”
“We were in complete compliance with the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act and they destroyed my house,” Ginnifer said.
But St. Clair County Sheriff Tim Donnellon says they were not, and added that officers did not take her vibrator and would never have a reason to.
He says aside from that allegation, the task force’s actions were justified and par for the course.
Even so, a judge dismissed the criminal charge of possession with intent to distribute against Ginnifer Hency two weeks ago.
But here’s what she says happened when she went to the prosecutor’s office to get her property back.
“Lisa Wiznowski who is the assistant prosecuting attorney said ‘I can still beat you in civil court, I can still take your stuff.'”
Michael Komorn is the Hencys’ lawyer.
“This is bully tactics,” he said. “We have your property we couldn’t get any charges to stick, we’re just going to keep it. drag it out.
“Here’s a person who they took her property and they couldn’t even make the charges stick let alone get a conviction. So if there’s an example of why there needs to be reform it’s this.”
“They left my (equipment) I used to grow ‘drugs’ – they left that,” Hency said when she testified. “Now that is what the state forfeiture laws are made for.”
The St. Clair County Prosecutor’s Office has about a week to appeal a visiting judge’s decision to drop those charges against Ginnifer Hency.
That civil case regarding her property still pending.
The sheriff, Tim Donnellon, says the drug taskforce has been in place for 30 years and has a 99 percent conviction rate. He says there was nothing unusual about this case except for Hency’s testimony about her vibrator which he claims is false.
Gary Johnson believes the tensions between police and minorities that led to two high-profile police shootings and the deaths of five Dallas police officers has a root cause: The long-running war on drugs.
The libertarian nominee for president did not directly tie the drug war to the shooting deaths in Minnesota and Louisiana by police or the sniper killings of five officers in Texas this week. But poor relations between police and African-Americans stems from the criminalization of drug use, he said.
“The root is the war on drugs, I believe. Police knocking down doors, shooting first,” Johnson said in an interview Friday in Washington. “If you are (black and) arrested in a drug-related crime, there is four times more likelihood of going to prison than if you are white. And shooting is part of the same phenomenon.”
“That’s the common thread. Shootings are occurring with black people, black people are dying,” he added. “This is an escalation.”
The former Republican governor of New Mexico is pitching a complete rewrite of the nation’s drug policy as part of his underdog run for the presidency alongside his running mate, former Massachusetts GOP Gov. Bill Weld.
Johnson wants to legalize marijuana and find other ways to deal with harder drugs than long periods of incarceration.
He said that will soon happen, predicting that California will vote this fall to legalize marijuana and President Barack Obama will remove cannabis from its listing as a Class 1 drug. “I think Obama’s going to do that going out the door,” Johnson said.
“The focus on drugs needs to be as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue. It can be illegal but does it need to be criminal? Do you need to go to jail for drugs?” Johnson said. “I do believe that the root of the militarization, knocking on doors, is a drug war phenomenon.”
The laid-back libertarian, dressed in jeans and an open-collared button-down in a hotel dining room, declined to join Republicans in criticizing Obama for pointing to “powerful weapons” this week as a cause of violence between police officers and minorities. But Johnson said the focus on assault rifles is misguided.
“That is a category of rifle that contains 30 million rifles. If you ban those rifles tomorrow and said hand ‘em in,” only half of the weapons would actually be turned over, Johnson said. “And we’re going to have a whole new criminal class of people.”
Johnson said that as president he’d be open to proposals designed to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists and the mentally ill. But he said he’d seen no such workable proposals in Congress, despite unsuccessful attempts by both Democrats and Republicans.