Tuesday, December 2, 2008
News This Debate Is Over
Posted by Dominic Holden on Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 10:33 AM
You've heard the argument before: States can't really change their drug laws because the federal government has more authority over that sort of thing, so, sorry voters, your state's rules on medical marijuana are irrelevant. But not even the Supreme Court agrees. Yesterday the court rejected an appeal from narcotics officers, thus requiring police to return marijuana to a man authorized to have it under California law. Reports the San Francisco Chronicle:
The city of Garden Grove (Orange County), joined by the California Narcotics Officers Association, argued that returning marijuana to a user would violate federal law, which strictly bans marijuana possession and distribution. [...]"It's now settled that state law enforcement officers cannot arrest medical marijuana patients or seize their medicine simply because they prefer the contrary federal law," said Joseph Elford, chief counsel of the advocacy group Americans for Safe Access and lawyer for the plaintiff in the Garden Grove case.
Lois Bobak, a lawyer for Garden Gove, said city officials and police were disappointed by the court's rejection. "Law enforcement officials are concerned about the proliferation of drugs," she said. In this case, she said, "they felt like they were being put in a position of violating federal law to comply with state law."
Bobak's quote is revealing. The issue for law enforcement is driven by an endless crusade to stop drugs, even though police know they are as incapable of stopping pot smoking as stopping kinky sex. The very notion of a "Drug Free America" has always been, as some famous dead guy once said, about creating laws in conflict with human nature in order to punish people. Cops now have to capitulate with drug laws they disagree with.
This decision also suggest that Washington can eliminate all penalties for pot possession. Federal law—as long a huuuuge amount of pot doesn't put the case in federal jurisdiction—be damned.
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Plus, the police are allowed to take a number of liberties with the law in their pursuit of law enforcement already - I'd like to see a cop try to ticket a speeder while staying under the speed limit.
Per the SF Chronicle article, the court simply declined to hear the case, without comment. This is not a ruling, and is something that they do to dozens and dozens of cases every year, whether or not they agree with the ruling being appealed. This could be because they didn't want to touch such a thorny issue at such a turbulent political time, because they felt they had other more pressing matters, or for no reason at all.
Yes, the effect of this is that the marijuana must be returned, but as the second half of the article makes plainly clear, the issue is far from decided legally, because once again, the Supreme Court took *no position* on this case. I would love for marijuana to be legal, but misreading articles and furthering (a common) misunderstanding of one of the basic aspects of our judicial process does nothing to help that.
You may not have have said this was a ruling in as many words, but by saying “But not even the Supreme Court agrees” and “This decision also suggest that Washington can eliminate all penalties for pot possession” you imputing some sort of legal opinion on the Court's action which simply isn't there.
USC Title 28 which governs the court's petition acceptance says: “Review on a writ of certiorari is not a matter of right, but of judicial discretion” (http://www.law.cornell.edu//uscode/html/…”, or as Wikipedia helpfully puts it, “A denial of a cert[iorari] petition is not a judgment on the merits of a case, and the decision of the lower court stands as the final ruling in the case.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stat…)
In other words, your statement “If there was a legitimate argument here--about the federal law trumping state law on minor possession cases--the Supremes would have heard it. But there wasn't, so they didn't” is completely untrue from a legal standpoint. Yes, the ruling of the lower court stands, but since that was a ruling by a state upreme court and not a federal court, nothing has changed legally from the position before this decision by the court.
You could argue that this shows a disinterest on the part of the court in wanting to bring the impending Fed vs. State conflict over this issue to a head right now -- which could be an interesting article seeing as how with the growing decriminilzation movement across the country this issue will have to be decided at some point and that decision will have profound implications for the states rights debate in the 21st century-- but that is not what your article says. This debate is not “over”, it has just been pushed off for a little while.
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