More here.

Just received this in my mailbox from Cheryl Aichele of or on behalf of Friends of Charles C. Lynch

FREE CHARLES LYNCH 8am Court Support 11am PROTEST
Body: Americans for Safe Access (ASA) members and friends will be providing court support and protesting for medical cannabis provider Charles Lynch on Monday, October 6, in Los Angeles. Mr. Lynch was convicted in federal court earlier this month of operating a medical cannabis dispensing collective and faces decades in federal prison. We need to show our support for Charles and his family as his attorneys ask for a new trial. We also need to let federal officials and local representatives know that Californians will not tolerate federal interference or local cooperation with DEA raids.

What: Free Charles Lynch - Court Support & Rally

When: 8:00 AM Courtroom #10, 11:00 AM in front of Courthouse, Monday, October 6, 2008

Where: 312 N. Spring St. (at Temple St.
) in downtown Los Angeles

For public transit information, visit http://www. metro. net/riding_metro/default. htm

Join us on Saturday, August 16, for a the LA-ASA meeting to start planning! The meeting is at 1:00 PM at the patient ID Center, located at 470 S. san Vicente Blvd., in Los Angeles.
Get a map and details at http://www. ASAaction. org

Invite your friends and loved ones to the meeting and protest!
Don Duncan
ASA California Campaign Director
Americans for Safe Access (ASA) is the largest national member-based organization of patients, medical professionals, scientists and concerned citizens promoting safe and legal access to cannabis for therapeutic use and research.

Little early to be advertising the actual rally/protest but it’s good to see them planning. I wish them the best of luck. The Charles Lynch case is horrible and if you can make it out to show your support I urge you to do so.

Update on Berwyn Heights Botched Raid

Things are getting worse for Prince George’s County, Md. police officials, after last week’s botched no-knock raid (previously chronicled on C@L here).

Not only did the police not have a warrant to conduct a no-knock raid, but it now appears they were well-aware that a drug ring was delivering large shipments of marijuana to innocent addressees’ homes in the D.C. suburbs. The packages would then be intercepted by other members of the ring, all without the addressees’ knowledge or involvement. Nonetheless, the cops executed their guns-ablazin’ raid on the home of Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic, where the cops shot the couple’s black Labs and detained Calvo and his mother-in-law in handcuffs for hours.

Astoundingly, P.G. County police refuse to admit that they did anything wrong in the raid. As police chief Melvin C. High said in today’s Washington Post:

In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation and an attack on the mayor, which it is not. This was about an address, this was about a name on a package . . . and, in fact, our people did not know that this was the home of the mayor and his family until after the fact.

I correct Chief High: When police officers execute a no-knock raid though they have no warrant or cause to do so, when they blast and shoot their way into a home without first learning who lives there, then they’ve carried out a flawed police operation. That’s the case regardless of whether Calvo and Tomsic are guilty of trafficking drugs.

In Prince George’s County, flawed law enforcement isn’t unusual. At least, in this case, the victims of the botched raid may have the social stature to fight back.

Lima, Ohio SWAT Officer Acquitted in the Killing of Tarika Wilson

A Lima, Ohio jury has acquitted police officer Joseph Chavalia of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson. Chavalia shot and killed Wilson and wounded her infant son during a drug raid last January. Wilson was unarmed.

During the raid, one of Chavalia’s fellow officers shot and killed the two dogs owned by Wilson’s boyfriend and the target of the raid, Anthony Terry. Chavalia testified that he mistook his fellow officer’s shots at the dogs for hostile gunfire coming from the bedroom where Wilson was standing with her child. Chavalia then fired blindly into the bedroom.

The jury concluded that Chavalia reasonably feared for his life when he heard the gunshots. I guess they were then willing to overlook Chavalia’s mistaking an unarmed woman holding a baby for an armed drug dealer, and the fact that he fired blindly into a room without first identifying what he was shooting at. It’s too bad that that same sort of deference isn’t given to the people on the receiving end of these raids when they too understandably confuse the police officers who wake them from sleep and invade their homes for criminal intruders.

California Medical Marijuana Dispensary Owner Charlie Lynch Found Guilty in Grotesque Miscarriage of Justice

Charles Lynch, the owner of a medical marijuana dispensary in Morro Bay, California that was fully compliant with state laws, has been found guilty in federal court of pushing drugs. The grim details, courtesy of The Los Angeles Times:

The owner of a Morro Bay marijuana dispensary was found guilty today in federal court of five counts of distributing drugs.

Charles Lynch, the owner of the dispensary, faces a minimum of five years in prison.

His closely watched trial involved conflicting marijuana laws and went to a federal court jury Monday. Jurors were asked to determine if Lynch was guilty of violating federal drug laws.

During a week-and-a-half-long trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, federal prosecutors sought to depict Lynch as a common drug dealer who sold pot to teenagers and carried a backpack stuffed with cash.

Lynch was charged with distributing marijuana, conspiring to distribute marijuana and providing marijuana to people under the age of 21.

Whole news story here.

Lynch is one of the countless casualties of an idiotic and tragically long-running war on drugs. His shop scrupulously followed Golden State laws and when he opened his shop in Morro Bay, local officials attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony. And that kid he provided medical marijuana to? A high school athlete who had lost a leg to cancer and had a prescription from a Stanford-trained doctor (and in any case, Lynch only dealt with the boy’s parents). Yes, a common drug dealer.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/…

Just north of D.C., in the small suburb of Berwyn Heights, a county SWAT team raided a house last week after a shipping service delivered a large quantity of illegal drugs to the front door.

Good police work in the war on drugs? Probably not.

The house is home to Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic, and their two black Labs (pictured left). Though the package containing more than 30 lbs. of marijuana was addressed to Tomsic, the couple may have had nothing to do with the drugs. In recent months there have been incidents in which large quantities of drugs were delivered to homes in the D.C. area, where they were then supposed to be intercepted by drug dealers — all without the package addressees’ knowledge or involvement. Calvo and Tomsic may have been caught up in just such a scheme.

This would make Calvo and Tomsic the unfortunate victims of an understandable error by the police SWAT team, except…

The police action was yet another guns-ablazin’, no-knock raid, in which the officers (in what seems like SOP) shot the couple’s dogs, even as one of the pups tried to run away. The cops then handcuffed Calvo and Tomsic’s mother-in-law and interrogated them for hours, while the dogs’ bodies laid in pools of blood nearby. The cops later found the package of drugs — unopened, as if it were an unexpected package. No arrests were made.

“My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs,” Calvo told the Washington Post. “They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t.”

Of course, it may end up that Calvo and his wife are part of a drug distribution ring, and the police have gotten their man. But even if that’s true, was a no-knock, shoot-the-dogs raid an appropriate police action for a lousy shipment of pot?

And what if the current, emerging picture is correct, and this is yet another botched police raid and cops-gone-wild? If that’s the case (and I emphazie the “if”), the Prince George’s County SWAT team and its superiors need to be held accountable.

Law enforcement officers have a difficult and dangerous job, and I do not make light of that. But their sworn duty is to protect and serve the public, not blast their way into innocent people’s houses and shoot their dogs. If they cannot fulfill that duty, then they cannot be law enforcement officers.

All this over a plant people like to smoke.

I wrote a poem called “Think of the Children” about the current drug war.  Inspired by Ginsberg with about 0.002% as much talent.  Here you go:

Think of the Children

Think of the children who’s lives are destroyed due to reality experiments
Society easily writing off those not in lock-step with status quo as having “problems with drugs”
When the real problems they have are with drug enforcement and the lack of individual responsibility and cultural awareness it breeds

Think of the children who listen to the sporadic percussion of .38 caliber pops and high speed rubber
Their neighborhoods overrun by violent pawns of a seemingly unstoppable market force
A market driven by the greed we teach in schools and propped up by politicians who claim to want safer streets

Think of the children who wake with swollen lips and earlobes from the bites of roaches
Their parents waging a war with the world’s greatest military power and living accordingly
Suffering in a nation that threatens it’s subjects with enslavement as a treatment for their health problems

Think of the children who’s frozen faces we find in the filth behind a strip mall on Route 33
Altering their consciousness with refrigerant, metallic paint or Air-in-a-Can because the safer alternatives are inaccessible
The prospect of death seeming more merciful than the promise of incarceration

Think of the children