What a concept. Court rules influence means… influence

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Pete

Idaho Court of Appeals overturns marijuana DUI conviction

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The Idaho Court of Appeals has overturned the conviction of a Boise man for driving under the influence of marijuana, a rare reversal for a kind of case legal experts say is typically settled by the science of blood testing.

In a decision issued late last week, the court reversed Geirrod Stark’s 2010 misdemeanor conviction on grounds that the blood tests taken after his arrest only proved he had used marijuana recently, not on the specific day he was pulled over by police.

While there is no question Stark was impaired that day, wrote Judge Pro Tem Jesse Walters, there was no proof that drugs — and not some other condition — caused the erratic driving.

What a notion. If you’re going to charge someone with driving under the influence of marijuana, they should actually be under the influence of marijuana. Such common sense logic is seldom found even in the general neighborhood of our justice system.

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5 Responses to What a concept. Court rules influence means… influence

  1. Thinking Clearly says:
    April 9, 2013 at 12:47 am

    Rare wisdom from a seemingly desert of justice. Solomon couldn’t have done better.

  2. Opiophiliac says:
    April 9, 2013 at 7:07 am

    O/T
    Alfred Anaya Put Secret Compartments in Cars. So the DEA Put Him in Prison

    He knew full well that he was flirting with danger—he could certainly guess how some of his traps might be used. But he also thought that California’s law on hidden compartments, one of the very few in the nation, offered clear guidance: Building a trap was illegal only if it was done with the “intent to store, conceal, smuggle, or transport a controlled substance.” Based on his consultations with fellow installers, Anaya believed he would cross that line only if a client specifically mentioned drugs.

    So Anaya adopted a policy similar to the one used by shops that sell bongs: He would turn away anyone who used drug-related lingo when ordering a trap. As long as a customer was discreet, Anaya saw no problem with taking their money.
    [snip]
    But the prosecutors in Kansas went after Anaya for a much graver crime than selling paraphernalia: They indicted him as a full-fledged conspirator in the California-to-Kansas trafficking operation. Even though he had never seen or touched any drugs and had been shunned as an informant after building just four traps in exchange for less than $20,000, Anaya faced the exact same charge as Maldanado, Montiel, and Crow.

    This aggressive legal stratagem was almost without precedent. The only similar case on record was that of Frank Rodriguez Torres, a New York trap maker who was extradited to North Carolina in 1998. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

    By the time Anaya was placed in custody in Kansas in April 2010, virtually all of the case’s 23 defendants were scrambling to cut deals. But Anaya resisted his court-appointed lawyer’s advice to plead guilty; he still couldn’t fathom how building traps made him a drug trafficker, and he was confident that a jury would sympathize with his plight.

    You know what happens next…24 years in prison.

  3. claygooding says:
    April 9, 2013 at 7:34 am

    How does the federal government panel their juries,,his entire panel were probably federal agents posing as normal citizens or else they have an IQ level of an ice cube.

  4. Jean Valjean says:
    April 9, 2013 at 7:42 am

    OT
    PBS is showing Jarecki’s The House I live In tonight, available for one week.
    http://video.pbs.org/video/2328265954

  5. Servetus says:
    April 9, 2013 at 11:21 am

    “The decision has also attracted the attention and concern of the Idaho attorney general’s office, which filed a petition to the Idaho Supreme Court seeking a review of the appeals court opinion.”

    The Idaho Supreme Court is the same legal entity that once denied payment of monetary damages to an Idaho family who suffered a grievous loss when their family member was gunned down by police in an illegal and botched drug raid netting less than 2 grams of pot. It will be interesting to see if the state’s top court has matured at all on the marijuana issue.

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