Government sued for street value of pot

This one’s been sitting on my desktop for a week, but I didn’t want to let it go by…
You know how the government always brags about how much marijuana it seized in a bust by assigning the highest possible street value for every bit of it? This could come back to bite them.

Dickes, a 38-year-old Desert Shield Marine who suffers from debilitating pain after catching grenade shrapnel in the Gulf, says he was treated worse by Colorado police than by anyone in Iraq. In April, 2007 officers raided his home after receiving a tip from a neighbor and, according to his lawyer Robert J. Corry Jr., threw the disabled veteran to the ground, held him at gunpoint and ransacked his home. They found 71 marijuana plants, at least 65 of which they confiscated illegally, and they charged Dickes with felony cultivation. After eight months of legal wrangling, the Arapahoe County district attorney dismissed the charges, determining that Dickes was in fact a certified grower. But, by then, his plants were long dead.
Thanks to a referendum passed in 2000, Article XVIII, Section 14 of the Colorado State Constitution stipulates that “any property… used in connection with the medical use of marijuana… shall not be harmed, neglected, injured, or destroyed while in the possession of state or local law enforcement officials.” Not being equipped with the growroom or know-how to maintain them, Aurora police simply uprooted the plants and threw them in the evidence room.

So Dickes is planning on suing the suburb of Aurora for over $360,000 in damages.