APPEALS COURT REVERSES FELONY VERDICT IN POT CASE

The Alaska Court of Appeals has overturned the 1999 felony conviction of
Fairbanks resident Carol Pease, who was found guilty of being in possession
of 25 or more marijuana plants.

The appeals court ruled that a number of the plants were dead and thus
should not have been considered in the trial.

Pease is the mother of Kevin Pease, one of four men convicted of the 1997
kicking death of 15-year-old John Hartman. The marijuana grow was
reportedly discovered when police came to Carol Pease's residence to arrest
her son.

According to the Court of Appeals ruling, police found 52 marijuana plants
in Pease's basement, but only 19 of them were alive. The other 33 had
already been harvested, leaving only the plants' stalks and root balls.
Jurors were instructed to consider the remnants as the equivalent of living
plants in reaching their verdict and as a result found Pease guilty of
fourth-degree misconduct involving a controlled substance, a felony charge
relating to the possession of 25 or more marijuana plants.

In July 1999, Pease was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Mary Greene to 30
days in a halfway house and 14 months on probation. But she did not serve
the sentence pending the results of the appeal.

In their Friday ruling, the appeals judges noted that the 25-plant law was
put in place in 1994 in order to supplement an earlier law that only
allowed the state to file charges in cases where one pound or more of
marijuana was being grown. The 25 plants were the number roughly estimated
to yield one pound of marijuana. The court of appeals noted the law can
logically only apply to living plants from which marijuana substances can
be culled.

The appeals court also looked at the common-sense definition of plant,
concluding that it generally is meant to refer to the living variety.

"When someone asks a gardener how many tomato plants they have in their
garden, the person posing this question is normally not seeking information
about the number of stumps of dead plants remaining from previous years,"
reads the ruling.

The appeals judges also noted that prosecutors must prove that the grower
was in possession of 25 living plants at the same time, a conclusion that
the jury would not necessarily have reached in this case given the evidence
at hand.

"The state presented no evidence regarding how long the 33 remnants had
been dead, or if there was ever a time when all 33 of them were
simultaneously alive," the ruling reads. "Thus, it is possible that the 33
remnants represented two or more prior harvests, and that Pease never
possessed more than 15 to 20 live marijuana plants at any one time."

Carol Pease's son Kevin was sentenced to 79 years in prison for the murder
of John Hartman, who was found kicked to death on a street corner in
downtown Fairbanks in October 1997. Pease's husband, John, was himself a
victim of murder along with two friends at a South Fairbanks boardinghouse
in March 1997. Charges against the accused triple-murderer in that case,
Jimmy Lee Price, were dropped by the state after a pair of strokes left
Price in a near-comatose state.