MINISTERS PLEAD GUILTY TO MISDEMEANOR POT CHARGE

SAN ANDREAS -- Two Wallace ministers charged with cultivating marijuana
after law enforcement agents raided their property last year and found 290
plants pleaded guilty Monday to a misdemeanor charge of possessing more
than an ounce of marijuana.

Ricky Dewayne Garner, 43, and Sue Melinda Garner, 40, were slated to go to
trial Wednesday in Calaveras County Superior Court but agreed to the terms
of a plea bargain offered by District Attorney Peter Smith's office.

Judge Douglas Mewhinney sentenced the Garners, who are ministers of the
Northern Lights Church, to two years' probation in exchange for their
guilty pleas. In addition, the Garners waived their rights against law
enforcement searches and agreed to abide by medicinal-marijuana guidelines
the county Board of Supervisors adopted last year.

Those guidelines were formulated to help county law enforcement agencies
and legitimate users make sense of Proposition 215, under which people
suffering from certain medical conditions can use marijuana with a doctor's
recommendation. The law, approved by voters in 1996, also states that
marijuana cultivation and possession laws do not apply to legitimate
patients or their primary caregivers. The latter is defined as the person
who has "consistently assumed responsibility for the housing, health or
safety" of a patient.

The county's guidelines, known as the Medical Marijuana Inter-Agency
Protocol, allow for six marijuana plants and 2 pounds for each person who
has a doctor's recommendation.

The Garners both have doctors' recommendations for medicinal marijuana use,
and they maintained they were acting as caregivers for more than a dozen
others -- all of whom had doctors' recommendations. They claimed they had a
legal right to grow the marijuana on their Wallace property for those reasons.

The prosecution maintained the Garners had more plants than a user and/or
primary caregiver needed for medicinal purposes and could not have been
considered primary caregivers for some of the people in question, because
they lived as far away as Bakersfield.

Those were the primary issues that would have been contested in the trial
scheduled to start Wednesday.

Adam Gasner, a San Francisco attorney representing Ricky Garner, said the
couple wanted to take the case to trial, but "the anguish of putting sick
people on the witness stand and the emotional turmoil they would have
experienced had to be weighed." "While they believe they would have gotten
an acquittal, the (plea bargain) allows them to do exactly what they were
doing before they were arrested -- and that makes them feel they achieved
something that was fair."

Both Garners declined comment after Monday's hearing.

Seth Matthews, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, said
the disposition was fair.

"Our primary goal was to see that (the Garners) comply with the law, like
it or not," he said. "We can now guarantee they will not be operating the
kind of cannabis cooperatives that exist in other counties and that
whatever they do will be no more than what the law allows."

Sheriff Dennis Downum said the confusion surrounding Proposition 215 "just
seems ludicrous. Either the citizens or some compelling authority has to
figure out whether it's legal or not. We just seem to be spinning our wheels.

"If you can't convict someone for having 300 plants, that's irritating.
Those people did this to challenge the entire system, and it looks to me
like they've won."