GUILTY ON ALL CHARGES

Sentencing Is Scheduled for October 20, but Attorneys Vow to Appeal

Los Angeles - Charles Lynch, in his recent federal trial for selling
what he wasn't allowed to call medical marijuana in Morro Bay, had
set out to do the unlikely.

Selling marijuana is illegal under federal law, and yet he didn't
dispute, on the stand of a federal court, that he'd sold marijuana.

Selling marijuana to people under age 21 is an even more serious
crime under federal law, and yet he didn't dispute, on the stand of a
federal court, that he'd sold marijuana to people younger than 21.

And selling lots of marijuana is especially illegal, and yet he
didn't dispute, on the stand of a federal court, that he'd sold
millions of dollars worth, to thousands of patients.

In short, he entered a system rigged entirely against him and
demanded a trial by a jury of his peers.

It was a bold tactic-nearly everyone who has been arrested by federal
authorities for running medical marijuana dispensaries has taken plea
bargains-but it wasn't really quixotic. Lynch's defense was that he'd
talked to representatives of the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration-they didn't deny it-and understood he wouldn't be
prosecuted if he opened a medical marijuana dispensary (they did
dispute that).His attorneys argued that Lynch was entrapped.

The jury didn't buy it.

"Charlie was steamrolled by the federal government," Lou Koory,
Lynch's former lawyer said. "It's hard to win when the jury is not
allowed to see all the evidence. How are you supposed to present a defense?"

Lynch was found guilty of the five charges against him. As a result,
he faces up to 100 years in jail, although Koory said the judge might
not be constrained by mandatory minimums, since it was obvious that
Lynch was not a drug kingpin.

"The trial judge requested briefs from both parties,' Koory said, "on
how he can avoid imposing mandatory minimum sentencing."

Lynch will be sentenced in October. Until then, he has been ordered
back on house arrest with an ankle monitor.

His attorneys have vowed to appeal.

In the Courtroom

The federal courtroom where Lynch was tried on charges of conspiracy
and drug trafficking seats only about 70 people, as observers
discovered during the final hours of his week-and-a-half-long trial.

In the first days of the trial, the courtroom was occupied by a few
reporters, a few curious lawyers outside the case, Lynch's immediate
family, and some former patients of his defunct Compassionate
Caregivers of the Central Coast medical marijuana dispensary, the
Morro Bay business that closed last year after a raid by federal
agents and local sheriff's deputies.

By the end of the trial, the courtroom was packed with medical
marijuana backers from the Los Angeles area, federal prosecutors with
no connection to the trial, and Lynch's die-hard supporters. The case
was featured on CNN in a report that called it the "apex" of a clash
between state and federal marijuana laws. The media attention was
further stoked by the fact that DEA agents raided two Los
Angeles-area dispensaries on the same day while the trial was underway.

Outside the courtroom, Los Angeles was sweltering. Even for August,
the city was sticky and cursed with a persistent heat that was
amplified by all the vehicle exhaust. Read what you want into the
weather; the case was also briefly delayed by an earthquake.

In theory, the prosecution's case should have been open-and-shut.
Under federal law, it's illegal to sell marijuana. Period. End of
sentence, beginning of sentencing.

And the case should have been made even easier by the fact that Lynch
was prevented from arguing that the drug was provided as a "medical
necessity." Under the specifics of federal law, Lynch was nothing
more than a simple drug dealer, and one who had computer records
listing all his sales and patients.

Yet Lynch was not a drug trafficker in the traditional sense, nor was
his dispensary some seedy drug house. His was a dispensary operating
under California law with the blessing of local officials, who had
provided him a business license and even posed for a ribbon-cutting
ceremony when the dispensary opened in 2006.

Although California has passed laws decriminalizing the drug for
medical use in California, the federal government refuses to
recognize marijuana as a medicine and has pursued, with great
enthusiasm, purveyors of medical cannabis.

More than 60 California dispensaries have been raided in the last two
years. To medical marijuana supporters, the raids are an assault on
patients, who are denied safe access to the drug when dispensaries
close, and, perhaps worse, are denied basic privacy rights when their
medical records get seized as evidence. Indeed, a patient of Lynch's
dispensary has filed a lawsuit against Sheriff Patrick Hedges,
alleging the lawman committed crimes when he sought the raid.

The recent crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California
has newly stirred the debate over a state's right to self-govern. And
Lynch, a soft-spoken man who had no previous criminal record-not even
a traffic ticket-when he was arrested, seems to have become, at least
for the moment, the poster boy for the medical marijuana debate.

Lynch's Defense

Charles Lynch took the stand in his own defense July 30, four days
into the federal marijuana trial.

Lynch's own attorney, Reuven Cohen, began by asking a comically
obvious question:

"Mr. Lynch," Cohen began, "Did you have some marijuana in that
marijuana dispensary of yours?"

Lynch cautiously affirmed that he did, eliciting snickers from his
supporters in the audience. They pooled along the left side of the
room, just behind the defense, and kept close watch on the jury for
any sign of fluxing emotion.

In general, medical marijuana cases are stupidly easy to prosecute.
Business owners provide their own prosecution case with tax
documents, patient lists, and receipts. Information about state law,
whether a person is conscious of it or not, never enters the
courtroom, and all that's left for the prosecutor is to tie the case
up with a nice little bow.

Lynch's defense, however, made murky that tidy prosecution formula.
His lawyers claimed that Lynch was the victim of an obscure form of
entrapment, estoppel, which basically means that he received and
relied on faulty information from an official within the federal
government. The foundation for that argument was a series of phone
calls Lynch made to the DEA, in September 2005, several months before
he opened the dispensary. Lynch's attorney wrote the phone numbers he
dialed on a white poster board, where they remained before the court
throughout the trial.

Estoppel is not only obscure; it allows the defense certain unusual
latitude, such as the right to keep their witnesses and strategy
hidden until it is actually presented. And, unlike most trials,
wherein the government bears the burden of proof exclusively, the
defense must also do some convincing, although their burden of proof
is considerably less than that of the prosecution.

In reality, his defense, and his future hung on just a few words
uttered by someone at the DEA. It went something like this:

On September 12, 2005, according to Lynch's phone records and his
testimony, Lynch called the DEA four times, being referred to another
number during each call. On the fourth call, which lasted seven
minutes, Lynch said that a woman answered the phone:

"Marijuana task force."

Lynch testified that he asked the person on the other line what the
DEA planned to do about all the marijuana dispensaries that were
popping up around California, at which point he was transferred to
someone he assumed was a supervisor. So Lynch asked his question
again, and this time, he testified, he got a definitive response.

According to Lynch's testimony, on the fourth call he was told that
it was up to cities and counties to decide how they wanted to handle
the matter of medical marijuana dispensaries.

So, Lynch asked: What if he wanted to start a medical marijuana
dispensary? He said he got the same answer.

From that minimal interaction, Lynch inferred that if he followed
state and local laws governing medical marijuana that he would not
have trouble with the DEA.

Clearly, that was not the case. Lynch's business was raided about a
year and a half after that call.

When the defense finally materialized in this fashion, it created
such a ruckus that the jury was dismissed for the day.

An estoppel defense has five specific elements that must be met, and
Lynch's defense had some holes. It requires, first, that the
authoritative figure actually has the power to give the information
the defendant relied on. Lynch didn't even know the person's name.
The authoritative figure must also be given all the relevant facts.
In Lynch's case, the prosecution asserted that information would have
included the location of the proposed dispensary and the fact that it
would be selling to "minors." The authority must explicitly mislead
by saying that an action is legal, not just imply that someone won't
be punished. For estoppel to work, one must also prove that the
defendant relied on the misinformation, and that reliance was reasonable.

The prosecution objected to the use of estoppel in this case,
sparking a series of debates, and Judge George Wu sent everyone home
for the day, without a decision on the legitimacy of the defense.

He returned the following day with a ruling: Estoppel would be
considered an appropriate defense in three of the five charges Lynch
faced, but for the two charges related to selling marijuana to
minors-which carry stiffer penalties, it would not be accepted,
because, from Lynch's testimony, no element of the conversation dealt
specifically with selling marijuana to minors. The rest was up to the
jurors to decide.

While the jury didn't buy the estoppel defense, the tactic was still
a minor moral victory for the defense, if only because it allowed him
to argue that he'd been in compliance with local laws, something
nearly unheard of in a federal marijuana case.

Lynch's attorney, John Littrell, commented before the verdict was
received, that at least "In the end the jury did get to hear about Charlie."

Once the estoppel was established, the testimonial floodgates were
opened. Morro Bay's mayor, Janice Peters, and its city attorney, Rob
Schultz, were both subpoenaed to testify as character witnesses on
Lynch's behalf.

Schultz described Lynch as a law-abiding citizen.

"I was basically asked my opinion as to the moral character of
Charles Lynch," Schultz said. "I said as a businessman he complied
with all the laws and rules and ordinances of the city of Morro Bay."

On the final morning of the trial, Debbie Beck, the mother of
19-year-old Owen Beck, who lost a leg to cancer, was also able to
testify to Lynch's character, even though her son had been kicked off
the stand days earlier, apparently because he mentioned the words
"medical marijuana."

Debbie Beck, who described herself as a conservative Republican, said
that medical marijuana wasn't the first prescription they sought to
ease her son's pain, but after they tried other pharmaceuticals, they
were ready to try something new. And, she said, the marijuana worked.

Owen, she testified, was too sick to grow his own marijuana, so
eventually they sought medicine from Lynch.

"It's a sad situation Charlie's in right now," Debbie Beck said after
her testimony. "My heart aches for a person who is set up like this."

What about Charlie Lynch?

Lynch does not seem the kind of man who will do well in prison. He
was described by one of his dispensary employees as not having a mean
bone in his body.

The former software developer is generally unimposing, and unfussy,
even in a suit. His hair is short, grey, and balding on top, and he
looks somewhat like the actor Jeff Daniels, only shorter. His lips
form a thin line, which is slightly turned down, but not in an unpleasant way.

Most remarkably, he looks like someone who's aged ten years in one year's time.

During the trial, he sat with hands clasped atop the desk, and looked
toward the jury as the prosecution used Lynch's own business records
and patient lists to paint him as a big time drug dealer who sold to
minors and masterminded a drug operation, which grossed $2.1 million
in sales for one year.

The Prosecution

Lynch's trial began Friday, July 25, and continued for seven days,
longer than anyone expected it would take to prove that Lynch was
involved with selling marijuana.

Federal prosecutors were painfully thorough during the first three
days of the trial, when they presented several witnesses from law
enforcement agencies, including sheriff's deputies, who were part of
the yearlong stakeout of the dispensary. They brought experts: a
chemist, who concluded that the marijuana and hash being sold from
the dispensary contained THC-the active ingredient in marijuana-and
an investigator from the IRS, who tallied grams of marijuana sold
from the dispensary based on receipts. DEA Agent Rachel Burkdoll, who
was largely responsible for executing the federal warrant to raid
Lynch's home and business, left her seat next to the prosecutors to
explain from the witness stand a series of charts made from patient
records. Lynch's clientele, the records showed, consisted of more
than 250 minors-younger than 21 years old by federal standards.

But perhaps the most damaging blow to Lynch's estoppel defense came
from a DEA agent who claimed to be the most probable person to have
answered the fourth phone number, except she said she didn't remember
Lynch's string of questions from more than two years ago.

Furthermore, she said, no one on that line would have answered the
phone as "marijuana task force," and they certainly wouldn't have
given Lynch any indication that selling marijuana was permissible.

Lynch's attorneys are already planning their next move. The omission
of certain facts could be the basis of Lynch's appeal, Littrell said
following the verdict. First, though, they'll have to wait for
sentencing, and then the appeal process can begin with a request for
a new trial. For now, Lynch is out on bail, though confined to his
home, at least until his sentencing.

"Our county is not any safer because of this prosecution," Koory
said. "I'm not sure who the raid and prosecution benefited."