JURY OUT ON MEDICAL POT CLAIM

SAN ANDREAS -- A Calaveras County jury deliberated for nearly two
hours Wednesday without reaching a verdict in the case of a
34-year-old man who claims his marijuana plantation was for medical
use and protected under California's Proposition 215.

That's the 1996 Compassionate Use Initiative, which allows people with
doctors' endorsements or caregivers of those people to grow pot.

Defendant Robert Galambos claims both -- that he needed marijuana to
ease his own lingering misery from a car wreck about 10 years ago that
fractured his skull and put him in intensive care for eight days, and
also to supply an Oakland cannabis club that would provide marijuana
for AIDS, cancer and other patients under Proposition 215.

He was busted in July 1997, when agents gathered 382 young pot plants
and about 6 pounds of bagged marijuana from around his home in Paloma
in western Calaveras County.

Galambos faces felony charges of cultivation of marijuana and
possession for sale. Deputy District Attorney Seth Matthews said the
maximum sentence is three years, eight months, in prison.

To Matthews, the case is relatively simple -- a guy grows pot, a guy
gets busted, a guy claims medicinal exemption after the fact.

Galambos has a legitimate doctor's endorsement for his own use, but he
didn't get it until two months after his arrest. And, while he did
have a contract with the Oakland club before the bust, he doesn't deny
that the bagged marijuana was from a 1996 crop, planted before
Proposition 215 was passed.

"He (Galambos) didn't conform his conduct to the law," Matthews told
jurors in his closing argument.

But J. Tony Serra, Galambos' defense attorney from San Francisco,
argued that his client had tried to get his own personal-use permit
long before his arrest, but that doctors in "zero tolerance" Calaveras
County wanted no part of it.

And Galambos grew for the Oakland club in anticipation of Proposition
215's passage, Serra said, out of a sincere desire to help people.

Helping people was Galambos' background, Serra said, and there was no
evidence of profiteering -- no fancy cars turned up by investigators,
no snitches talking about buying marijuana from him, no stashed
goo-gobs of cash, no bank accounts, no sales records -- nothing but a
lot of pot, some of it mildewed and unsmokable.

In an impassioned argument alternating between whispers and roars, his
hands sometimes flailing and sometimes held meekly behind his back,
Serra begged the jurors to see Galambos as a decent, kind, principled
man trying to help people, not make money from them.

Serra pleaded for jurors to hold out against the strong-armed law, to
show courage, set a local legal precedent.

It was vintage Serra, the subject of the Hollywood movie "True
Believer," several times calling his client the real "true believer,"
exhorting jurors to take the path of good, like his client had.

When his argument ended, more than half of about 40 spectators,
including nearly 20 from a Columbia cannabis club, burst into applause.

That's a no-no in court, and an infuriated Judge John E. Martin warned
that if he heard it again, he would clear the courtroom.

But Serra had been a hit, at least with most of the spectators. He
wasn't so sure about the jury, which wasn't any cannabis club and
which had come from a notoriously conservative county that voted

against Proposition 215. This isn't San Francisco.

Serra knew that. And he had been reminded of it last week, during jury
selection, when he asked a prospective anti-marijuana juror if he
wouldn't at least concede that the plant does seem to help some
seriously ailing people. People with AIDS, for instance.

"Up here, Mr. Serra," the would-be juror responded, "we believe in
Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."

That man didn't make the jury. As for the seven women and five men who
did, before they went home Wednesday night they asked the judge to
send them a copy of the Proposition 215 law.

They will get that before resuming deliberations today.