POT CASE PUT ON HOLD AGAIN

Medical Marijuana Hearing Pushed To April

Doyle and Belinda Satterfield now have to wait until April 22 to find
out if they will get their medical marijuana back.

Judge James Curry set the new hearing date Monday to allow Doyle
Satterfield's lawyer, Justin Scott, time to respond to legal
arguments filed by Yuba County District Attorney Pat McGrath.

"Something tells me there has to be some evidentiary hearing to
convince the court what appears to be contraband is not," said Curry.

The judge expressed some frustration about the medical marijuana situation.

"I personally wish state and federal law enforcement and folks who
wrote initiatives got on the same dad-gum page," he said.

Curry invited anyone else interested in the medical marijuana issue
to file an amicus brief, or friend of the court brief, in the
Satterfields' case.

The Linda couple were arrested in August and charged with illegal
marijuana cultivation. The charges were dropped in January.

Doyle Satterfield needs the marijuana for his insomnia and arthritis.
His wife uses it because she has chemotherapy treatments for breast
cancer.

"This law has been in effect for five years, and everybody's been
ducking it," Scott said of Proposition 215, the medical marijuana
initiative passed by voters in November 1996. "I don't think it's
going to get ducked this time."

He vowed to take the Satterfields' case on appeal if their medicine
isn't returned.

"This ought to be a patient-doctor issue," Scott said. "It ought to
be private. The courts have no business in it. I think that's what
the voters said.

"For some reason, it seems like the authorities don't want to follow
the law. I guess they want to say they can go out and take people's
legally possessed marijuana and destroy it and not give it back to
them because of some vague law they can't cite."

Scott obtained a court order in early February, he said, to bar law
enforcement from destroying the Satterfields' marijuana.

McGrath said Proposition 215's poor wording is causing the current problems.

"If the drafters of Proposition 215 had the foresight to think of
returning seized marijuana that was later determined to be used under
the Compassionate Use Act, they should have included it, but they
didn't," he said. "Because they didn't, we're in a big, balled-up
mess again."

Local law enforcement and judges, McGrath said, can't be put in the
position of returning marijuana because it's considered contraband
under federal statutes.

"Federal law creates a bogeyman for local law enforcement," he said.

But Scott said he's unaware of "any other law enforcement officer
who's been put in jail because they returned it, or any other judge
who's been impeached or put in jail because they returned it. I don't
believe for a minute that the feds are gong to come in and do
anything, or they would have already done it."