Cowlitz County Dismisses 42 Pot Cases In Wake Of Election

[Truth Seeker]

Cowlitz County Prosecutor Sue Baur said Wednesday she will dismiss pending marijuana possession cases against 42 people who were caught before voters made it legal to possess small amounts of pot.

"Did they get lucky? Yes, they did," Baur said of the defendants, who were facing misdemeanor charges. "But the people have said we're not going to criminalize marijuana, so we're going to clear the books."

The move is consistent with the actions of other prosecutors in the state, who said following November's election that they would drop minor marijuana possession cases.

Washington voters decided in November to legalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana and to create a government-sanctioned, taxed and regulated marijuana market. The law went into effect Dec. 6, but state officials said it will be about a year before the first licensed marijuana retailers open.

Following the election, Cowlitz prosecutors identified 64 pending misdemeanor marijuana possession cases, Baur said Wednesday. Of those, 22 cases are "still viable" because they involve other charges or people younger than 21. (It's still illegal for minors to possess any amount of pot.) Those cases will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, Baur said.

The remaining cases will be dismissed, she said. The vast majority of them involve people who have warrants for their arrest because they never showed up for court. The oldest case to be dismissed dates from 2008.

Baur said the relatively small number of cases pending in Cowlitz County shows that marijuana possession citations haven't been "clogging up the system," as some who favor legalization argued.

Cowlitz County voters didn't favor the legalization initiative, with 53.7 percent voting against it. Still, Baur said she is not surprised voters statewide approved it, especially considering that prosecutors and police in larger counties in the Puget Sound area already were liberalizing marijuana laws. In addition, she said, medical marijuana laws were muddling enforcement against recreational uses.

Baur said she is ambivalent about voters' decision. "I see the arguments on both sides," she said.

"I don't think people should necessarily go to jail because they had a marijuana joint," Baur said, adding that a citation did carry a minimum one-day jail sentence.

But she also said: "I just worry about the message to kids about drugs in general."

Baur said her office hasn't notified any of the defendants that their charges are being dismissed. Many, she said, will be difficult to find because they won't show up to court.

Those who want to know if their charges are being thrown out can call the prosecutor's office at 360-577-3080.

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Source: tdn.com
Author: Tony Lystra
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Website: Cowlitz County dismisses 42 pot cases in wake of election

 

[happybud]

I can only hope that prosecutors from around this great country take a good hard look at places like NYC and then do a general moral comparison. I have said this for decades: Just because the law says that you can bust me or my friends does not make the law right! There was a time where anyone could be jailed for drinking a beer or glass of wine.
The more power that you have the more of a responsibility that you should have to do the right thing. As we all know, most of the time all of this still makes absolutely no difference to some people with the power.
Lets just say for the sake of arguments that Washington State had put all of these people in jail. I ask, who really wins by doing so...nobody......everyone ends up a looser, Top to bottom! We turn our law abiding citizens into criminals and then in the very same breath let real criminals go. Meanwhile when your houses and cars are being broke into on a daily basis and there are no cop when you call them, they ask you to come down to the stations to make a report.
I recently had a cop tell me that even if we caught someone breaking into my house right in front of him. That the criminal would be out of jail and back home before he was done doing the paper work on them. He said they have no place to put them, let alone keep them in jail. Here in Oregon, it's a well known fact especially among the criminals that you basically have to kill someone before they will keep you in jail these days. Hell every week they release more people from our jails because they can't afford to house them, let alone try to prosecute them. Our local DA's from all over the NW are dropping cases by the handful because we don't have money to prosecute things like care theft, burglary or assault cases. The way I see it, there is no argument on both sides anymore there is dumb, dumber, and just plain common sense.
Who would you rather see kept in your local jails, child molesters, rapist, robbers or some harmless pot heads. It makes no sense to me that the message you send our kids should be that if you are a really bad person and you beat the crap out of people, rape and pillage you go to jail. Not that if you get caught smoking a harmless green leaf we will nail your ass to the courts and forget about those other crimnals to prove a point, because we can. What kind of message does that send to your kids @$$hole!!!
Sorry I can"t stand it I have seen so many good lives ruined by these same types of do goodie people that it now drives me a little nuts. Time for my Blood pressure pills, and a bong. LOL!

Peace HBF