September 6, 2004
-
Alaska Supreme Court Restricts Marijuana Search Warrants 9/3/04
It's getting tougher and tougher for cops in Alaska to bust people for pot. Since the state Court of Appeals last year reaffirmed a 1975 Supreme Court ruling legalizing the possession of marijuana for personal use in one's own home, police have been unable to arrest people for possession of less than four ounces in their homes. Now, an August 27 Court of Appeals ruling holds that police cannot seek or execute a search warrant for a person's home for marijuana unless there is reason to believe there are more than four ounces of it.
The ruling came in the case of Leo Richardson Crocker Jr., who was charged with "controlled substance misconduct" after police searched his home and found marijuana and grow equipment. A lower court ruled the search warrant should never have been issued because there was no evidence Crocker possessed more than four ounces of marijuana, and the Court of Appeals last week upheld that ruling.
The Court of Appeals decision in State v. Crocker is available at http://touchngo.com/ap/html/ap-1949.htm online.
*****************************************************************************
On November 2, 2004, Alaska voters will decide whether to regulate marijuana or keep it in the criminal market. Specifically, the initiative has the following three provisions:
- It removes the threat of arrest and jail for adults aged 21 and older who use marijuana without harming others.
- It prompts the state legislature to implement a system for the manufacture, taxation, and sale of marijuana so that adults who use marijuana must obtain it from a legally regulated market, rather than from the criminal market.
- It maintains penalties for distributing marijuana to minors, smoking marijuana in public, and driving while under the influence of marijuana.
http://www.regulatemarijuanainalaska.org/home/
- It removes the threat of arrest and jail for adults aged 21 and older who use marijuana without harming others.
Comments (5)
Big grin from the music! I've not read the post on Alaska and marijuana laws, but wanted to respond to your comment on Merrow's site... I'd clipped this for my own blog, but no time at the moment.
Re: Russian soldiers killing Chetchan (I'll be having to learn to spell this, won't I!) children, Stein says it very very well. We are appalled when armies kill children.
When your asymmetrical warfare strategy depends on gunning down schoolchildren, you're getting way more asymmetrical than you need to be. The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.
But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.
I do think pot would be less of a problem after suffering governmenr regulation...
Very different from here.
I'm just silly and sometimes I take things too seriously. Sorry about that.
The law is silly.
And by "the law," I mean a general sense of the word. There are so many loopholes and red tape.
Comments are closed.