How it All Went Down
It was October 2014. I was sitting in my home office working and minding my own business and I see a police officer outside of my apartment window staring at me. I pretty much knew right then and there I was busted. Unbeknownst to me at the time but there were some break ins in my building and due to this the police were called. It was upon looking around the building an officer noticed a smell coming from a hot air exhaust from my portable air conditioning unit in my grow.
The smell? Cannabis. Apparently a police officer allegedly smelling cannabis is justifiable cause to get a warrant and search someone’s home, which frankly I couldn’t believe at the time. Upon serving the warrant the state police found 77 plants and 10lbs. At least that’s what they charged me with. I didn’t have any dried flower other than personal use, so just know if you have an illegal grow the cops can weigh live plants as evidence even though much of the plant is not consumable.
A Race to the Finish Line
At the time I was working as an advertising sales executive, in fact I was just hired. Ironically this company was doing the background check on me as I was being raided by the state police. Luckily for me only convictions appear on your record. To say the next year was hell would be an understatement. It was a mental prison not knowing if my plea agreement would be accepted by the judge. Every time I had a court date scheduled I was scheduled to be out of the state on business so I had to keep pushing back the date again and again, which thankfully my attorneys assisted me in. My actual court date was not until September of 2015.
Due to the quantity of cannabis that was discovered at my home I was in a court of rapists and murderers, by comparison I wasn’t looking too bad. The judge even told me after looking at my professional branding and catalog that if you focused your energy on something in the legitimate world you could have a real future. Which is exactly what I did when I moved to Colorado the following year, but that is a story for another time.
What Happened With The Judge
After my attorney Marc Lopez of the Mark Lopez law firm plead my case and after a year of collective anxiety coming to a head in that court appearance the judge thankfully accepted my plea agreement. If he did not I was going away for four years. This plea agreement was tantamount to me walking. I received three months on house arrest, a year of informal probation and expungement after seven years as long as I didn’t incur any additional charges for crimes during that seven years.
As grateful as I am that my plea was accepted, I couldn’t help but notice other defendants that were of a darker skin color and had only public defenders to help them did not have their pleas accepted. This is systemic of a bigger problem, that our court systems as well as law enforcement are skewed towards implications of race and resource. It’s hard to imagine more blatant corruption. But it’s a pattern I’ve seen my entire life as someone that has worked in the cannabis space since I was 15.
This is an issue that we see rampant today. The war on cannabis is and always has been a war on people of color. African Americans are arrested at 3.8 times the rate of white people for simple cannabis possession. If you want to do your part to help right the wrongs of the race war disguised as the War on Drugs here are some of the worthy organizations spearheading the fight.
One love.
Related Articles:
The First Time I Ever Smoked Weed and How it Changed me
When I Moved to Colorado and Why – An Amazing Experience
The First Cannabis Blog Post I Ever Wrote And How It Was Rejected
Andy Evans Party, My Introduction to the Cannabis Industry
