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Current Affairs 2007 - Legal (153 items)
| Sep 27, 2007 | ON: Time For City To Grow Op After three hours punching each other silly over issues like amending the fireworks bylaw, the licensing and standards committee is finally ready to hear my deputation September 11.
I'm here on behalf of the Canadian Cannabis Society to speak to the final agenda item: how the city plans to police pot and divvy up the proceeds of grow op busts.
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| Sep 17, 2007 | AG Increases Use of Forfeiture Powers to Seize Assets The Ministry of the Attorney General has increased its use of sweeping provincial civil forfeiture powers in the past year to seize assets, including people's homes, even if criminal proceedings have been stayed or withdrawn because of Charter violations. ...A report issued recently by the attorney general's office stated that $3.6 million in property has been seized in the past four years in 170 proceedings. Nearly $1 million has been distributed to crime victims and more than $900,000 transferred to municipal police forces.
[More US-style war on civil liberties] |
| Sep 14, 2007 | NS: Marijuana Court Case Turns Into Constitutional Concern However, Ricky Logan Simpson, 57, told the jury hearing his Nova Scotia Supreme Court trial on three drug charges that he should not be considered a criminal because the laws forbidding the possession, growing and distribution of marijuana are unconstitutional.
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| Sep 14, 2007 | 'Not A Case Of Turning A Blind Eye': Lawyer FIVE Chinese immigrants should be given the benefit of the doubt and cleared of charges they knowingly participated in a massive marijuana grow operation, their lawyer argued Thursday....All five testified in their own defence and told court they didn't realize the crop they were working on was marijuana. Some believed it was fruit or vegetable, while one man thought it was "Chinese medicinal herbs".
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| Sep 13, 2007 | Soldier Claims Entrapment In Drug Trafficking Case OROMOCTO, N.B. - A soldier who sold a small quantity of marijuana to an undercover officer was convicted Wednesday of drug trafficking, prompting his lawyer to introduce a motion claiming abuse of process.
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| Sep 12, 2007 | NS: Judge Reins In Accused In Marijuana Case Ricky Logan Simpson, who is defending himself, sighed and shook his head when Justice Felix Cacchione intervened for about the 12th time Tuesday to prevent him from questioning one of four RCMP officers during the second day of his trial in Nova Scotia Supreme Court.
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| Sep 12, 2007 | Senior Officer Charged In Arrest, Strip Search EDMONTON - A city police officer has been charged with unlawful exercise of authority for arresting and strip searching the son of lawyer Tom Engel after evidence of the alleged crime -- a marijuana cigarette -- was thrown away.
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| Sep 8, 2007 | It's For Tobacco, Really (Wink-Wink, Nudge-Nudge) In every quadrant of our city, one can find shops where brightly coloured bongs line the shelves and a wide selection of pipes sit in glass cases. The stores have names like Grass Roots, Hemporium and Bongs and Such, just in case you still don't get the idea.
Known to some as "head shops," such businesses have been sprouting like, well, weeds all over booming Calgary. You can find them in Forest Lawn, in the northeast industrial area and in the tony shopping districts of Kensington and 17th Avenue S.W.
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| Sep 3, 2007 | The Unfairness Of The Forfeiture Law ...But in a justice system that revolves around presumed innocence, civil forfeiture changes the rules. It enables the Crown to take suspected criminals to a civil court when the evidence is not strong enough to hold up in a criminal one. There, the Crown doesn't need to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; it needs only to establish its case on a balance of probabilities. Even before it achieves that minimal standard, the province is able to freeze property until the court date, potentially bankrupting individuals before demonstrating that the assets it has seized were ill-gotten.
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| Aug 31, 2007 | ON: OPP Says RIDE Check At Hempfest Was Legitimate Ontario Provincial Police say an impaired driving checkpoint outside Hempfest wasn't a ploy to search festival-goers for pot, and deny charges by organizers of the annual cannabis festival that police attempted to drive off attendees. ...Rob Waddell, organizer of Hempfest, pointed out this week that no impaired driving charges were laid, for drugs or alcohol.
He also charged OPP went above and beyond their normal practice at RIDE checks by questioning passengers, checking for documentation and doing vehicle safety checks.
Some who attended Hempfest described a military-style roadblock a short distance from the event, manned by as many as 20 police officers.
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| Aug 27, 2007 | ON: Judges Tosses Out Drug Charges Against Whitby Man WHITBY -- Durham police seriously breached the constitutional rights of a Whitby man during a drug investigation, a Superior Court judge said in tossing out charges against him Monday.
Cops were acting solely on a hunch and denied Roland Liebregts the most basic of rights afforded to him under the Charter of Rights when they apprehended and questioned him near his Taunton Road home in the early morning hours of Sept. 23, 2005, Justice Barry MacDougall said in his ruling.
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| Aug 25, 2007 | Is It Or Isn't It? The Pot Pendulum Swings Again Just As Canadians Are Embracing Pot As Never Before, the Government Plans a New War on Drugs. the Move Is Fitting, Given This Country's Ambivalent Relationship With Weed Over the Decades ...For a lot of Canadians, the debate is over: They like pot, they smoke it.
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| Aug 24, 2007 | ON: Church Leaders Go To Court Over Confiscated Pot The spiritual leaders of a church that uses marijuana as its sacrament are seeking a court order for the return of several pounds of pot and other items seized from their Barton Street headquarters during an RCMP raid.
Church of the Universe ministers Walter Tucker, 74, and Michael Baldasaro, 58, were charged with possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking after the Mounties executed a search warrant on May 15, 2000.
The raid came after a sting operation in which undercover police officers pretended to join the church and began to buy the sacrament.
However, all charges against the pair were ultimately withdrawn by a federal drug prosecutor on Dec. 15, 2005.
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| Aug 11, 2007 | Potmobile Busted In Ferry Lineup WEST VANCOUVER -- It was a business venture worthy of famed '70s potheads Cheech and Chong: Police officers called to investigate a possible drunk driver discovered $60,000 worth of marijuana plants being grown inside a car.
The 140 plants -- in two stages of growth -- were being farmed inside a Toyota RAV4.
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| Aug 10, 2007 | BC: Pot Not a Police Priority, Deputy Chief Testifies at Trial Deputy Chief Bill Naughton said the society's Cormorant Street office of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society has not generated any complaints, adding marijuana ranks behind drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin in terms of Victoria police priorities. ....Also testifying yesterday in Victoria was Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, who chaired the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, which called in 2002 for the legalization of marijuana in Canada.
Nolin told the court the regulations, as they currently exist, are an obstacle to Canadians who want access to medical marijuana.
He said the rules ask doctors to be "gatekeepers" for access to legal marijuana. It's a role doctors don't want, and so Canadians are being denied access to a medical product.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | Roach Burn (class action suit) The irony is too delicious. A lawyer named Roach, in this case Charles Roach, taking on the feds' reefer madness pot laws. Roach argues in a class action filed Tuesday ( August 7 ) in federal court that laws making possession of pot illegal have had no force or effect since July 2001. That's when the federal government was ordered to enact a constitutionally valid law. It still hasn't. Roach's suit asks for $25 million in compensation for persons prosecuted under pot laws. Maybe the threat of having to pay out millions in damages will finally light a fire under the feds' asses to stop with their anti-cannabis charade. We're happily holding our breath on this one.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | ON: Church Argues Marijuana A Sacrament CHURCH ARGUES MARIJUANA A SACRAMENT
Parishioners Plan Charter Challenge, Say Current Policy Infringes On Their Religious Rights
If some religions sip wine at the altar, others should be allowed to smoke pot. At least according to Rev. Edwin Pearson and Rev. Michel Ethier, two ordained ministers behind a proposed $25 million class action lawsuit challenging Canada's marijuana laws.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | Why Is This Canadian Pot Dealer Campaigning for Ron Paul? He's Looking for a Pardon.
Marc Emery agrees his campaign-organizing effort for some 2008 U.S. presidential candidates is a bit unorthodox. He's Canadian, his political base of operations is the B.C. Marijuana Party in Vancouver, and he can be arrested if he sets foot into America.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | BC: Trial to Hear Testimony From Senator Who Backed Marijuana Legalization A Canadian senator who has called for the legalization of marijuana took the stand yesterday in the trial arising from a raid on the Vancouver Island Compassion Society's grow operation.
Pierre Claude Nolin chaired the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, which unanimously called five years ago for legalization of the drug in Canada. The committee recommended the government license production and sale of marijuana, which would be available to any Canadian citizen over the age of 16.
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| Aug 4, 2007 | BC: Medicinal Pot Grower Sees Huge Demand VICTORIA - A Vancouver Island grower of organic marijuana is being inundated with pleas for pot from disease sufferers, but Health Canada says he can supply only one person, a provincial court trial has been told.
Eric Nash said he wrote to Canadian Health Minister Tony Clement with a list of 121 people, all approved by Health Canada to use marijuana as medicine and asking him to grow it for them. One of them was a former RCMP officer diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
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