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Courthouse News Service reports:
The Ninth Circuit ruled Tuesday that the Justice Department is barred from using federal funds to prosecute individuals in states where medical marijuana is legal and the individuals are in compliance with state law.
Federal prosecutors in California and Washington state indicted a number of individuals under the Controlled Substances Act on a range of offenses related to the growing and distribution of marijuana plants.
The defendants moved to dismiss the indictments, arguing that an appropriations bill passed by Congress in 2014 and renewed in 2015 and 2016 explicitly bars the Justice Department from using federal funds to interfere with states that have legalized medical marijuana.
The story goes on to characterize the legal battle and the reasoning behind the ruling. Basically that ruling boils down to the fact that the state laws apply in this case, and the funding laws passed by congress seem to be only a bit player in this ruling.
Writing for the three-judge panel, O'Scannlain said that Congress' appropriations bill expressly prohibits the Justice Department from spending money to keep 40 states — including California and Washington — the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico from implementing their own medical marijuana laws. And federal criminal defendants may fight the use of those funds, he said.
The panel appeared to go further than just enforcing the "No Federal Funds" use by stating:
"By officially permitting certain conduct, state law provides for non-prosecution of individuals who engage in such conduct. If the federal government prosecutes such individuals, it has prevented the state from giving practical effect to its law providing for non-prosecution of individuals who engage in the permitted conduct."
That seems as close as you can come to a "States Rights" line of reasoning and still be welcome in liberal circles. The decision is reportedly being carefully scrutinized in the other circuit, and I would expect to see the government seek another venue.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 18 2016, @03:33PM
States rights, eh? That's the justification the Confederacy used when they tried to leave the Union. We all know they wanted slavery. Should the North have just stood aside and let them walk? Should we not have passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to finally stop the old South from disenfranchising voters on a racist basis with their Jim Crow bullshit state laws?
Slavery is evil, as anyone who has let an employer catch them in financial indentureship should know. "Need you to come in and work on Sunday, mmmkay," and you can't say no because then you'd be fired and you'd miss your house and car payments and soon be kicked out of your home and see your car repossessed, and your family would disown you. Slavery was a huge, very embarrassing presence that completely contradicted and made a mockery of the Founding Father's professions of a more perfect union through freedom and individual rights. Moreover, it is just plain inefficient. It's no coincidence that at the time of the Civil War, the South's economy and population was far smaller than the North's.
We keep having this argument, even now, 150 years after the end of slavery. Lot of employers really seem to prefer slaves to employees. They complain that the workers are unskilled, lazy, and ungrateful, not seeing that they created the conditions that lead to those attitudes, Their managers cling to this sophistry that people are lazy and must be constantly prodded, goaded, and otherwise forced to do work, and watched to make sure they are working. They read Ayn Rand, and they really believe in nonsense like Trickle Down Economics, despite truckloads of evidence to the contrary.