Medical Marijuana: California Activist Grower Eddy Lepp Guilty in Federal Cultivation Case, Faces 10 Years to Life

Eddy Lepp, a medical and religious use of marijuana advocate named High Times "2004 Freedom Fighter of the Year," faces a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence and up to life after a federal jury in San Francisco found him guilty of conspiracy and cultivation of marijuana with the intent to distribute. Sentencing is set for December 1.

Lepp was arrested in 2004 after DEA agents said they found some 32,000 plants in gardens on his property near Upper Lake. Although US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled the seizure was based on an invalid search warrant, she allowed prosecutors to enter into evidence 24,000 plants that were growing in plain view of a state highway.

Under federal court rules, Lepp could not mount a medical marijuana defense, and Judge Patel also refused to let him mount a religious use defense. As she pondered the religious defense issue, Patel said that while it may have been possible in a personal use case, it could not apply in a case where someone was growing thousands of plants and distributing them to anonymous parishioners.

"I truly feel I was very, very railroaded by the system, and specifically by (US District) Judge Marilyn Patel," he told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat after the verdict. Lepp said he is both a Rastafarian and a member of the Universal Life Church and that the marijuana was being grown for spiritual as well as medicinal purposes.

Lepp told the court that the plants, grown at a site known as "Eddy's Medicinal Gardens," were not his, but were being grown cooperatively by members of his church, the The Multi-Denominational Ministry of Cannabis & Rastafari. "All I did was make the land available to the ministry," he said.

Lepp is a well-known promoter of marijuana legalization and in recent years has been a fixture at West Coast marijuana reform conferences and festivals. Until she took ill, dying last November, his wife, Linda Senti, was his constant companion. The couple worked to gather petitions for Proposition 215 in 1996 and lobbied Lake County supervisors to set medical marijuana standards. Lepp was also known for publicly smoking marijuana in front of the federal building in Santa Rosa in 2002 in support of medical marijuana.

His attorneys said they planned to appeal on the religious defense and possibly other grounds. If those appeals fail, Lepp will spend much -- if not all -- of the rest of his life in the federal gulag.