Court Rulings

Bryan Epis is once again a medical marijuana martyr. This week, Epis, the first California medical grower convicted by the feds, was returned to federal prison to serve eight more years of a 10-year sentence imposed in 2002. He had been out on appeal, but his appeals have run out.

A California judge can order a medical marijuana patient to hand in his ID card and give up his medicine if he wants to go on probation instead of to prison, an appeals court has ruled in a 2-1 decision. The ruling provoked a harsh dissent.

A Colorado judge has delivered a shot across the bow to towns and cities moving to ban medical marijuana dispensaries on the grounds they violate federal law.

North Dakota farmers want to grow hemp. North Dakota has licensed them to grow hemp. But are they growing any hemp? No, and a new court decision means its likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Testilying -- the practice of police perjuring themselves to get an arrest or win a case -- is so prevalent in the NYPD that something has to be done, a federal judge complained this week.

Chakib El Khayari runs a human rights group in Morocco's Rif Mountains, where marijuana cultivation is a way of life. He has run afoul of the Moroccan government for criticizing its policies toward the poor pot farmers, and an appeals court has just ruled he should stay in a jail. Human rights and drug reform groups consider him a prisoner of conscience.

To be a caregiver or not be a caregiver? That is the question in Colorado, and the criminal courts, civil courts, state bureaucrats, and the medical marijuana industry are all fighting over it.

Medical marijuana caregivers must actually know the patients for whom they are growing pot, the Colorado Court of Appeals has ruled. The opinion, if upheld on appeal, could put a crimp in the state's fast-growing medical marijuana industry.

More than a decade ago, Colombia's Constitutional Court ruled that drug possession was not a prosecutable offense. Now, President Uribe is moving to undo that, but the country's Supreme Court has put a roadblock in his path by upholding that ruling.

It was strike two Monday for the Church of Cognizance and its argument that its members have a religious right to use marijuana. The Arizona Supreme Court rejected that claim from a church member. Last year, a federal court rejected a similar claim from church founders Dan and Mary Quaintance, who are currently in federal prison.