Eddy Lepp faces life in federal prison for growing medical marijuana
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – A year ago, things were really looking up for medical marijuana defendant Charles “Eddy” Lepp.
That was when Judge Marilyn Patel threw out the warrant that was used to seize over 32,000 marijuana plants from Lepp’s Lake County property in August 2004. Doing investigative work that Judge Patel described as “pure sloppiness,” the agents who secured the warrant had failed to include a list of items to be seized or an adequate description of the locations to be searched.
These deficiencies were easily explained. As revealed during an evidentiary hearing in September 2007, many of the agents involved in the investigation had no idea which parcels of land belonged to Lepp and which did not. Even the agent responsible for the warrant claims he was unaware of cultivation in the 25-acre field where the majority of the marijuana plants were discovered. By his own testimony, he remained ignorant of this fact until fellow agents happened to mention it to him while the search was already in progress.
It seemed that the agents had bumbled blindly through the investigation of what may have been the world’s largest medical marijuana bust, and that the carelessness had cost the government its case. Perhaps the magnitude of Lepp’s operation had made law enforcement overly secure about the validity of the seizure, and in their inflated confidence they failed to cross their t’s and dot their i’s. Whatever the reason for the negligence, Judge Patel refused to tolerate it and gave many a reprimand while striking down the warrant.
The decision had a huge impact on Lepp’s prospects. The high plant count had put him in danger of multiple life sentences, but the judge appeared to erase that possibility in a single swoop. As the news of the discarded warrant hit the public, medical marijuana activists were quick to rejoice about the ruling. It seemed like the beginning of the end of the case against Lepp.
The celebrations may have been entirely premature.
Notices on the path to Lepp's home hint of post-traumatic stress disorder
Then again, sudden changes of fate have been relatively commonplace for Lepp, whose personal history reads almost like a storybook. He personifies both the tragedy of a nation’s error and the redemption of a fairytale romance. A Vietnam vet haunted by the trauma of war, Lepp’s life had spun apart after his service and he hit a self-described rock bottom of destructive behavior. His postwar path led him back to his childhood town of Reno, NV, where he worked as a casino bartender until his father’s cancer diagnosis pulled him out of a hedonistic lifestyle of substance abuse. It was then that Lepp learned firsthand the medicinal power of marijuana, as he watched his father ease the pain of his final days by smoking thick joints through the hole for his tracheotomy. After his father’s death, Lepp focused on getting a handle on his post-traumatic stress disorder, and it was then that he learned firsthand the power of another healing force: love.
Lepp met Linda Senti as the 1980s came to a close, and the pair almost instantly formed a partnership. They quickly settled in northern California’s Lake County and embarked on various ventures that seem poetically suited for nesting newlyweds, most particularly their stint in breeding lovebirds. But things got deathly serious when Senti was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and underwent a procedure that cut her throat open from ear to ear. It was then, Lepp says, that he went out into his garden and prayed to God for his wife – if she survived, he pledged to devote his life to helping others to heal. This was no idle bargain. Lepp took the responsibility very seriously, and when Senti made it through treatment and into recovery, he became a man with a mission.
Things took a few interesting twists during the years leading up to large-scale cultivation. Along the way, Lepp became the first person arrested, tried, and acquitted under California’s medical marijuana law. A subsequent raid on his property in 2002 resulted in confiscation but not prosecution. After this, the gardens really took off, and Lepp devotedly explored the intersections between the religious and medical uses of marijuana. The couple formed a church, Lepp became an ordained minister, and their property became known as “Eddy’s Medicinal Gardens and Multi-Denominational Chapel of Cannabis and Rastafari.”
Eddy Lepp and his wife Linda Senti were true life partners
Lepp also adopted a plan to increase the safety and decrease the cost of medical marijuana by centralizing cultivation. He professed that a single-site operation would not only make the grow cost-effective, but it would also be less difficult to secure than guarding multiple smaller locations against theft. Under his plan, patients would make donations to his church and receive access to small parcels of his farm, on which marijuana would be cultivated for them by Lepp’s on-site volunteer staff. In this manner, he believed, he could get the cost of the medicine down to $500 per pound. And in August 2004, as his crop of over 32,000 plants began to mature, it seemed that his plan had succeeded.
But then the feds swarmed in, sloppy warrants in hand, and spent days and nights pulling up the plants. In spite of state laws permitting medical grows, marijuana cultivation remains illegal in the eyes of the federal government, and its agents carted off truckload after truckload of plants from Lepp’s garden. Multiple witness accounts say that the vehicles were packed so full that plants occasionally spilled out onto Highway 20, sending onlookers scrambling into the road like children grabbing for the innards of a busted piñata.
Visitors to the Lepp home are greeted and informed by a variety of signs
Although it was no party, an atmosphere of celebration did carry through the fallout from the raid. Lepp was bailed almost immediately, and spent the next weekend at Seattle’s annual Hempfest. A few months later, Judge Patel granted him permission to travel to Amsterdam for the High Times Cannabis Cup, where he received the award for “Freedom Fighter of the Year.” The gravity of the legal situation didn’t begin to show until February of 2005, when Lepp was raided and arrested yet again. But things were a little different with this bust. In addition to adding a few thousand more plants to the evidence vault, the 2005 operation also included a law enforcement sting aimed at securing a marijuana sales charge.
The case quickly became more complicated. This time around, Lepp was held without bail for a series of months in Santa Rita County Jail. There, substandard conditions and an accidental fall eroded his health until bail was finally granted in late April 2005. The sales charge also introduced a co-defendant to the case – a young man named Daniel Barnes who stands accused of delivering the marijuana that was allegedly purchased from Lepp during the sting. This episode is one of the most fascinating parts of the government’s case, and in Judge Patel’s view, it’s also one of the most suspect.
Although she has yet to declare governmental misconduct, Judge Patel is highly skeptical of the tactics used in the sting operation…and she is not shy about voicing her concerns. During a recent hearing, she summarized the accusations arising from this bust and urged their careful examination at the evidentiary level. As Judge Patel recounted, the informant used in the sting visited Lepp in order to sell him photographs of his earlier bust. Lepp had hoped to use these pictures in court against the government, claiming that agents illegally transported uncovered truckloads of the marijuana plants they seized from his fields. Lepp got much more than he expected, however, when the informant pushed beyond the sale of photographs and attempted to arrange the purchase of a pound of marijuana.
The Lepp home sits atop a hill in Upper Lake, CA, overlooking State Highway 20
Given previous descriptions that the defendant grew marijuana openly, the judge wondered aloud why the informant didn’t report witnessing cultivation firsthand and instead resorted to what she termed “the rouse with the photographs.” When Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall could provide little more than a shrug in response, Judge Patel began questioning the essential purpose of the sting operation. Hall maintained that the government acted to investigate violations of the defendant’s supervised release, and stated that they have the right to undertake such investigations.
Judge Patel frowned at his answer. “At what point, does this thing – given the situation, that it’s a sting operation and that no one just went and arrested him for his violations – at what point does this become governmental misconduct?” she asked. “No one’s addressed that.”
“I don’t think it ever has,” Hall said coolly. “The government has an interest in new and additional crimes. Investigating these sometimes puts under surveillance people already under indictment.”
“Investigation, surveillance -- no one’s saying it can’t be done,” the judge followed up. “Some restraint needs to be used. Find someone who’s buying and get the necessary information. But to set up the kind of rouse that was set up, where [Lepp] would be put in the situation to make the transaction, some of that may be overreaching.”
The prosecutor struggled to back up his claims, turning to the alibi of public safety. “To exclude evidence would frustrate the public interest in investigating charges,” he asserted.
Judge Patel wasn’t buying it. “No one is arguing about your right to surveil or investigate. We’re talking about a sting operation here. It’s quite a different thing, without which the government would not have had that particular arrest.” She paused here, emphasizing the need for further scrutiny of the tactics used. “There is a point where government conduct becomes misconduct. It is disturbing that the government is out there with a sting operation with someone who’s (already) being targeted.”
Although the judge had weighty concerns on this issue, the matter before her at the moment was the significance and validity of the search warrants. As she turned to address the warrants, Judge Patel had some parting words about her suspicions of misconduct. “I think it’s a serious problem. If you don’t see that it’s a serious problem, that concerns me,” she said pointedly to Hall.
It was easy to imagine why the judge would appear perturbed by the case before her. By all predictions, it was primed for resolution a year ago. Throwing out the 2004 warrant had started a domino effect – the 2005 warrant had been obtained using the same affidavit, and so it appeared quite likely that evidence from this second bust would get tossed as well. Lepp seemed to be sailing straight towards a dismissal of his case, and Judge Patel looked perfectly happy to throw him a kiss goodbye.
There was just one little snag, however, and it came from Hall himself. As soon as the 2004 warrant was invalidated, the prosecutor argued that he didn’t need a warrant to keep the plants in evidence. According to Hall, the government could still use the evidence from the bust because it had been in plain sight from a public highway. This claim, called the open fields doctrine, would supposedly legitimize the seizure of 25 acres’ worth of marijuana without a warrant.
At the time, Judge Patel didn’t take the prosecutor’s theory seriously. Having heard nothing to support the open field doctrine, the judge acted astounded and asked what evidence would be used to prove the claim. When the prosecutor answered that he planned to present a newspaper photo, Judge Patel almost laughed him out of the courtroom.
“What does that prove?” she snorted. “You can’t tell where it was taken from or even what it’s a picture of. I am mystified as to how we are proceeding in this manner. I want to see evidence, not hear your argument. The time is over for all of this.”
Hall pressed for an evidentiary hearing nonetheless, and Judge Patel seemed repulsed by the idea. “I think you oughta be stopped right here,” she told the prosecutor. “I don’t want to have officers lying on the stand about what they saw and have to second-guess them.”
But on September 5th, 2007, that’s exactly what the judge got.
Hall was determined to present law enforcement testimony that Lepp’s marijuana plants had been in plain view from Highway 20, and he pursued an evidentiary hearing on the matter. It was a tall order, since the government had no record of any such statements from the investigating officers, but after nine months Hall had rounded up his witnesses. He appeared nervous at the outset, mumbling and stuttering, forgetting the questions that had been asked of him, and, on one occasion, loudly knocking over his microphone.
Marc Macanga, the case agent for the 2004 search, was the first witness called to the stand. He was a moderately tall man with thin gray hair receding from his forehead and small eyes tucked underneath. His first order of business was to be sworn in. After that, the prosecutor went straight to the matter at hand, eliciting a declaration from Macanga that he saw Lepp’s fields from the highway on the day of the search. And the contents of those fields? “Rows and rows of what appeared to be marijuana plants,” Macanga answered obediently.
The agent went on to testify that newspaper and television reporters came to the fields to watch the eradication, and he witnessed reporters taking pictures from the road. When shown a photo of the scene taken by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Macanga agreed with the prosecutor that the picture was a fair and accurate depiction of the way the fields looked when viewed from Highway 20. Things weren’t looking good for Lepp, but it was still early in the game.
Gaining confidence, Hall presented a photograph taken during flyover surveillance of the area. The prosecutor handed the picture over to the defense table for review, but when Lepp got a look at it, he shook his head and whispered to his attorneys, “This isn’t my property.”
Upon examination, Macanga acknowledged this concern. “The lower portion of the page depicts a farm and a property that isn’t associated with Mr. Lepp. I believe it’s a strawberry farm.”
That revelation threw some doubt into the equation. Could the vegetation Macanga saw from the highway been strawberry plants that he mistook for marijuana? Concerned about this uncertainty, Hall had his witness assure the judge that he could tell the difference between strawberry plants and marijuana plants. Macanga’s explanation, however, was not perfectly solid. “I have not observed strawberry plants much,” he admitted, “but I know they have a different color and size. I have seen marijuana plants many, many times. I know from experience.”
Macanga described an area near the highway containing small plants, which were approximately a foot in height. Farther back in the field, he recalled, there were plants that were up eight feet tall, and he declared that these plants could also be seen from the highway. When Hall asked how far back the large plants were from the highway, Macanga estimated the distance to be 75 yards.
It was an answer defense attorney Lidia Stiglich was quick to attack during cross-examination, creating the defense’s first opportunity to discredit the witness. At first, Macanga claimed he could not recall testifying before a grand jury on this subject, but Stiglich quickly produced the transcripts of the proceedings. After a glance through the pages, Macanga was forced to acknowledge that he had previously testified that the plants were between 150 and 200 yards from the side of the road. The agent could offer no explanation for the variance between his earlier testimony and his current estimate.
He also had little to say when questioned by Stiglich about the affidavit he prepared for the search warrant in 2004. The defense attorney wanted to know why the agent had failed to mention in this document that marijuana plants were visible from the highway. As she noted, these observations were not put in the affidavit or any contemporaneous written reports. Even after doing an aerial flyover of Lepp’s property in May 2004, Macanga’s written observations made no mention of marijuana plants growing in the field. In fact, Macanga claimed he didn’t know there was marijuana in the field at all until a fellow agent mentioned it to him during the search of the property.
Alongside the strawberry farm of his neighbors, Lepp's field now sits empty
Stiglich’s point was clear: if marijuana plants could be seen openly from the road, why didn’t this officer notice them? He had investigated the case enough to write the affidavit for the search warrant, and had even done aerial surveillance of the property, but he still didn’t see the plants in the field until the search was being conducted and another agent told him where to look. With surprising agility and speed, Stiglich had extracted some compelling admissions from the witness. She took her seat again, coolly and primly, without the appearance of having so much as broken a sweat.
On redirect, Hall tried to salvage what he could. He attempted to coax from Macanga any and all reasons why the agent might not have seen the plants that were supposedly visible from the highway. “I wasn’t looking there,” Macanga explained to the prosecutor. “I was looking across the road at the house. The information from the confidential source directed me to a parcel described on a hilltop. This led us to Mr. Lepp’s house with the sign. This led me to concentrate on the residential property.”
Stiglich wasn’t satisfied with these excuses. Given another go at the witness, she got him to admit that he had been to the assessor’s office by the time he made the visit in question. “So you knew that Mr. Lepp had property on both sides of Highway 20?” she asked.
“Yes,” Macanga answered. He offered no further reasoning for his failure to make written observations about the field, and Stiglich didn’t press. The silence was louder and made more powerful insinuations than she could by badgering the witness.
The defense attorney did, however, press one more time for an explanation about the discrepancy in his testimony about the distance from the plants to the highway. Why had he given such a different answer to the grand jury? Macanga started to answer, but quickly predicted a losing battle and dug in his heels. “I wanted to make my best estimate, and furthermore…I’m done.”
Stiglich let him be, and Macanga was dismissed from the stand. He seemed happy to go, and was replaced almost immediately by another prosecution witness – David Garzoli, a sergeant in the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. Garzoli appeared slightly shorter and stockier than Macanga, though the two shared a similar head of thinning gray hair. Garzoli, however, had adopted the more hip style of keeping his balding head shaved smooth.
Hall led the sergeant first through a lengthy description of the experience he had gained from over seventeen years with the sheriff’s department. Garzoli detailed six years of service in a marijuana suppression unit, assignments to conferences for the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP), and logging hundreds of hours of overflight surveillance operations involving open field areas.
As the prosecutor questioned him, Garzoli described driving down Highway 20 on August 9th, 2004. This date was approximately a week before the raid on the property, and Hall was anxious to know if the sergeant had seen anything unusual while passing Lepp’s property. “A large agricultural field covered in marijuana,” Garzoli said, leaning close to the microphone for full clarity. “It was planted with marijuana as though it was any other agricultural product.”
Hall presented a photograph marked as Exhibit O, asking the witness how the picture compared to what he had seen during the day in question. Before Garzoli could answer, however, Judge Patel interrupted in a tone of annoyance, pointing out that the date printed on the photo had been hole-punched out. It took some cross-checking and confirmation, but both sides eventually agreed that, before the unfortunate encounter with the hole-puncher, the date on the photo had been August 18th, 2004.
Garzoli pronounced the photo to be an accurate representation of what he had seen the week before. He added, at the prosecutor’s urging, that tens of thousands of plants could be seen plainly from the highway. Even though he had not taken the photo or observed the photo being taken, Garzoli went on to tell the prosecutor that the cameraman had photographed the field while standing on the side of Highway 20. The sergeant based this statement on knowledge he had gained from living and working in the area all his life. Also, he claimed, he had additional perspective because had been to Lepp’s house on prior occasions. That revelation, which was never fleshed out in his testimony, raised a few curious eyebrows in the courtroom.
Hall then guided the sergeant back to a description of the events of August 9th, 2004, and Garzoli detailed the excursion he took onto Lepp’s property that day. He recalled driving off Highway 20 and onto the dirt roads that surround the fields. Unobstructed, he continued around the full perimeter and then back out onto Highway 20, affording him plenty of time and various angles from which to view Lepp’s land.
The road itself may not have been obstructed, but Garzoli’s driving tour did not go without interruption. As it turned out, the sergeant was driving on private roads, perusing the Lepp property without invitation or permission. Fieldhands alerted Lepp, who quickly came down from the residence to assess the situation.
At this point in his testimony, Garzoli was asked to identify Lepp in the courtroom. “He’s wearing a green shirt,” the sergeant said simply.
Judge Patel squinted at Lepp, leaning forward. “What’s that embossed on the shirt?” she asked.
Lepp was direct, answering simply in his deep, calm voice, “A marijuana leaf.”
A man of principle, Eddy Lepp is not intimidated by law enforcement
The judge gave a sly smile back to the defendant. “That’s what I thought,” she said with a chuckle. But Judge Patel’s good humor did not last long. During the witness’s next statements, she became perturbed enough to strike several lines from the record of his testimony.
Describing his encounter with Lepp that day, Garzoli started out by recalling some smalltalk. “I saw he was doing some remodeling, and I told him he must be doing well, to which he said, ‘I’m rolling in it, Dave.’”
Judge Patel looked aghast. “That’s all going to be stricken,” she declared, breaking in. “I don’t know where you were going with that.”
Hall then turned to a different line of questioning, asking the sergeant if others driving on the highway had been able to plainly see the fields of marijuana plants. Garzoli was unambiguous in his response. “Anyone who drove by from the south,” he speculated. “It was quite a running joke downtown that there was a big marijuana farm growing off the side of Highway 20 in Upper Lake, and no one was doing anything about it.”
Stiglich seized on this statement during her cross-examination, confirming that Garzoli hadn’t written down these citizen observations in any of the reports he prepared at the time. The defense attorney got the sergeant to admit that he didn’t write down any of these statements until just a year ago, when the 2004 warrant had been already thrown out and the prosecutor had embarked on arguing the open fields doctrine. It was then that Hall asked Garzoli to give a declaration that marijuana could be seen from the side of the road, and that’s precisely what Garzoli provided. Through question after question, Stiglich made it glaringly obvious that there was nothing in the records of the sergeant’s previous reports to back up the tale he was now telling about the “running joke downtown.”
The defense attorney didn’t let the sergeant slide on the trespassing issue either. When asked about the fence that separated Lepp’s property from Highway 20, Garzoli claimed to draw a blank. Stiglich, poised and prepared, was ready with a photo exhibit once again. After looking it over, the sergeant admitted that the picture refreshed his recollection that there had been a fence.
“So you knew it was private property?” Stiglich inquired.
Garzoli said that he did, and the defense attorney pushed further. “And you didn’t seek anyone’s permission to enter the property?” she asked the witness.
“No,” the sergeant told her plainly, without explanation.
Stiglich then asked questions about the plants Garzoli was able to observe on August 9th, 2004. According to him, the plants in front parcel of the field were 12 to 18 inches tall, and they had been planted between 50 to 100 yards away from the highway. Behind the smaller plants, just as Macanga had recounted, Garzoli described a great number of larger plants. “I recall it being a sea of green,” said the sergeant.
Judge Patel had some questions of her own for the witness, first asking how often he passed by the Lepp property. Garzoli confessed that he rarely drove that route, and the judge got down to her point. “Did you see marijuana growing there before August 9th?” she asked.
Garzoli’s response was peculiar. He gave a reply that appeared to satisfy the inquiry, without directly answering the question. “It was always a habit to look up at Eddy’s house and see marijuana growing at his house – that’s what I did,” he said.
Judge Patel then asked if the plants would have caught Garzoli’s attention even if he hadn’t known Lepp was growing marijuana. The sergeant was certain in his response, giving an unequivocal “yes.” To explain his position, he reiterated the details about his training and experience that he had disclosed at the beginning of his testimony.
“For six years of my life, that’s all I did was fly around and look at marijuana,” Garzoli told the judge. “Any other person might have written it off as any other agricultural crop.”
The sergeant was then dismissed from the stand, yielding the space to the next witness. Private investigator Tim O’Brien was then sworn in, but his time in the witness seat was remarkably short. The tall, sandy-haired fellow smiled his way through simple, factual questions about recent pictures he had been hired to take of the Lepp property. Judge Patel looked through these contemporary photos, but grew impatient while viewing video footage of the fields. Dismissing O’Brien from the stand, the judge promised to privately review the entire length of the video at a later time.
“We don’t need to sit here for 35 minutes,” she said, even though the day’s proceedings had already filled up the morning hours and spilled over into the afternoon.
The final witness to take the stand was Brandon Burkhart, the case agent whose surveillance operations provided information for the 2005 search warrant. He carried himself as a man with a casual demeanor, and although his mouth naturally slanted into a frown, it still somehow conveyed a certain affability. Under direct examination from the prosecutor, Burkhart described what he observed during an aerial flyover he had done for this case in November 2004. That was just three months after the massive DEA raid had cleared an estimated 32,524 plants from Lepp’s fields, and well past harvest-time for outdoor marijuana. For these reasons, Burkhart was surprised to see what appeared to be rows of marijuana plants while he was doing the flyover operation.
It was all very confusing for the case agent, who explained on the stand how he wrote up the report of the aerial surveillance mission. “All we said on November 19th was that we saw what we believed were marijuana plants on the edge of his property, and it shows continuing cultivation.”
That would be a set of perfectly reasonable assumptions, provided, of course, that the agent knew which land belonged to Lepp and which land did not. Without the aid of professional surveyors, Burkhart had attempted to visually estimate property boundaries while six thousand feet in the air and looking through the disorienting zoom lens on a camera. “We were trying to determine through photographs what the property lines would be,” he testified, as the judge and the attorneys squinted and tilted their heads at the photo exhibits from his surveillance.
One of the pictures, it turned out, was initially displayed upside down by the prosecutor. Even when turned to its proper angle, however, it made little difference as far as comprehension went. “It looks to be more like an impressionistic painting,” the judge quipped.
Defense attorney Michael Hinckley took the cross-examination of Burkhart, quickly eliciting an admission from the agent that he had gotten the property lines confused. During the flyover, this error had caused Burkhart to mistake land belonging to Lepp’s neighbor as land belonging to Lepp himself. The conclusions drawn from this surveillance, though incorrect, then became part of the affidavit used to secure the search warrant for Lepp’s 2005 raid.
“How did you clarify where the property lines ended?” Hinckley asked.
“I used the parcel map from the assessor’s office,” the witness explained. “But the fence was a different direction, which I didn’t realize, so I drew the property line wrong.”
In the air, Burkhart revealed, there wasn’t much opportunity for careful examination. It was a pressured situation for the agent, who had great difficulty getting the shots he wanted, and was eager not to attract too much attention to himself in the process.
“We had to make four passes to get the photos we wanted. We didn’t want to stay any longer because people were coming outside.” On the stand, Burkhart displayed some anxiety about this development, visibly distressed by the moment the observer had suddenly become the observed.
Still, the agent stood by his attempt. Eager for someone to give him an A for effort, Burkhart told the court over and over again how hard he had tried to get the right photos. “It’s difficult to actually get a specific angle when you’re in the air. It’s harder than it sounds.” Such pleas were often followed by admissions of his ignorance. “It doesn’t line up right, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
Hinckley wasn’t satisfied, throwing the agent off balance with continual insinuations that he had been negligent. “Why didn’t you do measurements?” the defense attorney asked.
Linda Senti died in her husband's arms on November 25th, 2007
Burkhart’s answer to this question was novel, a deviation from his typical pattern of responses. “I was told not to associate or confer, that there were people sympathetic to Mr. Lepp up there and I shouldn’t go to a surveyor for this reason,” the agent told Hinckley. It conjured up the image of an entire county being deeply enamored with Lepp, and wholeheartedly dedicated to disguising, concealing, or falsifying information to shield him.
Judge Patel cut in at this point, disrupting the vision of a protective community rallying around the defendant. Assuming no one unbiased could be found in Lake County, she wanted to know why Burkhart didn’t hire a surveyor from another county.
“I didn’t think it would help me,” the agent said simply. “I thought I had it right.”
Judge Patel sighed at the response, mumbling, “Oh, I think we’ve beat that horse.” Her speech and body language indicated that she had heard enough, and the attorneys on both sides finished up their questioning.
Before retiring, Judge Patel stated that she would consider all that she had heard, and if she decided that the evidence was in plain view from the highway, the fruits of the 2004 search would continue to be used against Lepp. If not, he would face prosecution for the 2005 bust only. Either way, future hearings would address evidentiary issues regarding possible governmental conduct and 6th Amendment violations. Or, as the judge hinted, Lepp’s life might have another sudden change of fate.
Wrapping things up, Judge Patel cocked her head and smirked. “My offer’s still open – if Mr. Lepp wants to go to Amsterdam…and not come back…”
From the defense table, Lepp shot the judge a winning grin, but both of them knew it was purely humor. Quitting on a battle of principle is antithetical to Lepp and all he represents – when an issue matters to him, he is sure to push the proverbial envelope…or, more accurately, to aggressively shove the envelope. One needs only remember that his first job, at the tender age of 12, was at a guard dog training
During his wife's memorial, Eddy released balloons that symbolized the years he spent with her
company where he was given the task of inciting the canines to attack. There is no compromise in Lepp’s agenda, and he refuses to be bullied by the country he fought to protect. “The only way we ever effectively create change is to force change,” Lepp is fond of saying.
His strength and composure have carried him through many obstacles, with his beloved wife fighting at his side. But on November 25th, 2007, he held her in his arms and said goodbye. The return of her thyroid cancer had been deadly, and the suffering she endured was acute. Before she lost consciousness, while she still had the capacity to speak, Linda Senti shared her final thoughts with her husband. According to Lepp, amongst some of the last wishes she conveyed to him were words of solid determination.
“She said, ‘Don’t give up. Don’t let the sons of bitches win,’” Lepp recalled, smiling with wet-eyed pride.
It’s difficult to imagine Lepp folding his hand, even with the stakes so incredibly high. He has stood to lose house and home, his land and his loved ones, and his personal freedom for the rest of his natural life. Nonetheless, his vision has remained clear, unshaken. With serenity and composure, he contemplates all the consequences.
“Given the right mental outlook, incarceration can be survived without destroying a man,” he says.
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