OAKLAND, CA -- After a fortnight of soul-searching, Jessica Sanders has decided that she will not fight the federal felony charge stemming from her employment with medical marijuana candymaker Tainted Inc.
Instead, Sanders signed and accepted a plea bargain in court yesterday, finalizing what was a very difficult choice. Her role in the business had been a minor one – she took the phone orders for Tainted Inc.’s marijuana-infused food products – but she was charged with a felony nonetheless. At the time of her arraignment, she felt inclined to take a plea bargain and get the case resolved as soon as possible. But shortly afterward, she began to consider the possibility of going to trial and fighting her charge. A felony conviction, after all, carries a slew of grave consequences, and Sanders had to be sure that she could accept this fate.
The change of plea was initially scheduled to take place earlier this month, but Sanders postponed the hearing for two weeks in order to have more time to consider her choice. In the end, she decided, her best option was to take a plea deal and hope for leniency at sentencing. Her chances at trial, she ultimately concluded, were slim and far too likely to land her with a sentence of several years in prison.
“I was sad to take a guilty plea, but that’s what I did,” she said, offering a pained smile.
Sanders had been hired to take phone orders for Tainted Inc.’s products, acting as an order clerk and a secretary. She did her job well, and in most instances, good performance is expected to bring advancement and success. In her case, however, it brought negative consequences beyond what she had imagined.
Last September, after less than a year on the job, Sanders’s employment was abruptly interrupted. Two federal agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Food & Drug Administration, orchestrated a series of searches and arrests relating to the operations of Tainted Inc. Sanders was targeted in this raid, along with three other individuals associated with the business. In an instant, everything in her world was in peril – her job, her freedom, her hopes for the future, and, yes, even her dog.
Doobie, her pet Doberman, was shot and nearly killed by a DEA agent during the searches. With grave injuries in her shoulder and chest, Doobie spent months unable to walk. “She had to be carried everywhere,” Sanders said. It was so sad.” But before Doobie will be given the treatment she needs to fully recover her mobility, Sanders is required to pay off the veterinary bills incurred from the immediate treatment of the wounds. This burden is just part of the financial and emotional fallout from the raid, and something Sanders certainly hadn’t anticipated when she was hired at Tainted Inc. “It was about helping people,” she said of the business.
The company has undergone many transformations since its inception, with name changes taking it from the original Tainted Truffles to the current Compassion Medicinal Edibles, but the mission has remained the same. Tainted Inc. made marijuana-infused food for those who have a physician’s approval for its consumption. While California law allows for such medical use, the federal government refuses to recognize state protections and enforces a blanket prohibition on marijuana. And it’s in the clash of these conflicting laws that the employees of Tainted Inc. have been caught.
“Tainting candy and other products with marijuana is not sweet – it is criminal,” DEA Special Agent Javier Pena announced following the raid, saying the effort was the culmination of two years’ worth of investigation.
As it turned out, the DEA’s scrutiny of Tainted Inc. was intensified by the case of a merchant marine who blamed the medical marijuana edibles when he came out positive for THC after a random drug test. He claimed that he had accidentally ingested food containing THC, and as evidence presented Tainted Inc.’s marijuana-laced candy bars. These products had wrappers that imitated the label design and names of popular mainstream candy bars – “Snickers” was called “Stoners,” “Reeses’s” was re-christened as “Reefer’s,” and “Butterfinger” got the new name “Buddafinga.”
Tainted Inc. had discontinued this labeling prior to the raid, but the company’s identity nevertheless appears to be inextricably linked to the parodies. They were brought up in every DEA press release and at nearly every court appearance in the case. Since the bust was made a month before Halloween, images of the mimicked candy bars and the repetition of the parodied names served to escalate a public fear that children might receive marijuana-laced candy while trick-or-treating.
Jessica Sanders and Mickey Martin
But Halloween came and passed, and the four people arrested in the bust had still not been charged. It took until after the next candy-focused holiday, Valentine’s Day, for the defendants to finally be arraigned. At that point, the group was split – Sanders and Tainted Inc. operator Michael “Mickey” Martin were charged with felonies, while Michael Anderson and Diallo McLinn were left facing only misdemeanor counts.
For his role in making deliveries of Tainted Inc.’s products, McLinn pled guilty to a charge of “aiding and abetting the possession of marijuana.” At a sentencing hearing last week, he was sentenced to two years of probation and a $25 special assessment. A similar outcome is expected for co-defendant Anderson, who has flown from his hometown in Georgia to accept a plea deal today.
With Martin and Sanders, however, the penalties are more serious.
Martin pled guilty last month to a single felony count of conspiracy to manufacture a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of marijuana. The felony conviction will brand the mark of criminality on the young father, preventing certain types of employment as well as removing voting rights and access to financial aid programs from the government. He has also been hit with forfeiture, losing his truck, some equipment associated with his business, and the currency that was seized during the raid.
Martin’s sentencing, which is scheduled for July 2nd, will determine whether he will serve time in prison as well. His charge carries a maximum penalty of five years of incarceration and $250,000, but the judge will ultimately have the discretion of how much time to impose. For his sake, as well as that of his wife and two young sons, Martin is hoping to serve his term on house arrest rather than behind bars.
Sanders is wishing for the same outcome in her own case. Still, the decision she had agonized over for so long almost didn’t go through yesterday. Due to what her attorney Randy Darr called a “bureaucratic snafu,” nobody in the courtroom had an official copy of the plea agreement that Sanders was finally ready to sign. It was a problem precipitated, it seemed, by shifts in staff in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oakland. The Tainted Inc. case had hit the courts during a time of a systemic switchover of prosecutors.
While Sanders and her supporters waited for an acceptable copy of her plea agreement to materialize as promised, Judge Claudia Wilken heard the other case on her calendar for that afternoon. It was a man who had possessed over five grams of crack cocaine and who had also committed multiple robberies. One of these was a bank robbery, but both involved the same tactics that Judge Wilken described as “violent” – tying up his victims and then dragging them around the floor during the ordeal. It was uncertain to the prosecutor whether there had been a real firearm, however, since the gun used in the robbery had never been found. Several such issues remained to be resolved, but the defendant was looking at a term of at least twelve years in prison.
Oakland Court
Soon after this hearing, an acceptable version of Sanders’s plea agreement was presented, even though it was still just a draft with handwritten notes on it. All parties agreed to review and initial the alterations on this edited copy, and the hearing proceeded. When the elements of the charge against Sanders were read, however, the contrast between her case and the previous one became conspicuous. An awkward pause followed the prosecutor’s two short sentences: that Sanders had knowingly or intentionally used a communication facility to distribute a mixture or substance containing the schedule I controlled substance marijuana.
“Is that it?” Judge Wilken asked during the pause. “Those are all the elements of the charge?”
Once this was confirmed, the judge took the defendant through the standard questioning required for a change of plea. Sanders revealed that she was 30 years old, that she was not under the influence of any drug that impaired her comprehension, and that she felt she had been represented adequately by her attorney. She also answered that her education level was “very close to obtaining an Associate’s Degree,” a reply that seemed all the more unfortunate given that her acceptance of a felony conviction would bar her from receiving any future financial aid from the government.
Outraged by this injustice, Martin is hatching a plan to help his co-defendant. He wants to create a scholarship program to be called the Sanders Educational Fund, as an effort to make up for the aid that’s lost by Sanders and other students like her. The donation-supported fund would, he said, “go to educating someone who has been wrongfully convicted due to the disparity between state and federal laws.” In the meantime, however, Sanders’s psychology degree is so close but so far away.
At the podium, she stood with her hands folded placidly in front of her and answered the judge’s questions with a polite smile. When the time finally came, she gave a guilty plea to the facts of her charge: that on July 11th, 2007, while working at a company called Tainted Truffles, she used a telephone to distribute seven kilograms of a substance containing a detectible amount of THC. It was now official – Jessica Sanders had become a convicted felon.
But she was a convicted felon yet to be sentenced, and the court wrangled for a few minutes over setting a date for those proceedings. Judge Wilken wanted to sentence both Sanders and Martin at the same time, but this intention was thwarted by the fact that Sanders was unavailable on Martin’s scheduled sentencing date of July 2nd. The judge tentatively settled on July 9th as an alternate, but was so insistent that the co-defendants be sentenced together that she has requested Martin’s hearing to be moved to this date as well. Whether or not that will happen is yet to be decided.
Outside the courtroom, the mood was warm and caring. About a dozen people had gathered to watch the proceedings and give Sanders moral support. One of them told her that Tainted Inc. had set a high standard that is now being applied to all other medical marijuana edible products, suggesting that the company had left a legacy of quality and safety. There were hugs and there were assurances, and there were the parting words to Sanders, “Remember – you aren’t a criminal.”
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