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SACRAMENTO, CA -- Medical marijuana patient Matthew Zugsberger has an unusual reason for possessing three pounds of pot at the Sacramento International Airport on December 4th, 2008.
He says he was attempting to take his personal stash to Louisiana, where he planned to have his ex-wife use her culinary training to cook up a variety of pot-infused foods for him to take back home and eat.
No doubt this plan is curious and oddly labor-intensive. But is it criminal?
That’s what Deputy District Attorney Satnam Rattu claimed during closing arguments in Zugsberger’s trial yesterday afternoon. Although he lacked any conclusive proof of sales, Rattu appealed to jurors to use their common sense to find Zugsberger guilty of possession with the intent to sell and the illegal transportation of marijuana.
The prosecutor’s closing speech retraced the basic facts of his case in a tidy PowerPoint presentation, including testimony from police officers who found bricks of marijuana wrapped up in Zugsberger’s luggage and on his person. However, since Zugsberger admitted that he had three pounds of marijuana in his possession at the time, much of this testimony was a formality. Rattu’s case therefore relied heavily on the opinions of his expert witness Detective Lannom, who testified that Zugsberger’s marijuana was likely intended for sale since it would fetch a higher asking price when transported eastward to Louisiana.
“It’s not just three pounds of marijuana,” Rattu said in closing. “It was three pounds of marijuana being taken across the country. It was three pounds of marijuana being concealed.”
Zugsberger testified that he concealed the marijuana to prevent it from being stolen, but Rattu didn’t buy the explanation. It was hidden, according to the prosecutor, because it was being illegally smuggled. “You take California marijuana to New Orleans, and you’ve got an expensive product,” Rattu told the jury yesterday.
The prosecutor also reviewed some unusual mathematics concocted by the expert witness in an attempt to demonstrate that Zugsberger possessed more marijuana than was necessary for his own personal use. For instance, the detective calculated that it would take Zugsberger a year and a half to go through three pounds of marijuana if he smoked one joint every two hours around the clock.
There were a couple obvious problems with Lannom’s numbers. First off, they relied on the debatable assumption that a joint is composed of only 0.2 grams of marijuana. Secondly, they ignored the realities of Zugsberger’s preferred method of ingestion. The detective himself acknowledged that people who eat marijuana, as opposed to smoking it, require greater quantities. However, he also testified that he doubted Zugsberger’s marijuana was intended for the production of edibles because it was “high quality,” whereas marijuana processed into food is usually lower-quality “shake.”
It turned out that Rattu’s closing arguments relied just as heavily on discrediting Zugsberger’s expert witness as they did on reinforcing the testimony of his own expert.
When defense witness Chris Conrad took the stand on Tuesday, the prosecutor took him through a lengthy cross-examination. Rattu devoted even more time to Conrad yesterday, spending nearly half the time for his closing arguments addressing the credibility of the defense’s expert.
Although it didn’t seem to bother Rattu that his own expert witness was not a medical doctor, the prosecutor counted Conrad’s lack of a medical degree against him during yesterday’s arguments. Similarly suspect was Conrad’s position as an instructor at Oaksterdam University, since the school supposedly focused on teaching students how to be part of the marijuana industry.
The prosecutor also reminded the jury of Conrad’s testimony about an essay in which he coined the term “Cantheism” to describe a set of practices common amongst various world religions that use marijuana as a sacrament. “He created a religion about the use of marijuana!” Rattu emphasized. “I don’t know how much credibility you can give to a person like that.”
Perhaps attempting to use humor in his favor, the prosecutor employed comical images taken from the internet to make some of his points about Conrad.
 “I think it’s clear Christopher Conrad is a very big proponent of legalization,” Rattu said to the jury. “This is what he wants to see on every corner, available to everyone,” the prosecutor continued, flashing on the display screen an image of the McDonald’s sign recast in green to read ‘Marijuana.’
Although the stunt used images intended for humor, Rattu seemed so much in earnest that his demeanor clashed with the frivolity and created an odd effect. Most observers appeared more bewildered than tickled, but the prosecutor went for a repeat performance nonetheless. “If Christopher Conrad was a superhero, he would be ‘Marijuana Man,’” Rattu declared, presenting to the jury a drawing of a comic book marijuana superhero in the style of Simpsons creator Matt Groening.
If jurors were a bit perplexed about what these gags had to do with the charges against Zugsberger, it was understandable. But Rattu quickly got down to his point, which was that Conrad believed so obsessively in legalizing marijuana that his passion would bias him in favor of Zugsberger and make him inclined to give whatever opinion of the case benefited the defendant. In addition, Rattu argued that the fact that Conrad was paid by the defense to testify further reinforced this bias. “For $1500 a day, he’s going to come in and say whatever you want him to say,” the prosecutor said of Conrad.
Furthermore, Rattu recalled a statement by Conrad about earning $140,000 per year from testifying and consulting on marijuana court cases. “Mr. Conrad had 140,000 reasons to come in here and say what he said,” the prosecutor quipped.
According to Rattu’s assessment, Conrad would be inclined to issue an opinion that marijuana was intended for sale only if he personally caught the seller red-handed in the transaction. “The world doesn’t work that way,” the prosecutor scoffed.
Rattu also referenced a question he put to Conrad about how much marijuana would be an indication of intended sales, if he were to go by weight alone. Conrad had replied that it was hard to justify the personal use of a quantity like thirty to fifty pounds of marijuana, which Rattu apparently regarded as an outrageous answer. The prosecutor then gathered up all the marijuana in evidence that had been seized from Zugsberger, setting it on the table in front of the jury box and asking the jurors to imagine a quantity more than fifteen times that size. This might have been a more impressive visual example if the defendant had not packed the marijuana so compactly. As it was, a few paper lunchbags full of pot made no very dramatic appearance of bulk. Still, Rattu made exclamations of overwhelm. “That’s obscene!” he said after urging the jury to envision what fifty pounds of marijuana would look like.
Of course, Rattu maintained that just three pounds was simply too much for personal use. In doing so, the prosecutor had to counter a letter from Dr. Milan Hopkins that specified a yearly amount of twenty-five plants and five pounds of marijuana. However, the letter was easily contested because it was written to apply to any of the doctor’s patients and because Dr. Hopkins did not come to court to specify the amount appropriate for the defendant’s personal use.
The prosecutor’s closing argument also reminded jurors that Zugsberger had told various law enforcement agents that he had cancer, a claim Rattu clearly didn’t buy. “The recommendation that was given said nothing about cancer,” the prosecutor asserted.
Although Zugsberger acknowledged his medical marijuana recommendation was for back pain, he also testified that a Florida oncologist told him he had a cancerous growth on his vertebrae. During the trial, Rattu had done his best to diminish the talk of cancer by getting Zugsberger to admit that he had not had a biopsy to confirm the diagnosis and that he had not undergone cancer treatments. The prosecutor didn’t accept the defendant’s offer to show the court the protrusive growth on his back, and the claim that he hadn’t gotten cancer treatments because he’d spent all his money on a legal defense was stricken from the record. Addressing the jury during his closing, Rattu returned to this subject, saying, “To play the cancer card is offensive … to claim terminal illness to get out of trouble.”
Zugsberger hadn’t gotten out of trouble, though. There were no lists of transactions or pay-owe sheets, no pre-packaged commercial amounts, no evidence of potential buyers or admissions of sales, but Zugsberger was nonetheless charged with possession for sale. Counting against him was only the quantity and the theories constructed around his circumstances. According to the prosecutor, three pounds was simply far too much marijuana for any person to have at one time.
Even if Zugsberger actually did use five pounds of marijuana per year, Rattu told the jury yesterday, it was still unreasonable to possess three pounds. “You don’t need three pounds at once,” Rattu argued. “There’s absolutely no need for that.”
Also unreasonable, according to the prosecutor, was Zugsberger’s story about his intended use for the marijuana. To Rattu, it seemed like an awful lot of trouble to pack up pounds of marijuana and take it across the country only to make edible products that would then have to be transported back home. The prosecutor cited evidence of Zugsberger’s frequent airline travel, as well as the details of a previous case in which he was stopped with five pounds of marijuana and a digital scale. Rattu then asked the jurors to critically question whether the defendant was really just the victim of circumstance, or whether he was abusing the state’s medical marijuana law in an attempt at personal gain.
“There’s a law in place to help people out,” the prosecutor said of California’s Compassionate Use Act. “Some people abuse that law. This is a simple case of abuse.”
Concluding his arguments, Rattu returned to the same basic rhetoric he used to address the jurors at the beginning of the trial. “It’s too much marijuana,” the prosecutor said. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
With closing arguments from the defense expected today, the jury will soon be given the opportunity to decide the matter for themselves.
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Like any other medication different patients require more cannabis than others. Likewise— and this is the biggest weakness in the prosecution case— eating marijuana requires a much higher dose than smoking.
Deputy DA Rattu should find some real crimes to prosecute— like burglary, car theft, assault, rape, armed robbery, child molesting, kidnapping and murder.