Last month I
noted that a visit to an indoor gardening store plus wet tea
leaves in your trash can earn you an early-morning visit by
rifle-wielding agents of the state. In addition to drinking tea, a
fondness for hibiscus (perhaps to put in your tea) can make you
look like a felon to cops with too much time on their hands, as
Angela Kirking discovered
last fall. Four DEA agents and five local police officers burst
into Kirking’s Sherwood, Illinois, home around 5 a.m. on October
11, looking for a marijuana grow. Instead they found 9.3 grams of
pot (less than a third of an ounce) and three glass pipes. Kirking,
a 46-year-old face painter, recently
asked a judge to throw out the evidence obtained during the
search and the two misdemeanor charges resulting from it, arguing
that police did not have probable cause for a warrant.
Why did the DEA think Kirking was growing pot? On September 17,
The Huffington Post
reports, Donn Kaminski, a Braidwood, Illinois, police
officer assigned to the DEA, was staking out Midwest
Hydroganics in Crest Hill when he observed Kirking “exit the front
door of the store carrying a green plastic bag containing
unknown items.” Kirking says it was liquid fertilizer for her
hibiscus plants. Based on her apparent interest in gardening,
Kaminski obtained Kirking’s electric bills, which were
“consistently higher” than the bills of two neighbors. He also
sifted through her garbage, finding “multiple green plant stems”
that allegedly smelled like “green cannabis.” A field test (perhaps
the same kind that
misidentified Addie Harte’s tea leaves as marijuana) supposedly
confirmed that the stems came from a cannabis plant. Presto:
probable cause. Or so a judge thought.
Another judge may decide differently. During a hearing earlier
this month, Patch
reports, Will County Judge Bennett Braun seemed
unimpressed by Kaminski’s electric-bill analysis, saying “ComEd
routinely notifies him that his electric bills are higher than
average.” The DEA’s formula for probable cause in this case mixed
two completely innocent facts—a fertilizer purchase and relatively
high electric bill—with an agent’s odor report and a field test,
both of which are notoriously
unreliable and both of which proved inaccurate with respect to
Kirking. The DEA spent nearly a month investigating Kirking, but
somehow it could not spare the time for a lab test on her plant
stems before charging into her house.
Beyond the lack of diligence in this particular case is the
standard outrage of pot prohibition, which leads employees of our
government to spy on the customers of hydroponic supply stores and
rummage through their trash, looking for traces of arbitrarily
proscribed plants. Grown men should be embarrassed that they do not
have better things to do with their time.
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