cannabisnews.com: Canada to Extradite US Medical-Pot Defendant? 





Canada to Extradite US Medical-Pot Defendant? 
Posted by FoM on April 14, 1999 at 06:08:11 PT
Source: High Times Magazine
The long arm of the US War on Drugs has reached into the mountains of British Columbia to pluck forth marijuana refugee Renee Boje of Staten Island, NY, but she's not going quietly. 
On April 21, Boje will appear before a Vancouver immigration court to challenge her pending extradition by a criminal-justice system in the United States which is geared up to subject her to a virtual life sentence for pot, with routine sexual humiliation and abuse a documented certainty.Like most other women charged in the United States with drug offenses, 28-year-old Renee Danielle Boje's basic offense was her acquaintance with men targeted for exemplary "narcotics" prosecution by police authorities. In the summer of 1997, Boje was one of several attractive young women in Los Angeles who were close enough to medical-marijuana celebrities Peter McWilliams and Todd McCormick to wind up listed on their "conspiracy" indictment.An LA County narc squad that July raided the neo-Gothic Bel Air mansion which McCormick was renting on McWilliams' tab, confiscating all the medical-marijuana plants which McCormick was growing, allegedly, to treat his documented chronic-pain conditions. To make the raid appear to be something important--and to tie McCormick and McWilliams together in a formal "conspiracy," mandating extended prison terms on conviction--the original Los Angeles County indictment was larded with numerous co-defendants who, like Renee Boje, had merely been working for McWilliams' publishing company, Prelude Press, for which Todd McCormick was a contracted author.Boje, a graphic artist working freelance for McWilliams, spent 72 hours in police custody, being strip-searched an astonishing 15 times over that brief interval, frequently in the presence of male corrections officers who ostentatiously ogled her and made degrading comments. Shortly afterward, when LA County gave the case up to the federal Department of Justice for prosecution, the DoJ promptly voided the charges against all the extraneous defendants who, like Boje, had been busted simply to make the case look important.'Compassion' Club, Eh?While the McCormick/McWilliams case went on making headlines, Boje quietly relocated in British Columbia, where the Vancouver Compassion Club has been providing medical marijuana for years without molestation by local or provincial authorities. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, however, are never loath to exercise federal jurisdiction in local areas on the slightest pretext, and last February 15, working on a snitch tip, they raided a grow-room near rural Roberts Creek, BC. Inside it they found a hydroponic setup being inspected by William Small, a Compassion Club director, and Rene Boje with her boyfriend. The grower himself was absent at the time, though he had posted over his plants the formal contract that had been made out between him and the Compassion Club.The VCC's grower contracts, which stipulate that the grower is bringing up medical-grade marijuana exclusively for the VCC and is subject to spot inspections by VCC personnel, have afforded some security against raids by local police, according to Abbotsford attorney John Conroy, a VCC adviser who's representing Boje now in her extradition battle. The RCMP ignored this one, though, confiscating all the pot and grow gear, and hauling Boje, her boyfriend and Small off to their Vancouver HQ. All were released uncharged when the alleged grower peaceably turned himself in hours later, though Boje had to post a $5000 bond to ensure she'd stay in the area while the RCMP investigated her immigration status.And while they were doing this, the RCMP's computer turned up the news that prosecutors from the US Federal District for Southern California were looking for Renee Danielle Boje. At some time after they'd dropped the charges against her in October '97, the US feds on the McCormick/McWilliams case had very quietly re-indicted her. So RCMP narcs pounced on her when she showed up for her first immigration check, and imposed another $5,000 bond on her pending extradition to the USA.Setting An ExampleBoje's reinstated indictment, to go by attorney Conroy's description of it, simply reiterates the original guilt-by-association charges in the original federal script, which basically theorized that Boje must have known that Todd McCormick was growing pot, and that Peter McWilliams was helping him to do so. In an ordinary prosecution, anyone this peripheral to a "conspiracy" would at worst face subpoena as a material witness; but the McCormick/McWilliams prosecution has become a truly extraordinary exercise in exemplary pretrial punishment, and the more pain the feds can inflict on everyone involved, the better this exemplary purpose is served.Todd McCormick, a long-time HIGH TIMES Freedom Fighter who has been active all his adult life in marijuana causes, was stricken in childhood with a rare, nonfatal form of cancer requiring extensive and repeated surgery and growth therapy, which left him with several permanently fused vertebrae. The resulting incessant pain can be legally treated only with debilitating and addictive drugs like morphine and Dilaudid, though illegal marijuana works fine for McCormick, without any side-effects at all--not even a high, since he has to smoke it so often that he's continuously tolerant to it. Since his arrest in July '97, however, the federal judge on his case has forbidden McCormick to use marijuana while awaiting trial, and he's urine-tested continuously to make sure he stays properly immobilized, either with agony or with prescription dope.Peter McWilliams, who had a long-controlled level of HIV in his system in July of '97, now describes his viral load as totally unmanageable. Like AIDS patients everywhere, McWilliams has to take fistfuls of nauseating prescription chemicals, several times daily, to keep opportunistic diseases at bay--in his case, non-Hodgkins lymphoma--and try to keep the HIV from duplicating itself in his blood cells. Marijuana is the only anti-nausea drug that helps him keep his medications down, as the United States Attorney for the Southern District, Fernando Aenelle-Rocha, has solidly determined. Forbidden by Aenelle-Rocha to use marijuana, McWilliams was puking in a wastebasket in open court when his judge, the Hon. George King of the First District of California, routinely denied his lawyer's request to use pot last year. Since then McWilliams has lost 30 pounds, and was recently described in the Los Angeles Times as a man clearly on his deathbed.The vicious disregard for human life and suffering evinced by all the federal authorities in the McCormick/McWilliams pretrial proceedings, as they drag on for year after excruciating year (preliminary motions are not expected before next September, at the earliest) has wonderfully succeeded in terrorizing medical-marijuana patients everywhere, and their physicians. As to the actual facts in the case, though, the feds are working with a sadly short-handed deck, according to every experienced defense lawyer who has ever looked at the indictment. Most of the critical "overt acts" which might conceivably link the two main defendants in a "conspiracy" consist of random credit-card receipts from the Prelude Press accounts, supposedly used to buy hydroponic gear, and other similarly dubious trivia.Which is why, obviously, Rene Boje was dragged back into the case. If the feds can pressure her into reading a script for them that more securely ties McCormick to McWilliams, they'll have an infinitely better chance of winning a conspiracy conviction than the present mound of irrelevant horse shit would afford them.A Bad 'Women Behind Bars' ScriptAs the Vancouver immigration court will hear on April 21, prosecutors in the United States can indisputably bring savage pressure to bear on female drug defendants there. In Canada, as attorney Conroy explains it, the charges which Boje faces might bring a fine and a stretch of community service, at worst, depending on the discretion of the trial judge. In the USA, of course, the judge would have no discretion at all; on conviction, Boje will face a mandatory minimum of ten years in federal prison for each of the four marijuana counts she faces. "We used to have a mandatory minimum of seven years, strictly for marijuana importation," Conroy tells HIGH TIMES, "but it was written out of the federal statutes after it was found cruel and unusual, and plainly disproportionate to any offense involving just pot."The Canadian immigration court, then, will be in the position of authorizing the deportation of this defendant to a country where she'll face prison penalties considerably more inhuman than penalties already deemed cruel and unusual for Canadians. Attorney Conroy, a longtime member of the NORML Legal Advisory Committee, is moreover collecting documents from several international human-rights organizations which have been investigating the special horrors inflicted on women prisoners in the contemporary United States of America.On March 5, Amnesty International published a report on US women's prisons which reads like a bad Shannon Tweed movie script. The USA has about 130,000 women prisoners at any given time now, preponderantly nonviolent drug offenders, who are subjected to systematic sexual abuse as a standard population-control policy, Amnesty found. Humiliating sexual comments and groping accompany daily "pat-down" searches for all inmates of women's facilities, inflicted by corrections personnel of both sexes. While it presumably succeeds in keeping women tractable, William Schultz, executive director of Amnesty USA, says this policy fits every international definition of the term "torture."The Amnesty report was followed independently on March 31, in Geneva, Switzerland, by a years-long study from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights' "factfinder" on women's prisons worldwide, Radhika Coomaraswamy of Sri Lanka. Accustomed to writing up this sort of thing about places like Cuba and Bosnia, the UN report laconically states, "At least two-thirds of the female inmates have been sexually or physically abused." Corrections officers of both sexes in the USA routinely extort sexual gratification in exchange for trivial privileges, and there is a universal sanction for guards watching women as they shower and defecate. Restraints are conspicuously over-used in US women's prisons, even by international standards; women giving birth in prison hospitals are usually unshackled elsewhere, but not in US jails. The sale of women prisoners as forced prostitutes was found to be appallingly commonplace. Legislation criminalizing intercourse between corrections personnel and inmates is rare in the USA, and even more rarely enforced. And so on, ad nauseam.The federal Bureau of Prisons, responding to this UN survey, has proudly divulged that exactly 10 of its corrections personnel were duly "disciplined" in 1998. They also pointed out indignantly that the UN really only investigated women's-prison conditions in the states of California, Connecticut, Georgia, Minnesota, New Jersey and New York. Conditions are presumably much more wholesome in states like, for example, Alabama and Mississippi.Still, in federal prisons across the United States, 70 percent of the guards are male. In Canadian women's prisons, less than 19% of guards are men. This alone ought to give Canadian immigration authorities reason to pause before sending Rene Boje back to the USA to face the music for medical marijuana.Make checks payable to:John Conroy In TrustMedical Marijuana Legal Defense FundConroy & Co.2459 Pauline StreetAbbotsfordBritish Columbia V2S 3S1
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Comment #7 posted by FoM on April 21, 1999 at 16:49:07 PT
Hello Again!
Hello Den de Cannabist,This will do for a little while but I want you to check your e mail on and off tonight. I will send you more directions on what I'm doing. This will work better and easier then yahoo. I am deleting any mail I receive too. I'll be back when I'm thru or you will know where I am by e mail. I haven't disabled my cookies either just the java stuff and active x. I run on high security too.This is really stupid to have to go to these extremes to avoid these people! Peace, FoM!
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Comment #6 posted by DdC on April 21, 1999 at 15:38:39 PT:
Hey There! Fancy meeting you at a place like this.
I don't get any attachments, just those paperclip icons. Are both em(e-mails)yours and active? Did you find the FFFF club? I haven't deactivated anything but I do get some weird stuff occasionally. I never got nor heard of this blue screen thingy. When I overpost at Ron's I can't post under any title because of my ip cookies I guess. Thats how someone told me to get back into the conservative boards I'm banned at also, but I haven't disconnected anything because I need the cookies to get to my e-mail on Netscape. If I use my microsoft browser I can't get to yahoo email. So I pretty much stay on Netscape and use my cookies(whatever they are). I deleted all my hotmail letters just in case and I'm deleting everything with that paperclip icon. So if these emof yours are active, let me know or let me know which to use and try to get to the FFFF club or let me know where to send the invite.Peace not WoDFFFFDdC
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Comment #5 posted by FoM on April 21, 1999 at 13:26:19 PT
Glad you found it!
This is about the safest I think! I've been learning to dodge for almost a year now. I can't post on the board so bookmark this until they find it but know they will. I hope this is over soon because he or they are hurting many people and many web sites. I haven't sent you any attachments. I received an e mail from ally and I wrote her back but told her it isn't safe. I was hit with that thing they call the blue screen of death again but it didn't hurt my computer. I have deactivated all that Ron said to deactivate. Watch your back this is very very bad! Peace, FoM!
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Comment #4 posted by DdC on April 21, 1999 at 13:15:52 PT:
Found it
Now what? I was not cut out to be a spy! LOL! Hate this covering tracks schtuff. Oh well. I have 2 em for you. which is the correct one? I am getting a paperclip thingy on all your em's. Is this normal? The FFFF club is set up but I haven't been back since I em you and the others. Hope alls well.PnWFFFFDdC
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Comment #3 posted by FoM on April 21, 1999 at 12:31:59 PT
FoM to Den de Cannabist
Hope you find this!Peace not WoDs FoM!
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on April 14, 1999 at 20:09:53 PT
It's Really Scary!
Yes you sure can! Guilt by association! If brother is pited against brother this will be the end of our country as we know it! It will be just a matter of time. When trust is eroded hope is lost! I'm going to post your page since it says Norml under your Freedom Page! Peace, FoM!
Ally's Freedom Page
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Comment #1 posted by 4myamryjane on April 14, 1999 at 10:42:30 PT
reply
This is hedious! See you can get implicated for being a friend and lighting up! peace,4mmj
Ally's Freedom Page
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