1:20pm | By Cheri Sicard | I have been carefully following the Long Beach medical marijuana case of Joe Grumbine and Joe Byron reported on in The Post.  Many things about the case concern me: waste of taxpayer resources raiding, investigating, and prosecuting a man already found to be compliance with state law; the lack of equal protection under the law for marijuana providers; the judge’s and prosecution’s apparent lack of knowledge of California medical marijuana law and more.  But by far the most egregious component of this case is Judge Charles D. Sheldon’s abuse of its potential jurors by taking away their ability to do their job and return a fair verdict.
 
Last Thursday Judge Sheldon denied Grumbine and Byron any kind of medical defense in the 13 felony charges facing them.  In a state where medical marijuana has been legal for over 15 years, how can the fact that the defendants were operating a legal collective not be relevant?  How can it be just for a judge ask a jury of patriotic Americans, stepping up to the plate to do their civic duty and serve on a jury, to decide the fate of two men without allowing them to hear the true facts of the case?
 
Judge Sheldon’s ruling will mean these two individuals, who have no prior convictions for anything on their records, will be presented to the jury as ordinary back alley drug pushers.  Why is this judge and this prosecutor so afraid to allow the jurors to hear the real facts?  When did court cases become more about winning, losing, and feeding the prison industrial complex machine than about justice?
 
If allowed to hear the facts, a jury may or may not agree that Grumbine and Byron were operating within the limits of California law.  We’ll never know. Without being allowed to hear the facts, these men almost certainly face serious jail time.  
 
The news is filled with reports of juries claiming they would not have convicted defendants had they known all the facts of the case, most recently in the Troy Davis case in which the defendant was executed.  Judge Sheldon is setting up the jury in the Grumbine and Byron case to return an unfair verdict they will later regret.  By denying medical marijuana defendants a medical defense, which state law entitles them to, Judge Sheldon has flagrantly displayed his contempt for California laws and the will of the people who voted to put them in place.