What life is like after police ransack your house and take ‘every belonging’ — then the charges are dropped

What life is like after police ransack your house and take ‘every belonging’ — then the charges are dropped


A self-described Michigan “soccer mom” who had “every belonging” taken from her family in a 2014 drug raid has been cleared of all criminal charges, 19 months after heavily armed drug task force members ransacked her home and her business. But in many ways, her ordeal is only beginning.

Annette Shattuck and her husband, Dale, had been facing felony charges of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, possession with intent to manufacture marijuana and maintaining a drug house. But last month, Michigan Circuit Court Judge Daniel Kelly threw out all criminal complaints filed against the Shattucks “on the grounds of entrapment by estoppel,”according to court filings. Entrapment by estoppel occurs when a government official leads a defendant to believe that their conduct is permissible under the law.

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In 2014, the Shattucks were starting up a marijuana dispensary under Michigan’s medical marijuana law. They worked to ensure every last detail was in full compliance with the law as they understood it: They obtained the permission of the landlord of the building where the dispensary, called the DNA Wellness Center, was to be housed. They went to local planning commission meetings to obtain the proper permits and licenses. They discussed business hours, security measures and even signage requirements with the planning commission.

The town building inspector checked the property and approved the signage. The chairman of the planning commission publicly thanked the Shattucks for working within the allowed legal framework. According to court documents, the Shattucks even went so far as to call the local sheriff’s Drug Task Force to invite them to inspect the property and verify their compliance with the law.

“We really went above and beyond,” Annette Shattuck said in an interview. “We asked for help. We went out of our way to make sure that everything was legit.”

But the Task Force never inspected the property. Instead, acting on an anonymous tip that marijuana was being sold at the location, agents of the St. Clair County Drug Task Force conducted a number of “controlled buys,” where informants with medical marijuana cards entered the dispensary and purchased marijuana under the guise of medical use. That gave them enough probable cause to execute a raid.

Michigan’s existing voter-approved medical marijuana law doesn’t address the legal status of dispensaries, leaving room for conflicting interpretations. The Shattucks’ case is an example of what some drug policy experts say are the shortcomings of writing drug policy via ballot initiative. A more carefully considered piece of legislation may have clarified the gray areas that led to the raid on the Shattucks’ home and business, for instance.

 Technically, Shattuck’s dispensary should not have been approved by the town planning commission, because the law does not provide for selling marijuana in dispensaries, Guilliat said. “I think the township probably thought they were doing the right thing, without knowing what the law says,” he added.

On July 28, 2014 — not long after the couple reached out to them to perform a compliance check — task force agents raided both the dispensary and the Shattucks’ home. In addition to charging the Shattucks with a variety of marijuana-related drug crimes, they took a lawnmower, a bicycle, their daughter’s birthday money, their marriage certificate and numerous other belongings, according to Annette Shattuck’s testimony before the Michigan House last year.

But Judge Daniel Kelly ruled last month that, because the town planning commission had signed off on the dispensary, and because the Shattucks “would not have called [the Drug Task Force] and invited law enforcement to their compassion center for an inspection unless [they] believed in good faith” that they were operating within the bounds of the law, “basic principles of due process preclude prosecution in this case.” In short, the government can’t prosecute you for operating an “illegal” business if another arm of government has given you the green light on it.

Annette Shattuck says “it’s beyond exciting” to have the criminal charges cleared. But the tough work of getting her forfeited property back has only just begun.

Under asset forfeiture laws, police are allowed to seize and keep property suspected of involvement in a crime, regardless of whether the property’s owners are ever convicted — or even charged, in many cases. Michigan’s laws are particularly skewed against property owners, according a 2015 report from the Institute for Justice. The nonprofit civil liberties law firm gave Michigan a D- on its forfeiture laws, citing “poor protections for innocent property owners” and policies that allow police to keep up to 100 percent of the proceeds from forfeited property, creating a profit motive for seizing belongings.

Annette Shattuck says that since the charges have been dismissed, the Drug Task Force has returned some of her property. But much of it is damaged. Electronic items are missing power cords and remotes. Her and her husband’s phones were smashed. They returned her husband’s guns and the safe he stored it in, but they didn’t return the key. Two of the kids’ insurance cards are missing. Shattuck says her marriage and birth certificates haven’t been returned, and since the Task Force does not itemize seized documents in its paperwork, it has no record of taking them in the first place.

“We had plans to get the property back and sell a lot of it to pay for legal fees,” she said. “But now we can’t.”

Sheriff Tim Donnellon, who oversees the drug task force involved in the raid, said his office has “no vendetta” against the Shattucks, and that if any items or components are missing from their returned property, it wasn’t intentional. He said the Shattucks should get in touch with the police supervisors overseeing the return. “We’ll make things right for her,” he added.

Donnellon agrees with Guilliat, the assistant prosecutor, that murky statute language has made things difficult, not only for medical marijuana patients and caregivers but for law enforcement officials as well. “Medical marijuana in Michigan is a nightmare,” he said in an interview. “It’s really shifting sand. It changes continually. It’s really an Achilles heel for law enforcement.”

The tension between strict federal prohibition and state-level legalization is likely only to grow as more states consider changing their marijuana laws this year. “Medical marijuana policy in the United States is putting Americans at risk,” the Brookings Institution’s John Hudak warned last week. Medical marijuana patients are often “victimized by an unjust, arbitrary, and downright harmful system that hinders access to a clinically proven medical benefit,” according to Hudak.

The Shattuck family has experienced this harm first-hand. Beyond the financial burden, the raids have left the family with considerable emotional trauma as well. When the task force raided her home, Shattuck’s mother was  babysitting her four children, who were all under age 10 at the time. “During the dynamic entry, armed DTF officers wearing ski masks separated the children from their grandmother at gunpoint, shouting at her to get the dog under control or they would shoot it,” a court briefing filed by the Shattucks’ lawyer alleges. “The deputies kept the children lined up on the couch at gunpoint, refusing even to remove their masks to help calm the kids.”

Donnellon called this a “misrepresentation of the incident.” During raids like this, he says, it’s standard for officers to enter with weapons drawn. “If you come in at a dynamic entry raid, you’re going to aim that gun at the parents. Children are going to be sat at a couch. There’s absolutely no way in hell would we point a gun at child on a couch,” he said in an interview.

He added that his officers typically don’t wear ski masks, either. “These guys on the SWAT teams are dads, too,” he said.

After the raid, the officers left devastation in their wake, according to the family’s account.

“They had Annette’s lingerie strewn everywhere,” Annette Shattuck’s mother said in the briefing. “From the ceiling fan… Boxes and bags of food had been pulled from the cabinets and stepped on with their big boots.“

The description goes on: “They took everything, the birth certificates, the adoption papers. There was nothing that they didn’t destroy, they ripped off facings of the cabinets, every picture was off the wall.”

Sheriff Donnellon has previously disputed the Shattucks’ characterization of the raid, saying that it wasn’t as confrontational or disruptive as the Shattucks or their lawyer presented it.

Now, “if my kids are outside in my yard, they run into my house if they see a police officer,” Shattuck said. “They’re petrified.” Her 10-year-old daughter has been in counseling for a year and a half.

The pending charges had made it difficult for the Shattucks to find work. Annette’s husband Dale had worked in construction before starting up the dispensary. But since the police seized all his tools, he had difficulty returning to his old line of work. They turned to borrowing money from friends and family. “We owe a lot of people a lot of money,” Shattuck said. “We depended on the kindness of relatives. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything.”

US Cops Raid Native American Reservation, Destroy their Medicine and Eradicate Entire Industry

US Cops Raid Native American Reservation, Destroy their Medicine and Eradicate Entire Industry


The Pinoleville Pomo Nation made headlines earlier this year when they announced that they will be growing medical marijuana on their reservation.

Aided by a Kansas company called FoxBarry that helps Native American tribes develop for-profit ventures, and United Cannabis, a Colorado company that develops strains of pot, the Pinoleville Pomo Nation set out to make history.

Although the partnership with FoxBarry and United Cannabis would be short lived, the Pinoleville marijuana farm was well on its way to being the first large-scale medical pot cultivation and distribution enterprise on tribal land in California.

The new operation, on their sovereign land, would benefit those in need as well as create jobs and revenue for the downtrodden tribe. It was a win-win.

However, this mutually beneficial endeavor would be short-lived thanks to tyrants whose job it is to attack people for growing and selling a plant to willing customers.

On Tuesday, courageous deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office invaded the sovereign nation and trespassed on native land to destroy everything that this tribe has built.

According to the Press Democrat:

Deputies eradicated some 400 pot plants from an outdoor location. At another location, they began dismantling a “highly sophisticated” chemical laboratory where honey oil — a sticky, concentrated pot product used to make edible medicine— was being manufactured under the auspices of the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, said Sheriff’s Capt. Greg Van Patten. More than 100 pounds of trimmed and drying marijuana also was found inside the laboratory building, a former car dealership on North State Street.

The tribal leaders immediately denounced the raid, stating that their operation was legal.

“I think what they’re doing is not right,” said Nori Baldridge, the tribe’s director of economic development. “This is sovereign land, and this is a sovereign nation,” she said.

“We were shocked,” said Mike Canales, president of the tribe’s business board.

Canales rightfully contests the legal basis for the raid as the Sheriff’s department does not have any authority over the tribal land or its people.

In Texas, police search woman’s vagina for marijuana

In Texas, police search woman’s vagina for marijuana


A Spring woman claims sheriff’s deputies violated constitutional protections by conducting a body cavity search on the concrete of a Texaco gas station parking lot during a routine traffic stop in late June.

Charnesia Corley, a 21-year-old African American, was driving in northern Harris County around 10:30 p.m. on June 21 when a male deputy pulled her over for allegedly running a stop sign. He said he smelled marijuana, handcuffed Corley, put her in his vehicle and searched her car for almost an hour. He didn’t find any pot, according to her attorney, Sam Cammack.

Returning to his car where Corley was held, the deputy again said he smelled marijuana and called in a female deputy to conduct a cavity search. When the female deputy arrived, she told Corley to pull her pants down, but Corley protested because she was cuffed and had no underwear on. The deputy ordered Corley to bend over, pulled down her pants and began to search her.

Then, according to Cammack, Corley stood up and protested, so the deputy threw her to the ground and restrained her while another female was called in to assist. When backup arrived, each deputy held one of Corley’s legs apart to conduct the probe.

Incredibly, a spokesperson for the Harris County Sheriff’s Department told a local TV station that “the deputies did everything as they should.” And so there you have it. Holding a woman down and forcibly penetrating her vagina to search for pot is official policy in Harris County.

Drug war thuggery

Drug war thuggery


From the OC Weekly:

The Weekly has received footage from a recent marijuana dispensary raid that appears to show Santa Ana police officers eating pot candy and throwing darts after destroying–or so they thought–all the surveillance cameras inside the cannabis shop.

The video footage shows an officer stuffing something into his mouth and handing something to another cop, who asks him “What flavor?” The officers then laugh. The footage is too grainy to be certain that the item that the officer picks up from the counter of the cannabis shop is in fact a pot edible, although the behavior of the officers suggests this is the case.

Also in the footage: a female police officer joking that she wanted to kick Marla James–a marijuana activist and wheelchair-bound amputee who was present during the raid–in her “nub” . . .

Other footage obtained by the Weekly shows police officers, some of whom are wearing ski masks, battering down the dispensary’s front door and then storming the establishment with guns drawn. The footage also shows the officers using a crowbar to dislodge various surveillance cameras and a DVR machine.

Apparently, Santa Ana just awarded medical marijuana licenses to 20 dispensaries drawn from a lottery. This dispensary was not one of the 20. Hence, the raid. But a judge had also just issued a temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit from the dispensaries that weren’t chosen. So it’s not entirely clear that this dispensary was breaking the law.

But even if it was, the casual thuggishness and cruelty on display here are really appalling. What justification is there for these cops to destroy the surveillance equipment? And why the face masks and commando tactics? The police department says the video has been edited. But it’s hard to imagine an unedited video that makes this any less outrageous. And if additional video would have provided the context to explain the officers’ behavior, I guess it’s unfortunate for them that they destroyed the other cameras.

Police Shoot, Kill 80-Year-Old Man In His Own Bed, Don't Find the Drugs They Were Looking For

Police Shoot, Kill 80-Year-Old Man In His Own Bed, Don't Find the Drugs They Were Looking For 

Deputies approached the house, and what happened next is where things get murky. The deputies said they announced their presence upon entering and were met in the hallway by the 80-year-old man, wielding a gun and stumbling towards them. The deputies later changed the story when the massive bloodstains on Mallory’s mattress indicated to investigators that he’d most likely been in bed at the time of the shooting.

Investigators also found that an audio recording of the incident revealed a discrepancy in the deputies’ original narrative: Before listening to the audio recording, [Sgt. John] Bones believed that he told Mallory to “Drop the gun” prior to the shooting. The recording revealed, however, that his commands to “Drop the gun” occurred immediately after the shooting.
When it was all over, Eugene Mallory died of six gunshot wounds from Sgt. John Bones’ MP-5 9mm submachine gun. When a coroner arrived, he found the loaded .22 caliber pistol the two deputies claimed Mallory had pointed at them on the bedside table.

Mallory had not fired of a single shot. The raid turned up no evidence of methamphetamine on the property.