UPDATE 12/4/2011: So trial is scheduled to start Monday, however it probably will get delayed again. I am being tried with another person who has a similar case but not related. We have tried to get the Judge to separate the trials but the DA has always objected. Now the DA wants the trials separated. Judge will decide whether to separate and if he does, mine gets moved out.
-Elisa Kappelmann
Woman to fight medical marijuana felony charges
Written By BRYCE CRAWFORD ON WED, JUL 13, 2011 AT 4:04 PM
- Elisa Kappelmann
The Beacon Street raids of last May shook a community still getting its feed underneath it. House Bill 1284, the state’s first attempt to regulate its medical marijuana industry, had just passed the Colorado legislature and folks in the MMJ world were looking at what to do next (a position everyone’s still faced with, nicely enough).
Then it came out, later, that the county had spent a grip of money to contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to have a heat-imaging plane fly out of Montana to scan a building that officers on the ground had already confirmed held marijuana.
Later, after we kept a running countdown of how long District Attorney Dan May’s office had waited to arrest or charge the raided growers, the police did just that and all went to court.
Four of the seven charged have thus far have agreed to plea bargains with the DA’s office, but not Elisa Kappelmann, a 51-year-old former corporate trainer with Hewlett-Packard who has been charged with two felonies and will go to trial on July 25, the first of the group to bring her case to trial, and one of the first MMJ-related trial cases in El Paso County.
We spoke with both her and her attorney Rob Corry; look for more from our conversation with the co-owner of Southern Colorado Medical Marijuana in tomorrow’s Independent. In the meantime, here’s more from the noted Denver attorney.
- Rob Corry
ON KAPPELMANN’S DEFENSE:
“Ms. Kappelmann has ample coverage as far as the amount of patients she was working with and the amount of medicine she had. And not just paperwork, but patients who are going to show up and testify live, in court, under-oath, that she’s their caregiver. I mean, she’s clearly not making this up after the fact. She did everything possible that she could to be legal both under local ordinances and under state law. She filed all the appropriate applications; she was properly zoned; and this was a regulated, legal enterprise. And probably most importantly, there is zero evidence of any distribution whatsoever outside of medical use, which would be the typical criminal case they could bring, if they had a sale to somebody who was not a patient. But they don’t have that here.”