HouseOfPollen
Member
This guy is looking at 25 years to life mandatory minimum sentencing:
SC pot law:
100 to 1,000 plantsfelony
SC pot law:
100 to 1,000 plantsfelony
25 years MMS**
$25,000Previous article that led to this article:Marijuana bust shines light on utilities
Shared meter data led to arrest
By Glenn Smith
[email protected]
Sunday, January 29, 2012
The electric meter outside your house helps the power company determine just how much to bill you every month. But it can also give authorities a peek into your life to see if you've been up to no good.
A former state trooper learned that lesson when Dorchester County deputies raided his Ridgeville rental property in January 2010 and discovered a sophisticated indoor marijuana farm.
Court papers recently filed in the case revealed that investigators were tipped off by the tenant's utility company. Edisto Electric workers called police after noticing unusually high electricity use on the property and numerous instances of tripping circuits, authorities said.
The find was a boon for law enforcement, but it raises questions about the electric company's role in the process: Should a utility function as an arm of law enforcement and share information about its paying customers without a warrant based purely on its suspicions?
Edisto Electric, a rural electric cooperative based in Bamberg, refused to comment on the incident or its policies for sharing information with police. Spokesman Frank Furtick cited the pending criminal case and "a policy of Edisto Electric to refrain from publicly commenting on such things."
Area police and utility company officials say such incidents are relatively rare, and some power companies insist they wouldn't turn in customers simply because their bills are high. Spikes in power usages more often result from faulty heating systems, leaking duct work or other mundane maladies, they said.
Santee Cooper workers have notified police when they've stumbled across marijuana farms, but utility officials couldn't recall reporting anyone for high energy use, spokeswoman Mollie Gore said.
South Carolina Electric and Gas spokesman Eric Boomhower was even more direct.
"Do we report people to authorities based on a given customer's electric usage? The answer is a flat-out 'No.' "
Big Brother concerns
The potential for power company privacy intrusions has sparked debates in California, Florida and other states with the spread of so-called "smart" meters that transmit consumption data to utilities from homes and businesses.
Designed to make America's power transmission system more efficient, the meters have drawn suspicion from folks worried about Big Brother spying on their household habits.
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Should utility companies share information about their customers with police without a warrant?
512 total votes.
- Yes 25% 129 votes
- No 74% 383 votes
Identifying illicit pot growers through excessive electrical use is nothing new. Indoor growers often give themselves away by using high-intensity lamps and climate-control equipment to nurture their plants.
Tracking diverted power helped police in suburban Port St. Lucie, Fla., shut down dozens of grow houses five years ago. Or take the case of a Nashville grower undone two years ago by racking up electricity bills three times larger than his neighbors'.
In most cases, however, police approach power companies for information after receiving a tip or evidence of a marijuana-growing operation.
In the Dorchester County case, Edisto Electric took the first step and, in essence, became a police informant, authorities said.
Dorchester County sheriff's Maj. John Garrison said the utility was being a good corporate citizen and helped the sheriff's office uncover a significant growing operation that might otherwise have escaped attention.
"I don't know if we would have found it without them," he said.
Narcotics Detective Shaun Tumbleston testified in a hearing on the case last week that Edisto Electric was concerned in late 2009 because its workers kept having to go to Stable Lane to reset a transformer after the circuits overloaded. They couldn't figure out why a rural property with no residence was racking up electric bills of $800 a month, he said.
That tip yielded several arrests and the seizure of more than 300 marijuana plants being grown in the sheds and a container on the property of former state trooper Kurt Steffen, authorities said.
A duty to share?
Danny Lee Kyllo is an Oregon man whose marijuana-growing case helped define national standards for police searches. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled authorities overstepped their bounds when they uncovered more than 100 pot plants in his home based on heat detected by a thermal imaging camera. The court ruled that a warrant was needed to conduct such a search.
Kyllo, who is writing a book about his case, said he was troubled by several aspects of the Dorchester County incident, including the utility company's willingness to drop a dime on a customer who paid for a service.
"For them to call up the police on this person because the electric bill was too high, that is going beyond what that service is supposed to be," he said.
However, Charleston criminal defense lawyer Michael O'Connell said the power company appears to be within its right to do so.
"People don't have an expectation to privacy in every area of their lives," he said. "And I don't think you have a privacy as to what your electricity bill is."
The issue is bound to crop up again, as indoor marijuana cultivation is said to be on the rise as growers use advanced hydroponic techniques to avoid scrutiny in open fields. Indoor growers are estimated to consume about 1 percent of the nation's electricity, enough to power some 2 million homes, according to a study released last year by Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy & Technology, said questions about the Dorchester County case are part of a larger debate about a lack of national privacy standards.
Under current law, customers have no constitutional right to protect data held by third-party companies they do business with, whether it be a utility, bank or Internet travel service, Dempsey said. In an age when more business is being conducted electronically, police often no longer need to bust down your door to learn your habits and intimate secrets, he said.
"There is all of this sensitive data all over the place," he said. "That data is only getting richer, and it's only getting easier to collect it, analyze it and share it."
Will big pot bust go up in smoke?
Lawyer says land searched illegally
By Glenn Smith
[email protected]
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Dorchester County investigators smelled the tang of marijuana in the air soon after they hopped the gate of a former state trooper's rural Ridgeville property in January 2010.
The weed's smell drifted from a portable container near a shed where a sheriff's deputy heard the hum of indoor lights. Hoses snaked from the container to a nearby pond. Electrical wires ran between the shed and a smaller out-building.
These observations helped deputies uncover what prosecutors describe as an elaborate and illicit indoor growing operation.
But the question is: Should investigators have been there in the first place?
The attorney for former Highway Patrolman Kurt Steffen wants a judge to consider tossing out the evidence against him, alleging that it resulted from investigators trespassing on his property without a warrant, in violation of Steffen's constitutional rights.
A hearing on that motion, filed by Public Defender Mary Gordon Baker, is scheduled for Thursday in U.S. District Court in Charleston.
A ruling in Steffen's favor could hurt the government's efforts to tie the
30-year-old former trooper to some 315 pot plants seized on his land. Authorities say Steffen, who resigned from the Highway Patrol in December 2009, was part of a ring that conspired to distribute at least 1,000 pot plants in the Charleston area.
Federal prosecutors maintain the defense motion to suppress evidence is full of smoke. They insist deputies acted prudently and with the blessing of local prosecutors as they worked within the law to build a case to search the property.
They also point out that a state judge already upheld the search in a case involving one of Steffen's co-defendants, according to court documents.
Dorchester County sheriff's Maj. John Garrison said deputies did nothing wrong.
"I think we acted in good faith and acted on good advice," he said. "So we are going to stand by it."
First Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe, whose office advised deputies on the warrantless January 2010 visit, concurred.
"I commend law enforcement for how they conducted the investigation," he said.
Dorchester deputies got their first whiff of trouble at 300 Stable Lane in November 2009 when Edisto Electric notified them of extraordinarily high electricity use on the property. Steffen and his wife owned the land and rented it to others, court documents state.
A deputy went to the 5-acre, fenced tract and spotted a portable storage container, large bags of potting soil and a shed emitting a humming sound from indoor lights. Baker argues that the deputy trespassed on Steffen's property to make that find, but prosecutors insist he was on neighboring land.
After surveillance on the property failed to spot people or vehicles on the land, investigators met with local prosecutors to discuss the possibility of conducting a warrantless search. Prosecutors gave them the go-ahead as long they didn't enter any buildings, based on a legal doctrine that permits warrantless searches of open fields, court documents show.
A search on Jan. 5, 2010, helped deputies compile the probable cause needed to gain a search warrant. They returned to the property that day and found 105 marijuana plants in a sport utility vehicle and 210 more in the structures, along with thousands of dollars worth of growing equipment, prosecutors said.
Baker did not return a phone call Monday. But in court papers, she argues that it's unclear whether the property qualifies as an open field and that the first deputy's visit was "based on the thinnest of reasoning, a high electric bill."
Baker states a hearing is needed to determine whether deputies violated Steffen's constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.
In their response to her motion, federal prosecutors argue that the property is clearly an open field and that deputies followed the letter of the law in conducting their visits.
Reach Glenn Smith at 937-5556 or Twitter.com/glennsmith5.
