Another drug case thrown out

Today’s front page details how a pair of local marijuana growers were let off the hook.

At first glance, it’s easy to be quick to anger over Superior Court Judge Gregory Health’s decision to throw out the case — a case that seemed to have nabbed a pair of local growers red-handed. Acting on a tip, Alaska State Troopers found marijuana plants and more than a third of a pound of the drug in the home of Robin King and Samantha Clymer.

Open-and-closed case, right?

It should have been, if it weren’t for how police handled the case, Heath says in his ruling. What’s most concerning, however, isn’t that local law enforcement seems to have made a poor decision in its zeal to prosecute. It’s that one investigator in particular seems to believe his own brand of cowboy justice is enough to put criminals in jail.

That’s basically the conclusion Judge Heath came to in his scathing ruling, and one we agree with as well. It seems Investigator Kyle Young of the Mat-Su Narcotics Team neglected to follow a basic rule of law — also one of the first tenants of good journalism — consider the source.

Police receive tips all the time for many reasons. In this case, the tip that King and Clymer were growing marijuana came from King’s brother, who apparently had an altercation with his sibling. But in obtaining a search warrant for King’s house, Young failed to inform the magistrate who granted the warrant that the motive for the tip to police was revenge.

Legally speaking, that’s a big no-no, Health says in his ruling.

“Investigator Young was more than negligent in his failure to disclose the additional information about the assault,” the judge says, adding that by doing so he “violated his duty of candor to the court.”

Why not chalk this up to human error? That may be fitting if this were an anomaly for Young, but it isn’t. We reported about the investigator in April when another of his cases was thrown out of court. In that case, Young alleged he could smell growing marijuana wafting on the air as he drove by the home of a suspected marijuana grow operation. That whiff was what got him a search warrant. But in federal court, the judge ruled that, given the air filtration system in the home and the distance Young was from the building, there was no way Young could have smelled the marijuana.

It’s obvious there’s plenty of pot growing going on in the Valley and that our local law enforcement is tuned in to that. They also know the law, and while those who choose to break it have the luxury of ignoring the law, the police don’t.

We hope this is the last time we have to report about marijuana growers being let off the hook because investigators couldn’t be bothered to follow the law they are sworn to uphold.