Case against pot growers ‘up in smoke’

ANCHORAGE — The long and winding saga of a Meadow Lakes couple may have reached some kind of a conclusion.

Trace and Jennifer Anne Thoms’ marijuana growing operation landed them in federal court in 2010. Their case began with an investigator claiming he smelled marijuana on the air and that it was coming from their home. He then pulling their electricity records and found their bill was unusually high.

That investigator, Kyle Young, has been the subject of numerous news stories since that have described the arrest as the “magic odor” case. A judge cast doubt on his stated ability to smell the marijuana in the winter over a great distance and despite the elaborate air filtration system the Thomses had installed.

That line of attack seemed to be working for their defense, but was tied up between multiple rulings from multiple judges and an appeal from federal prosecutors.

A second line of attack on the case — that Young obtained a warrant to search the Thoms’ home, but had also searched other buildings, one of which contained the grow operation — proved to be more fruitful.

“A lot of people have large parcels of land and there could be buildings that are not part of the house,” Vikram Chaobal, Jennifer Anne Thoms’ lawyer in the case, told the Anchorage Press last month. “Search warrants are not meant to be open-ended or meant to give license to the government to search anything.”

The federal appeals court agreed with the Thomses on that point and, on the basis of that, threw out most of the key evidence in the case, including the 500 seized marijuana plants.

In reaction to that, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephan Collins moved on Oct. 25 to ask U.S. District Court Judge Ralph Beistline to dismiss the case entirely. On Tuesday, Beistline agreed, signing the order dropping the case.

But that’s not quite the end of the road. Chaobal said that in addition to the grow case the federal government had filed a concurrent forfeiture case.

“The forfeiture case is to take all of their money and their property,” he said, including the family home.

Rex Butler, who represented Trace Thoms, said he thinks there’s a case to be made that the forfeiture case should collapse along with the drug case.

“I think that it’s certainly going to be affected, and I say that because the drugs are out of it,” he said. “I think it affects your ability to take the home.”

Also, the IRS is going after them for back taxes.

“We’re trying to go pay the back taxes but we’re going to be fighting the forfeiture case,” Choabal said.

And even that might not be all of it.

“Stephan Collins, the U.S. Attorney, has hinted at possible other actions,” he said. “The government doesn’t like to lose.”

Young’s police work has been upheld in state court appeals raising issues similar to the ones raised in the Thoms case. Most notably, a December 2012 case that tried to raise questions about his ability to smell marijuana failed to gain traction. The appellate court chose instead to uphold the convictions of John Shook and Michael Hamilton.

But a state Superior Court Judge blasted Young in a ruling eviscerating a case from 2011. Robin Kling and Samantha Clymer had been charged with growing a small amount of marijuana — just nine plants. Superior Court Judge Gregory Heath said that Young relied on an unreliable informant as the basis for the warrant and “violated his duty of candor to the court” in tossing out the Kling/Clymer case.

The state’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has since taken up their cause, trying to change state laws to allow both Kling and Clymer to clear their names.

Chaobal said that the case against the Thomses has been a waste of time and money.

“Just think about this, you know how much money the government spent on this case over three and a half years to prosecute a small grow operation when there’s decriminalization occurring across the board across the country?” Chaobal said.

Butler said that his clients fought the case hard because they didn’t want to see their family broken up.

“They’ve got kids to take care of to raise,” Butler said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.