Back in the 2009 City Attorney’s race, in a response to a question about pursuing low-level marijuana cases, Tom Carr replied:
You’re apparently reading from the Stranger. You’re talking about relatively small numbers. We do between a hundred and 200 cases a year. Whether we prosecute depends on the report that’s in front of us; whether or not it’s a case. Most of our marijuana cases are cases that come in when we’ve got another crime, so someone gets in a bar fight and they have marijuana in their pocket. That’s pretty much all we do.
So now that Pete Holmes has taken over Carr’s office and announced that he’s no longer prosecuting people for marijuana possession, what’s he finding out?
As PubliCola reported (via Twitter) from our Town Hall event with City Attorney Pete Holmes last night, Holmes’ new criminal division director Craig Sims is in the process of reviewing all outstanding marijuana prosecutions pursued by former City Attorney Tom Carr.
…
Interestingly, although Carr insisted repeatedly that he was only prosecuting cases with associated crimes (e.g., resisting arrest with pot in your pocket), Mulady says most of the cases Sims has reviewed so far are “stand-alone marijuana cases”—the sort of cases the city attorney and police were explicitly instructed not to pursue after the passage of Initiative 75, which made marijuana possession the city’s lowest law-enforcement priority.
No kidding! So an overzealous law enforcement official with a penchant for nanny crusades was lying about what his office was doing? Who could’ve seen that coming?