2:40pm | A juror in the just-completed trial of Joe Grumbine and Joe Byron says that the pair’s own meticulous paperwork showed their three medicinal-marijuana collectives to be turning a profit, while failing to show that profit being put back into the collectives.
The juror, who calls himself “a proponent” of medicinal cannabis and says he has several acquaintances with doctor recommendations to use cannabis, spoke with the Long Beach Post on the condition of anonymity. We’ll call him ‘Juro.’
“I’m sympathetic to the cause,” Juro says. “I was a ’70s kid. That should tell you a lot about my background towards the idea of using marijuana. […] At first I was looking at it [i.e., the charges] that this was a big shell game that the City was throwing on. […] They had to literally prove to me that these guys messed up. And unfortunately, they proved to me that these guys messed up. […] I’m a proponent for this. I felt really bad having to put down a guilty verdict on this. But because of what they showed me and what I was told to follow, that was the only verdict I could give them.”
According to Juro, the most damning piece of evidence was the defendants’ meticulous bookkeeping.
“Unfortunately, they kept really good records. Their records are what sunk them for us,” Juro says. “All [their] paperwork was just immaculate, and they were showing at the end-of-the-day’s sales report, the very last line there was, ‘Profit Percentage.’ Every day they were writing 48 to 50 percent profit. That’s a lot of money per day. Their paperwork was pretty much showing us that, yes, they were making a profit. Now, they weren’t showing what they were doing with any of this money. They said they were doing things with it, but they had nothing — no paperwork, nothing — saying that they were putting money into this, putting money over here into this, putting money towards some cancer project, or anything like that. They didn’t put any of that down. […] When they showed the one deal on the profit margin, that right there is pretty much what sealed their fate on any kind of legal sales. […] If the paperwork wasn’t so good, they might have been able to get away with it,”
During the trial, the prosecution seemingly ran together the question of whether all storefront sales are illegal (an interpretation of the law that then-State Attorney General Jerry Brown contradicts in his 2008 guidelines — about which Juro confirms the jury never got hear) and whether for-profit sales are illegal (which is undisputed). As a result, Juro came away from the legal arguments believing that storefront dispensaries are disallowed by state medpot law, but that some sales are legal, even if as such they are not called “sales.”
“In a way, [storefront dispensaries] are illegal, according to the laws that they have set out,” Juro says. “You really shouldn’t have any storefront deal if you’re collective. […] [T]hey can make a sale to one of their collective members, [although] the sale wouldn’t be considered an actual sale […] it would be more like a reimbursement to the collective itself,. But for the fact that the prosecution was able to prove profit…If they couldn’t have proved that to me, in my eyes [Grumbine and Byron] would have been not guilty [of the charges related to sales].”
Juro also says the prosecution demonstrated that the pair’s three collectives — Fourth & Elm Natural Health Collective, 2200 Health Collective, and Unit D — did not function as properly organized nonprofit cooperatives.
“They were able to prove that […] they weren’t running as an actual cooperative, [where] every member has a say and owns that cooperative,” he says. “[During the trial] they asked a lot of people that were members there, and all they could say was that they were members, [but that,] ‘They never asked me if I could do anything for the collective, and I never asked them if I could do something for the collective.'”
Juro also said that numerous persons who work in the three collectives testified that Grumbine and Byron “were running the show,” which is not in keeping with Juro’s understanding of what a collective is. “What I found is that a collective is owned by everybody who is a member,” he says.”
Since Juro did not feel that terms such as collective, cooperative, and dispensary were adequately defined within the courtroom, contrary to Judge Sheldon’s instructions, Juro consulted the Internet.
“I had to look this stuff up,” he said, “I really did, even though the judge said we weren’t supposed to. I was really iffy on some stuff, so I had to look up what a collective was, I had to look up what a co-op was. And then I started looking at some of the California rules and regulations of it. And when it was proven to me that they were not an actual collective […] that’s when my vote got changed. […] I felt compelled to do [outside research] because I wanted to make sure I was right on my convictions. And when I found out what the definitions of these things were…Because, you see, they never really defined those in the court. But myself, I needed to know. And I don’t think it was that bad of a thing, because it didn’t really sway my judgment any which way. It did let me know a few things, like a dispensary is a profit-driven entity, not one you can just break even with. […] It even states: ‘A dispensary is a profit entity.'”
Regarding Sheldon, Juro feels far less sure than some courtroom observers that the judge was biased against the defense.
“He was running that court with a firm hand,” Juro says. “It looked like he knew that he was going to have a big problem with this [trial], and he didn’t want to make it a pony show. He did object to a lot of stuff that the defense threw out there — objections and stuff like that; he over[ruled] a lot of them. But then when the defense got up there and started doing their thing, he was trying to be as fair as he could. […] He definitely [overruled] a lot of objections that they [i.e., the prosecution] were throwing out. [But] he could have been biased. He looked like he was a person that really didn’t put up with this medical thing, and he probably feels that it’s gotten out of hand — which it really sorta has.”
Juro was unaware of Sheldon’s limitation on the number of witnesses the defense was allowed to call, and so chalked up the disparity in number between prosecution and defense witnesses as a mistake by defense attorneys Christopher Glew and Allison Margolin.
“Where the defense messed up is they didn’t bring a ton of people out,” Juro says. “They only brought out a couple of people.”
Another example of Sheldon’s bias alleged by many observers is a trial day when Sheldon had a partition erected to keep the jury from seeing the pro-defendant gallery. But Juro says this is a misrepresentation of what actually took place.
“To make it easier for us to see the screen, it was moved to the opposite side,” Juro explains. “It was not a partition between the jury and the audience. […] It had nothing to do with blocking out the little protesters that were sitting out there in the audience.”
Juro reports that on several occasions supporters of Grumbine and Byron would attempt to approach jurors in the hallway, but that other supporters would typically intercede — although on at least one occasion a protester did speak with a juror, a circumstance that was reported to Sheldon.
“That’s what I called them: the protesters,” Juro says. “They were quite comical.”
In his final analysis, Juro says that, aside from the tax and power-theft charges against Byron (which Juro says were definitively proved), his guilty verdict came down to the question of profit — a question Byron and Grumbine indirectly answered in the affirmative.
“I myself feel [the trial] was a total waste of taxpayers’ money,” Juro says. “If [the prosecution] had looked at my questionnaire form, they probably would not have picked me. […] But when I walked in there, the judge asked me if I could be fair. And I will be fair. […] And there was proof of a profit, and they’re not supposed to be making a profit. […] That paperwork is what buried them. […] With all that thrown out at us, all we could say was that they’re guilty.”