It's been almost a month to the day since Joe Grumbine was arrested at the Long Beach downtown courthouse when he showed up for a regularly scheduled trial conference hearing. Along with his partner Joe Byron, Grumbine had run a pair of Long Beach pot dispensaries as well as Garden Grove's Unit D collective until the shops were raided in Dec. 2009. Both men were tried and convicted of several counts of selling marijuana (Byron was also convicted of stealing electricity). But the charges were overturned for judicial misconduct after Judge Charles D. Sheldon recused himself from the case for writing a congratulatory letter to prosecutor Jodi Castano before the trial had actually ended.
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“Joe looks worse each hearing, both physically and mentally,” King reports. “When the deputy raised him to leave, he turned to slowly face his friends, family, and backers and seemed to look each one in the eye as if to say thanks. At that slow-mo moment, you could feel him strenthen his resolve in the deliberately slow walk to the inmate door as he fed off the love, and admiration(as in my case) and stood tall.”
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).