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Washington Post, July 14, 2020 at 7:23 a.m. EDT
A disabled black veteran drove through Alabama with medical marijuana.
Now he faces 5 years in prison.
By Teo Armus
The first mistake that left Sean Worsley facing a five-year prison
sentence was choosing to stop for gas in tiny Gordo, Ala. The next was
blasting music at the pump loudly enough to catch the attention of a
local police officer.
And the third error was letting Officer Carl Abramo, who said he smelled
weed in Worsley’s car, to search the vehicle.
What was the worst that could happen? The marijuana in his back seat had
been legally prescribed to him in Arizona. Worsley, an Iraq War veteran
with a traumatic brain injury and PTSD, had used the substance for years
to calm his nightmares and soothe his back pain.
Yet unbeknown to him, even his legal prescription was illegal in
Alabama. The worst-case scenario was far more severe than Worsley could
have ever imagined: a years-long legal fight that plunged him into
homelessness, cost him thousands of dollars in legal fees, and recently
concluded in a 60-month prison sentence.
“I feel like I’m being thrown away by a country I went and served for,”
Worsley wrote in a letter from the Pickens County Jail to Alabama
Appleseed, a criminal justice organization that recently published a
detailed account of his case. “I feel like I lost parts of me in Iraq,
parts of my spirit and soul that I can’t ever get back.”
Besides painting a damning picture of Alabama’s criminal justice system,
Worsley’s tale underscores the wildly inconsistent legal landscape
across states on marijuana. While recreational use of the drug is legal
in 11 states and the District of Columbia and medicinal use is allowed
in 33 jurisdictions, the substance is entirely banned in Alabama.
Not so in Arizona, where the substance has been legal for medical
purposes since 2011. Worsley, a Purple Heart recipient who spent five
years in the military, including a 14-month deployment to Iraq, used his
legal prescription to relieve his short-term memory issues, depression
and chronic pain, according to the Appleseed report.
Neither the Gordo Police Department nor Pickens County District Judge
Lance Bailey immediately responded to phone calls requesting comment
from The Washington Post. According to the Appleseed report, Abramo no
longer works for the department, and attempts to reach him by The Post
were unsuccessful.
In 2016, Worsley and his wife, Eboni, were driving from a visit to her
family in Mississippi to surprise his own relatives in North Carolina.
Driving along Highway 82, they stopped at a gas station outside
Tuscaloosa, Ala., to refuel their car. Worsley played air guitar at the
pump.
On Aug. 15, 2016, shortly after 11 p.m., Abramo heard loud music coming
from a vehicle and “observed a Black male get out of the passenger side
vehicle,” according to a police report obtained by Appleseed. “He was
laughing and joking around and looking at the driver while doing all this.”
When Abramo told them their music was violating the noise ordinance in
Gordo, a town of less than 2,000 people, they quickly turned it down.
After the officer said he smelled marijuana, Worsley said he was
disabled veteran and tried to show the officer his medical marijuana
card from Arizona.
“I explained to him that Alabama did not have medical marijuana,” the
police report said, according to Appleseed. “I then placed the suspect
in hand cuffs."
In the back of the vehicle, Abramo also found a prescription bottle of
marijuana, rolling papers, a pipe, a six-pack of beer, a bottle of
vodka, and some pain pills, all of which he cited as reasons to arrest
the couple. (It is illegal to possess most types of alcohol in Pickens
County, which at the time was one of Alabama’s 23 partially dry counties.)
While first-time possession of marijuana is sometimes charged as a
misdemeanor, according to the Appleseed report, it can be charged as a
felony if the arresting officer believes the substance is for purposes
“other than personal use.”
That’s what the Worsleys, who spent six days in jail, were charged with.
After being released on bond, the couple’s legal nightmare seemed to be
over.
But almost a year later, the bail bondsman called back with a dire
message: The Pickens County judge was revoking bonds on all his cases.
That meant they had to rush back from Arizona, he told the couple, or
they would be charged with failing to appear in court.
They hustled and drove back overnight to Alabama, where the Worsleys
were split up and taken to separate rooms for questioning — even though,
as Eboni insisted to authorities, her husband’s disabilities meant he
needed a legal guardian to help make him an informed decision.
“They said no, and they literally locked me in a room separate from
him,” Eboni Worsley told Leah Nelson, the Alabama Appleseed researcher
who authored the report. “They told him that if he didn’t sign the plea
agreement that we would have to stay incarcerated until December and
that they would charge me with the same charges as they charged him."
It was that threat that caused Worsley to give in and sign the plea
agreement: 60 months of probation, drug treatment and thousands of
dollars in fines.
But in February 2019, he missed a court date in Pickens County. The
local probational program cut short his supervision, citing “failure to
attend” and “failure to pay court-ordered moneys.” And it wasn’t until
months later, according to the Appleseed report, that he learned from
the Department of Veterans Affairs that Alabama had issued a fugitive
warrant for his arrest.
Now struggling with homelessness, he failed to pay $250 months later to
renew his medical marijuana card. When he was arrested at a traffic stop
in Arizona last August, according to the Alabama Political Reporter,
police found him in possession of the substance without a valid medical
marijuana card.
Pickens County demanded that he be extradited back to Alabama — and made
Worsley pay for it, more than doubling the $3,800 he already owed in
court costs. In April, the Pickens County judge sentenced Worsley to
five years in prison.
Worsley is appealing the sentence. But he is also back in Pickens County
Jail, waiting for a spot to open up in the Alabama prison system.
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