Federal Cannabis Prisoner Luke Scarmazzo to Walk Free Today
After serving 14 years of a 22-year-long sentence, the nation's last federal medical marijuana prisoner has received compassionate release
Almost exactly two years ago, I reported for Forbes on the grueling reality of Luke Scarmazzo, a federal cannabis prisoner who had been assured a pardon from then-President Trump only to have it snatched away for unknown reasons at the last second. His bags were packed, his family notified. It was only when he saw Biden being sworn in on the prison television did he realize that nobody was coming for him.
“I was just devastated,” Scarmazzo said during a phone interview with me in January 2021 from Yazoo City, MS-based FCI Yazoo City, where he has been incarcerated for the last several years. “I…I don’t really even have words to say how I felt. I was right at the gate of being released, and at the last second, it was snatched away.”
After winning his compassionate release case late yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, the petition for which was filed in 2019, Scarmazzo is scheduled to walk free today, Feb. 3, 2023. He will be on supervised release for five years after serving 14 years of a 22-year-long sentence. I also reported a short update for Forbes earlier today. The court documents are attached below.
Scarmazzo was originally convicted of manufacturing marijuana and possession with intent to distribute alongside his business partner, Ricardo Montes, who was jailed on the exact same charges and received a commutation from President Obama in 2017. They were also charged with operating a continuing criminal enterprise, which is colloquially known as the “Kingpin Statute.” It is typically applied to criminal organizations, like cartel operations, and carries a mandatory minimum of 20 years imprisonment.
However, Scarmazzo and Montes were operating a California state-legal medical dispensary under the law of the land at the time, Prop 215 (though cannabis sales and distribution were at the time and remain federally illegal). Scarmazzo believes they attracted the ire of the feds after recording a music video in 2006 for his hip-hop song titled “Business Man,” which he made under his rap alias Kraz, prior to his arrest. In one of the verses, Scarmazzo is heard yelling, “Fuck the Feds!”
The prosecutor on the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Servatius, said at his sentencing that “we don’t prosecute people because they sing songs. We prosecute people because they sold marijuana in violation of federal law.”
Unlike some cannabis prisoners whose prosecutors later reversed course and ended up advocating for those they helped imprison, securing their release, Scarmazzo’s prosecutors have remained firm on their stance regarding his conviction and imprisonment.
“Mr. Scarmazzo was in violation of both state and federal law in operating a very profitable illegal marijuana business,” U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott told me in 2021. Scott was serving his first appointment as U.S. Attorney, which ended at the close of 2008. “The legitimacy of his prosecution and sentence is perhaps best represented by the fact that first President Obama and then President Trump, each of whom pardoned large numbers of persons convicted of selling illegal drugs, turned down his pardon petitions.”
It’s worth noting that since Scarmazzo’s initial sentencing and imprisonment, a congressional appropriations rider was passed, which has prohibited the prosecution of individuals who complied with state medical marijuana laws. Since that rider was approved by Congress three-and-a-half years after Scarmazzo’s conviction, his team had hoped to have it retroactively applied to incarcerations, as well as prosecutions as another legal strategy. That didn’t come to fruition, but Scarmazzo’s clemency petition with the White House is still in play, his lawyer, Kerrie Dent, told me in an email earlier today.
You can read the rest of the story here if you haven’t already.
As of 4 p.m. CT today, according to Dent and one of his advocates, Weldon Angelos, who was imprisoned alongside Scarmazzo for seven years and who received his own pardon from Trump in December 2020, all of this is history. Luke Scarmazzo–the nation’s last federal cannabis prisoner for medical marijuana charges, according to NORML–is finally free.
Here’s the order for Scarmazzo’s release, as well as the brief from last night’s decision.
