Criminal Justice
Concerns
The objections a prosecutor, a judge or a skeptical committee member would raise, stated in their terms.
“This rewards the illicit market.”
Section 21a‑420c is untouched. It provides a civil penalty of thirty thousand dollars for each violation, with each day a separate offense; another thirty thousand for an owner or controlling shareholder who knowingly aids it; ten thousand a day for a landlord who knowingly makes the space available; and an order the Superior Court may issue forthwith, ex parte and without a hearing, directing a municipality to close the business, seal the premises and take the cannabis, the related merchandise and the proceeds. The bill also adds felony exposure above ten pounds where none exists today.
“A hundred-pound operation would walk.”
It would not. Subdivision (6) of section 7 makes incarceration available where ten pounds or more is combined with a fixed location held out to the public, the direction or employment of two or more people, continuation after service of a cease-and-desist order or injunction, or transport into or out of the state for sale.
“People will hide behind the plant limit.”
Subsection (d) of section 6 bars charging the same plants under other statutes by reason of the count alone. It expressly preserves any charge supported by independent evidence of manufacture, sale or intent to sell, and any charge involving another controlled substance. It states in terms that it creates no rule of evidence.
“Prosecutors lose the drug factory statute.”
Only as to cannabis. Section 2 states twice that subsection (c) remains fully available for every other controlled substance, and that nothing in it renders evidence inadmissible in any other proceeding.
“Judges lose discretion.”
Section 5 removes a floor. It imposes no ceiling and creates no mandatory term of any kind. Sentencing within the authorized range is unaffected.
“The sentencing procedure is unconstitutional.”
The opposite. An earlier draft assigned the aggravating finding to the judge on a preponderance standard. State v. Bell, 283 Conn. 748, 810 (2007), holds that unconstitutional under Apprendi, and the bill was changed to require a jury finding beyond a reasonable doubt on a second part of the information — the procedure Connecticut already uses for persistent offender allegations under § 53a-40.
“Untested cannabis endangers consumers.”
Nothing in the bill touches testing, labeling, product standards, or the Department of Consumer Protection’s authority over any of them.