State v. Longo: You Can’t Have Your Marijuana and Eat it Too
In State v. Longo, Division One of the Washington State Court of Appeals held that the State was not barred from introducing evidence of Mr. Longo’s allegedly illegal marijuana grow by virtue of a previous decision in a city forfeiture proceeding which held that the search of Mr. Longo’s house was illegal.
The Court’s decision turned on the doctrine of collateral estoppel, the latin label for the legal doctrine of issue preclusion. Longo argued that because the hearings officer in the city forfeiture case found that the police search of his grow operation was illegal, that ruling applied equally against the State when it initiated criminal charges against him.
The Court disagreed. Of the four items on the collateral estoppel checklist, the Court found Longo only checked off two. He satisfied the first two—the issues were identical in each proceeding (whether the search was legal), and the order of the municipal court was final and not under appeal. However, the Court found that the city and State were not in “privity” for purposes of collateral estoppel. Unlike in the previous case of Barlindal v. City of Bonney Lake, where the Court ruled that Pierce County and the city of Bonney Lake launched a joint operation against the defendant to prosecute and forfeit his property, the State in this case had no control over or involvement in this forfeiture proceeding, and therefore did not have the same opportunity to challenge or interest in challenging the hearing officer’s decision in the forfeiture case. The Court reasoned that statutorily mandated ten percent cut the State would get from the forfeiture proceeding was insufficient to prove that the city and State had a “mutuality of interest.”
The Court also denied Longo’s motion on the fourth prong, adopting the State’s argument that an injustice would be done by collateral estoppel because the State’s interest in prosecuting Mr. Longo for a crime were different from the city’s interest in forfeiting his property, and that the State shouldn’t be prevented from vindicating the unique criminal justice aims of punishment and ensuring community safety (how incarcerating the proprietor of an arguably illegal marijuana grow operation furthered these purposes was not elaborated upon by the court).
