Appellate court finds fault with conviction

A Spokane County sheriff’s detective received an anonymous letter in March 2003 that said Edwin and Jannette Curfew were growing marijuana at their Nine Mile Falls home.

The letter offered details and was accompanied by a map that eventually led officers to what indeed appeared to be an indoor marijuana-growing operation.

In addition to live and harvested marijuana, officers found a ledger of transactions and a large amount of money when they raided the Curfews’ home in March 2003.

Jannette Curfew, 41, was convicted of one count of manufacturing marijuana and one count of possession with intent to deliver, but the Washington Court of Appeals has overturned those convictions in a newly released opinion.

Edwin Curfew, from whom Jannette was divorced although they continued to live together, died before the case went to trial.

According to the appellate court, a sheriff’s investigation failed to find enough evidence of the kind of criminal conduct described in the letter. Without sufficient evidence that the tipster was credible, a key search warrant was invalid, the court ruled.

To obtain the warrant, Deputy Mark Smoldt flew over the Curfews’ property, studied their electric bills, discovered that they had no reported income since January 2000 and found that their two pickups had been spotted at a Valley garden supply store that sells indoor growing equipment.

Smoldt said in a search warrant affidavit that 90 percent of 40 search warrants for marijuana grows had involved customers of the garden shop, which he didn’t identify. The sheriff’s office had been tracking vehicles at the shop for several years.

Monthly electricity use at the Curfews’ Mathias Lane home ranged from 3,830 to 6,290 kilowatts from January 2002 to January 2003, Smoldt said. That compared with a range of 350 to 1,110 kilowatts for a nearby home that was nearly twice as big.

The evidence was enough for District Court Annette Plese to issue a search warrant, and for Superior Court Judge Kathleen O’Connor to allow the case to proceed to trial on the basis of facts that Curfew and Deputy Prosecutor John Grasso agreed were accurate.