Point Reyes Light - November 24, 1999
Moon Hill pot doc gets a year in jail, but can smoke when's out
Nicasio foot doctor Alan Ager last Wednesday was sentenced to one year in county jail for growing hundreds of marijuana plants at his Moon Hill home.
However, Marin Superior Court Judge John A. Sutro has allowed the retired podiatrist to keep an ounce of pot on him for medical reasons when he gets out of county lockup.
Ager, 52, pled guilty in September to five felony pot charges to avoid trial following a pair of raids in which lawmen seized several pounds of marijuana and thousands of immature plants from his home on Nicasio Valley Road.
Last January 26, the doctor had been awaiting retrial for a 1996 pot arrest when Sheriff's deputies raided his house and arrested him once again for growing marijuana. Lawmen also took his 22-year-old son, Daniel Ager, into custody for selling a half-pound of marijuana to a police informant just days earlier in a Fairfax parking lot.
Daniel Ager pled guilty in September to a single felony count of selling marijuana. Last Wednesday, Judge Sutro sentenced him to six months in county jail.
The January arrest was Ager's third in six years and his son's first. The foot doctor narrowly escaped conviction on drug charges in 1997, when a jury split after defense attorneys argued that Ager suffered back pain from a car accident and grew marijuana strictly for medicinal use.
Marin County health officials registered Dr. Ager as a certified medical marijuana user in 1998 with no limit on the amount of marijuana he could grow.
Defense attorney Jeff Segal said last week that the foot doctor was "not pleased" with his one-year sentence and will ask to serve house arrest before he surrenders to authorities on Dec. 29. Both the doctor and his son have said they were mistreated by Sheriff's deputies during their booking last January.
Judge Sutro last week refused the foot doctor's request for a suspended sentence. "We think that given the unique circumstances of this case, he should have gotten a suspended sentence," attorney Segal told The Light.
If he had lost a court trial, Dr. Ager could have been sentenced to serve up to eight years, eight months in state prison. Daniel Ager, who pled guilty in September to a single felony count of selling marijuana, faced up to four years in prison.
Segal said he knew of no precedent in which a Marin County judge allowed a convicted drug felon to have marijuana in his possession during his parole. "It is something we asked for," he said. "It was something we felt was very important."
Daniel Ager's attorney, Stephen Berlin, said his client mistakenly thought he was selling marijuana to a caregiver instead of law officer last January. He will also apply to the parole board to serve his sentence by wearing an electric monitoring bracelet.
Berlin had asked the court to give the younger Ager, an undergraduate at UC Berkeley at the time of his arrest, a two-month jail sentence. "He would like very much to get back in school," Berlin said this week. "He's an excellent student."