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A Menlo Park police officer following the scent – literally – on Tuesday afternoon reportedly discovered 101 marijuana plants and 14 pounds of processed pot .
At 1 p.m. on Nov. 4, the officer was patrolling along the 1100 block of Madera Avenue when he “noticed a strong odor of marijuana in the area.” He then decided to talk to a group of people standing in front of a house, and found that the homeowner, who was among them, was on probation.
A search of the home “located a large quantity of both processed and unprocessed marijuana as well as an elaborate marijuana growing operation,” according to police. The San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force assisted.
The homeowner, 50-year-old Byron Johnson Sr., was arrested and booked into county jail for allegedly violating probation, selling marijuana and cultivating marijuana plants.
Hold on a sec. Haven’t the courts held that, in a traffic stop, a cop can’t search a car merely because he says he smells marijuana? How is a home less open immune a search than a car?
If you are on probation, the police/probation officer can search your house w/o a warrant. Here, police made contact with the owner on the front lawn, determined he was on probation, then proceeded to search the house.
Good probable cause. No violation of rights are anything else.
Great pinch!
Bummer. Marijuana should be legalized.
Yay!!! Let’s load up the jails with pot entrepreneurs.
America. Home of the imprisoned.
@SteveC – on its face this is not enough for probable cause. A judge is not going to issue a warrant b/c a police officer smelled marijuana near a house. Smelling or even seeing a person smoking marijuana inside a house is also not an exception to establishing probably cause. See People v. Hua.