South Carolina Hemp Arrest Triggers Legal Chaos

On Thursday, a hemp farmer was arrested in South Carolina for allegedly growing the plants illegally and the action of the state has ignited a legal battle which has sucked in farmers, lawmakers, prosecutors and state agencies.

John Trenton Pendarvis is a licensed hemp farmer who realized that he had made an error when providing the GPS coordinates of his farm to state agriculture authorities. When he attempted to correct that error, the South Carolina Department of Agriculture referred his case to the State Law Enforcement Division for enforcement action.

SLED agents promptly arrested Pendarvis and mowed down his entire ten acres of industrial hemp reportedly worth $12 million.

The law enforcement agency says that they took such drastic action because they believed that Pendarvis wilfully tried to withhold information about the particulars of his hemp farm, something that was a violation of the state’s hemp cultivation rules.

The row that is engulfing the entire hemp industry in the state has to do with whether SLED was justified to destroy the hemp plants without due process of law.

Some argue that the enforcement arm of the state was required to obtain a court order before destroying the hemp plants while the department of agriculture insists that Pendarvis waived the right to due process when he signed the license documents allowing him to grow industrial hemp.

Lawmakers are also livid that the state arrested a farmer on a charge for which there is no prescribed penalty in the law establishing a hemp growing program in the state.

The agriculture authorities say that the lawmakers have no one but themselves to blame for such an omission since they were the ones that wrote the law which the state departments are implementing.

Stoking the fires of this chaos are the conflicting legal opinions issued by the office of the South Carolina attorney general. Initially, the office wrote an opinion saying that Pendarvis should be subjected to due process before any decision is made regarding what to do with the hemp plants.

However, the deputy AG later wrote another letter to SLED saying that the division could take any action that it deemed fit since Pendarvis waived his right to due process by signing the hemp cultivation agreement with the department of agriculture.

There are so many twists and turns in this case and analysts are certain that hemp companies like Earth Science Tech Inc. (OTCQB: ETST) and Geyser Brands Inc. (TSX.V: GYSR) will be following the developments closely since the outcome could set precedents for other jurisdictions when similar issues arise.

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