The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the conviction and 10-year mandatory minimum sentence of Chico medical marijuana grower Bryan Epis in an unpublished decision filed on 8 April 2009.[1] A three-judge panel rejected his challenges to the conviction and to the denial of safety-valve relief from the mandatory minimum.[1]

Epis had been arrested by Butte County officers in June 1997 and convicted by a federal jury in 2002 of conspiring to manufacture 1,000 marijuana plants within 1,000 feet of a school and of manufacturing 100 plants near a school.[1][2] Authorities seized 458 plants from his home, and he said he was growing for a Chico patients group, admitting he sold some plants at cost to co-op members.[2] He held a doctor’s recommendation for chronic back and shoulder pain, but the trial judge excluded medical evidence; California’s legislature later cited the case when urging federal medical-cannabis action.[2][3] Epis served a little over two years before his release on bail in 2004, and the panel’s 2009 decision ordered him back to prison to serve the remainder.[2][4]