A man in the Znojmo district, whose name Novinky knows but withheld because of the sensitivity of the case, caught thieves creeping through local gardens with a neighbour, and after a fight they held one until police arrived.[1] Officers then caught two more men and found a van in which the group had a sizeable stock of cannabis apparently meant for sale in Austria.[1] While there, police noticed plants in the garden, harvested them all, seized his stocks in a house search, and a criminal case began.[1]

The Znojmo District Court sentenced him to nine months, suspended for two years, for growing cannabis for his own use.[1] He refused to accept that and appealed, so a senate of the Brno Regional Court heard the case; at Thursday’s hearing his lawyer asked for community service instead of a suspended sentence.[1] He told the appeal panel that cannabis is a herb, part of life, and should be settled at gardening competitions rather than in a courtroom.[1] The prosecutor saw no reason to soften the penalty and called the suspended sentence educational and fitting.[1] The appeal senate cancelled the suspended sentence and ordered him to work off the offence with 100 hours of community service, obecně prospěšné práce.[1]

Judge Mária Petrovková said the court had agreed with the defence in almost everything: he had never been punished, was in essence a decent citizen, and this had been his only lapse, and he had grown the plants for health reasons.[1] She said he now knows what he may do and must not go beyond it, referring to a criminal-code amendment under which a person may grow three plants at home for personal use without punishment.[1] He has fought chronic back pain and an autoimmune disease of the digestive tract for years, and during the investigation became a cannabis patient who collects medically grown cannabis in tablets from a pharmacy at set intervals.[1] After the verdict he told Novinky that the tablets help with pain but are otherwise quite different, because the ritual of preparing what he grew himself is missing.[1] He said he pays a co-payment of 20 crowns a gram, with the insurer covering the rest, and that the state took his stocks and limits growing for his own use while spending large sums to grow cannabis for him.[1]