The city appealed, and the appeals courts reversed, finding the trial court wrongly considered Wheeler’s lack of knowledge and wrongly granted a defense motion to dismiss, and Wheeler appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.
In Thursday’s opinion, the justices first noted that the city has enacted policies contemplating noncriminal treatment of the least culpable violators of the cannabis ordinances, such as through citations in the city’s Administrative Citation Enforcement Program.
Given her professed lack of knowledge, and the lack of contrary evidence, the justices wrote that the trial court could reasonably put Wheeler at “the bottom end of the spectrum” of violative conduct when considering the nature and evidence of the crime.
While the appeals court found that Wheeler’s lack of knowledge shouldn’t have been considered, the justices wrote that “any circumstance of a crime, whether or not necessary to prove an element of the crime, might render a defendant less culpable without rendering her innocent. And ‘mitigating’ circumstances, to use the language of the appellate division, are ordinarily thought to include circumstances of the crime itself that, although not proving innocence, lessen culpability.”
