Lawyer Lets Grief Propel His Fight for Medical Pot

Ask him, and attorney Robert L. Kennedy can tell you the exact moment of his conversion to the controversial medical marijuana movement and his motivation for taking one of its most important cases.

It’s been almost one year since his son-in-law died of brain cancer, and Kennedy still cannot accept the death of the loving husband and father who had been an altar boy until age 21.

Pictures of his late son-in-law, Paul Comouche, dot Kennedy’s well-appointed office. There’s one of the dark-haired, movie-star handsome Comouche with Debbie, Kennedy’s daughter. Another of Comouche with a 5 o’clock shadow, grinning alongside his 2-year-old daughter--Kennedy’s granddaughter.

Then there are the pictures kept out of sight. Comouche wasting away, Comouche without hair. It was this painful period and his beloved son-in-law’s death that led Kennedy to an unlikely alliance with the medicinal marijuana movement.

When Comouche was dying in 1997, dozens of medicines failed to ease his pain. Kennedy read that marijuana helped other cancer patients and begged his son-in-law to try the drug.

Then Kennedy contacted Marvin Chavez, the director of the Patient, Doctor, Nurse Support Group, a cannabis club based in Garden Grove.

Chavez steadily provided Comouche with marijuana until Comouche died last year at age 31. So when Chavez was arrested in April on charges that he sold marijuana to an undercover officer posing as a caretaker for a terminally ill patient, Kennedy took the case for free, out of gratitude.

Kennedy recalled that Comouche’s nausea subsided and his appetite returned after using the drug. His son-in-law also lived within 10 days of a full year, although doctors had given him six months to live.

“I have a soft spot in my heart for Marvin,” Kennedy said of Chavez, who took many legal risks. “I didn’t have to expose my license to jeopardy; I didn’t have to go to clients of mine who are dealers or go into the street and get ripped off.”

A finely carved statuette of Don Quixote stands in the corner of Kennedy’s Long Beach office, a gold-handled sword in one of Quixote’s hands and an open book in the other. When it comes to the Chavez case, Kennedy sometimes views himself as the fanciful knight of literature who yearned to combat the world’s evil but ended up tilting at windmills.

“My first thought when I met Marvin and saw how they were distributing marijuana was: “This ain’t gonna work in Orange County.’ ”

The county’s reputation for conservatism, Sheriff Brad Gates’ campaign against Proposition 215--the successful ballot measure seeking to make marijuana available for medicinal purposes--and the fact that many of the judges in Orange County were once prosecutors make the case challenging, he said.

Several of his colleagues agree there are obstacles to Kennedy’s winning the case.

“But this goes to Bob’s own personal sense of what is right,” said family law attorney Boo Giuffre. “That’s why he’s willing to deal with the D.A. where a lot of us at some point just throw our hands in the air and say, ‘You win.’ ”

Also, Kennedy makes no secret about the fact that he enjoys challenging the odds.

“It’s not popular to say so, but a defense attorney is really liberty’s last champion, and Bob Kennedy exemplifies that,” said lawyer Stephanie Loftin.

Orange County may be unlikely territory in which to blaze a trail for the use of medicinal marijuana, but Kennedy has had tough fights before.

In September 1995 he represented the California Grocers Assn. after racist pamphlets had been tucked inside products in stores in Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties. The association had endured the problem for two years before hiring Kennedy.

Although no law had specifically prohibited the pamphlet insertions if product seals weren’t broken or food actually touched, Kennedy won permanent injunctions against a Glendale man said to be behind the pamphlets.

He also won injunctions in three counties against the White Aryan Resistance, whose members, including the Glendale man, were believed to be behind the pamphlet insertions. The injunction bars them from such insertions. Three months later, the state Legislature enacted a law making all such distributions illegal.

The perpetrators “knew just how far they could go and what they had to do to stay somewhere on the borderline of the law,” said Don Beaver, former president of the California Grocers Assn. “Bob Kennedy’s a real bulldog--that’s why we used him. We knew he’d go after this guy with passion, and he did.”

Kennedy believes the law is on Chavez’s side. Proposition 215 may be poorly drafted, he said, but its intent is clearly to help people who are ill.

Orange County officials simply plan to ignore the law, he said.

He cites passages of Proposition 215--also called the Compassionate Use Act of 1996--whose stated purpose is “to encourage the federal and state governments to implement a plan to provide for the safe and affordable distribution of marijuana to all patients in medical need of marijuana.”

Officials should have helped Chavez distribute marijuana legally rather than letting him flounder, Kennedy said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carl Armbrust sees it differently. Chavez maintained he was just seeking a donation when he asked the undercover officer for money, but police and prosecutors say that he was conducting a drugs-for-money transaction--illegal even under Proposition 215.

Armbrust maintains that once money is received in return for marijuana, the law has been broken.

Chavez, a slight man with a wiry build who suffers from a degenerative back disorder, was recently released on $100,000 bail after three months in jail. He has tried a variety of prescription drugs but said none work as well as marijuana, which is why he champions its use. “I’m willing to do the time and fight for the cause in an ethical, practical and peaceful way, but definitely, we’re going to win,” Chavez said.

Kennedy, he said, is the ideal lawyer for the case.

“He’s been there with the movement, and now it’s time to use his experience as an attorney to defend the spirit of the law for the people.”

Like Chavez, Kennedy is optimistic that marijuana one day will be prescribed by doctors and supplied by pharmacies. And he is ready to tell his personal story to anyone who wants to listen.

Why go after sick people seeking solace from marijuana? he asks.

Looking at his daughter’s wedding picture, he added: “No one who has seen a close relative die an agonizing death would do it. . . . I wouldn’t wish this last year of hell that my family has suffered on anybody, but maybe that’s what it takes for people to understand.”