The B.C. Director of Civil Forfeiture is being branded a “vexatious litigant” and accused of malicious abuse of process for trying to grab the home of a couple given minor sentences for growing marijuana for a compassion club.

Although a Provincial Court judge two years ago refused to order the pair to forfeit all or part of the Burnaby property as a consequence of the 2008 offence, the elderly couple say the director is wrongly taking another kick at the can.

They asked B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ronald to stop the latest forfeiture proceeding.

“I felt like I had beaten cancer and it was back again,” Terrence Roger Tetz, 66, said in an affidavit, adding that he was in poor health.

His common law wife Ellen Lee De Rosenroll said she was staggered at the renewed attempt to confiscate her home.

“It has been a nightmare,” complained the 59-year-old, who had nothing to do with the grow operation.

The litigation has thrown the spotlight on the civil forfeiture office — run by former Mountie Phil Tawtel — and is one of a handful of cases moving through the province’s senior trial court that raise serious constitutional and fundamental legal concerns about its governing legislation.

Tetz and De Rosenroll were charged after police searched 7092 Patterson Ave. on March 27, 2008.

The RCMP found a small marijuana grow operation with 140 plants behind a false wall in the garage, 16 pounds of dried marijuana and $5,400 in cash — $5,000 in a brown envelope in a backpack.

Police also raided a warehouse in Richmond where Tetz was cultivating hundreds of clones and some mature plants.

For at least the previous two years, Tetz apparently had received $130,000-plus a year supplying medical marijuana — six pounds a month to the club at $2,200 a pound. There was no evidence he sold to the black market, though he had sold clones — fledgling plants — to fellow growers.

Tetz pleaded guilty to his first and only conviction and was given a conditional sentence of eight months on Sept. 29, 2011; De Rosenroll was handed a $1,000 fine.

The Crown sought to have the house, which is in De Rosenroll’s name only, surrendered.

After a four-day hearing, Provincial Court Judge William Kitchen concluded forfeiture would be a disproportionate punishment.

He cited a lack of evidence the home was purchased in 2004 with the proceeds of crime or to support and facilitate the pot growing.

The couple were relieved, but they were forced to re-mortgage the home (adding $100,000 to the original $299,000 debt) to pay $23,000 in legal fees and other bills that had piled up during the three-and-a-half year ordeal.

Then, nearly two years later, out of the blue, the director of civil forfeiture turned up demanding they hand over the house and the $5,000.

The couple’s lawyer, Tonia Grace, slammed the entire proceeding as an abuse of process, a collateral attack on Judge Kitchen’s order, vexatious and barred by estoppel — the civil rule that says once an issue has been competently adjudicated it cannot be relitigated.

“There is no Lamborghini in the driveway,” she fumed.