Barely a month after her husband died of cancer, Rhonda Firestack-Harvey got more devastating news: Obama administration prosecutors had convinced a judge to imprison her for tending their medical marijuana garden, which fell on the edges of complying with Washington state law.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice sentenced Firestack-Harvey on Friday to one year and a day in prison for violating federal law by growing between 50 and 100 marijuana plants. Her son and daughter-in-law, who helped with the garden and like Rhonda and her late husband were state-legal medical pot patients at the time of a DEA raid in 2012, also got prison sentences for the 74-plant garden.

Rolland Gregg, an alternative energy developer, received the harshest penalty, 33 months. His wife – Michelle Gregg, who works at Microsoft – got a year and a day in prison.

"The fight continues," says family media coordinator Kari Boiter, who attended the daylong sentencing hearing. "It certainly should have ended before now."

The three are free pending appeal and through Boiter declined to comment. Earlier, the family had hoped for a slap on the wrist, perhaps probation, after beating almost all charges at trial.

Possession of marijuana for any reason outside limited research remains a federal crime, but the Justice Department, citing prosecutorial discretion, allows recreational marijuana facilities in Washington state and elsewhere to break the same federal law the family faces prison for violating.

Federal agents and prosecutors generally respect local laws in the more than half of states that allow some medical use of marijuana and in the four states that have laws regulating sales for recreational use, but the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Washington is known for taking a tough line on marijuana and alleged the four family members and family friend Jason Zucker – jointly nicknamed the Kettle Falls Five – were in fact marijuana dealers.

Citing seized photographs taken a year before the DEA raid, prosecutors initially charged each of the defendants with growing more than 100 plants, which carries a mandatory minimum of five years in prison for a first offense. A charge for possessing a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime could have triggered another mandatory five-year sentence. The family successfully argued the guns were for hunting and self-defense and that they did not sell the marijuana.

The case long has infuriated medical marijuana advocates and their allies in Congress. Family patriarch Larry Harvey, who died in August, helped lawmakers sell an amendment that bans federal drug agents and prosecutors from spending money to undermine state medical pot laws, lobbying on Capitol Hill and insisting he had done nothing wrong.

Unfortunately for the defendants, the federal spending prohibition – which sailed through the House of Representatives last year in a bipartisan 219-189 vote and was re-approved by a broader margin this year – did not change the underlying law and could not have ended a pending prosecution.

Rice ruled in February the group was unprotected by the measure anyhow because their garden violated Washington state’s medical marijuana law, which allowed patients to grow 15 plants each, with a cap of 45 plants in collective gardens. The cap meant the five would have been allowed under state law to collectively grow 75 plants, just not at the same location.

As the case attracted national headlines, then-Attorney General Eric Holder visited the U.S. attorney's office in Spokane last year. Advocates for the defendants hoped in vain he would instruct U.S. Attorney Michael Ormsby to drop the case, in line with his urging that prosecutors avoid charges for nonviolent drug crimes that carry mandatory minimum sentences and the Justice Department's 2009 guidance against prosecuting medical marijuana users.

Despite Holder's visit, the case moved to trial. A representative for Holder, now in private practice, did not respond to a request for comment on the case's outcome.

Harvey was excused from the case earlier this year because of his terminal pancreatic cancer. Zucker took a plea deal just before trial and received a 16-month sentence.

Firestack-Harvey and the Greggs, after refusing plea deals for three years in prison, were acquitted by a jury of all but the lesser cultivation charge, even though they were not allowed to mention state law or say why they were growing marijuana.

Rice, an Obama appointee, worked two and a half decades in the prosecuting U.S. attorney’s office, but Boiter says he deserves some credit for giving Harvey-Firestack and Michelle Gregg downward departures from sentencing guidelines for their illnesses. And by giving them a year and a day, he made them eligible for early release, she says.



Boiter optimistically says it's possible the case will "go away" while on appeal, perhaps if Congress passes further reforms to federal marijuana prohibition or if there's leadership change at the prosecutors' office.

Boiter says in addition to the human toll, which she believes includes the stress-related hastening of Harvey's death, the case was a significant waste of taxpayer dollars

"At what point is someone going to say, 'No more, Michael Ormsby, it's time for you to resign or get in line'?" she says. Boiter says she counted at least 13 people on the federal payroll during the daylong sentencing proceeding Friday.

Steph Sherer, executive director of the national medical marijuana advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, similarly denounced the outcome.

“Jail time for the Kettle Falls defendants is an embarrassment to the judicial system,” Sherer said. “We’re calling on President Obama to pardon all three defendants immediately.”

ASA estimated earlier this year that the prosecution had cost the government at least $2 million. The cost of imprisoning a federal inmate for one year was more than $30,000 in fiscal year 2014.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office says the prosecution team had not released a statement on the outcome and that their public statements would be limited to the court record.

Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., a co-sponsor of the federal spending prohibition the case helped pass, said the trial was unfair and wasteful.

"By barring the family from admitting into evidence that they were medical marijuana patients, the scales of justice were weighted towards conviction because the courts refuse to hear all the facts," says Farr, who plans to reintroduce legislation allowing people in similar circumstances to tell jurors why they were using marijuana.

"This heavy-handed approach is not what the American people want," Farr says of the case. "They want the federal government to stop wasting limited resources prosecuting patients and instead go after real criminals.”