A judge has ordered state regulators to allow a company previously headed by former congressman William Delahunt to move forward with plans to open medical marijuana dispensaries in Mashpee and Plymouth, ruling it was improperly denied licenses last year.

In a 22-page ruling Monday, a Suffolk Superior Court judge found that the Department of Public Health failed to follow its own regulations in June when it rejected a bid by Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts to open three dispensaries, after initially supporting it.

The denial came five months after the company scored the highest among 100 applicants and was among 20 selected to move on to the inspection phase. It also paid a $50,000 registration fee for each of its three proposed dispensaries.

Suffolk Superior Court Judge Mitchell H. Kaplan concluded that the state launched an additional review of applications following a barrage of criticism about the controversial selection process, then ruled against Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts without allowing it to address concerns. By then, he said, the company had already invested significantly in its planned facilities.

Revisiting issues that had been previously disclosed by the company “and then ‘non-selecting’ the applicant based on that second look, caused MMM precisely the type of prejudice that the regulatory scheme was intended to prevent: the expenditure of substantial sunk costs that MMM has no means to recover,” Kaplan wrote.

– Read the entire article at The Boston Globe.