Marijuana games, inmate cats, upscale bird houses

KAMIAH, Idaho — A 70-year-old woman was killed when she fell while preparing to flee from a wildfire expanding quickly east of Lewiston, the Idaho County Sheriff's Department said Saturday.

Authorities said Cheryl Lee Wissler of Adams Grade died Friday from a head injury she sustained when she fell.

An estimated 30 homes and 75 other structures were lost to the blaze, the sheriff's department said. The fire is surrounding the small town of Kamiah, about 60 miles east of Lewiston, and burned to the edge of Clearwater River, directly across the water from downtown.

The blaze is one of dozens taxing fire crews across the Pacific Northwest. Wildfires have destroyed homes in Oregon and Idaho, forced thousands of evacuations throughout the region and left at least 9,000 without power in eastern Washington.

At the Idaho blaze, more than 750 people were assigned to fight several fires that together have charred more than 50 square miles in the area near Kamiah.

The region was already struggling after severe drought damaged wheat harvests, with farmers watching as their normally plump wheat kernels grew pinched and stunted from the lack of water. Though most of the wheat had been cut before the fires started, bone-dry stubble still covers the prairie and the forests surrounding Kamiah are parched.

Many of the residents are farmers and ranchers. It's not yet clear how much livestock has been caught in the fires.

Fire information officer Jeremy Olson said that forecasters expect the wind to die down for the next few days. But Olson said the region is so dry that very active fire behavior will continue throughout the weekend.

GILLETTE, Wyo. — Recent decisions by state judges have revealed a legal loophole in Wyoming's marijuana law that lawmakers are trying to close.

First District Court Judge Steven Sharpe recently dismissed the case of a man accused of possessing enough edible marijuana in his car to be charged with a felony because Sharpe said the existing law specifies that possessing only the plant form of marijuana can be a felony.

Sharpe's July 29 decision in Cheyenne was discussed Thursday in Gillette at a meeting of the Joint Judiciary Committee, which is studying how to change the law to consider edible forms of the drug.

Another Laramie County District Court judge, Catherine Rogers, testified before the committee that she must consider Sharpe's decision when cases are brought into her court.

"I have concerns about these cases based on the rationale in my colleague's decision letter," she said. "But every case is always going to be weighed on the facts, and the testimony that is presented to the court in that case, and also in the way that is charged."

The Casper Star-Tribune obtained a copy of the letter Sharpe sent to attorneys on both sides of the case.

On April 13, the Wyoming Highway Patrol stopped a motorist for an alleged traffic violation. The trooper smelled alleged marijuana and seized 1.9 pounds of alleged edible marijuana candies, cookies, bread and chocolate bars.

State law states that more than 3 ounces of marijuana in plant form is a felony, the judge wrote in a summary of the case. Prosecutors filed a felony possession of marijuana charge, but the defendant countered that he did not possess more than 3 ounces of marijuana in a plant form.

Sharpe wrote that after reading the law, he concluded prosecutors can only charge someone with felony marijuana possession when the accused possesses it in plant form and when the weight exceeds 3 ounces.

Laramie County District Attorney Jeremiah Sandburg said he has refiled the case as a misdemeanor in circuit court.

State courts have decided differently on edibles, and until the state Supreme Court rules or if the law changes, there will be varying opinions, Sandburg said.

The Joint Judiciary Committee is discussing a proposal that would require police and prosecutors to weigh the entire edible, including chocolate and butter, and include those weights when determining the amount of marijuana in an edible.

Possession of 3 ounces of an edible would bump a charge from a misdemeanor to a felony, with a sentence of up to five years behind bars and a fine of up to $5,000, according to the draft bill.

The committee plans additional discussion on the bill in November.

But John Jolley of the Wyoming State Crime Laboratory said it's not easy to determine in an edible the amount of the tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana.

"Just the analysis and detection of the presence of THC is a very intensive process," he said.

SANTA FE, N.M.— The private consortium that manages the Los Alamos National Laboratory has been fined by the federal government for losing track of secret weapons data and nuclear material.

The fine of more than $192,000 finalized last month was reduced by about 20 percent from what was initially proposed by the Department of Energy in May.

Federal investigators said the lab contractor failed to catch a discrepancy in shipping papers for the classified material when it was sent to the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported. The classified materials and nuclear material have never been located.

The lab management company is called Los Alamos National Security and is headed by Bechtel Corp. Laboratory spokesman Kevin Roark told the newspaper Friday that lab management cooperated in the investigation after reporting the issue to the government. The notice of violation is being reviewed, Roark said.

Government reports show the classified material was misplaced sometime between when it was shipped from the lab to the Nevada site in 2007 and when a lab worker realized it wasn't there in 2012.

Los Alamos National Security workers determined the material probably never left the lab and was likely destroyed. The contractor's investigation found that the area was secure, and that "it is unlikely that a scientist saved the item and walked out with it later."

Federal investigators disagreed. They said security had been reduced at the site where the classified material had been stored.

Three dozen people had access to the area where the material was stored, and 16 of them had building keys, according to federal investigators. In addition, security had been reduced, and pedestrian and vehicle searches were not performed.

Los Alamos National Security, which has a $2 billion contract to oversee the lab, challenged the federal government's findings and argued that the original fine was "excessive."

Investigators reduced the proposed $247,500 fine because the security lapse was a one-time incident.

In a separate, final violation notice, Department of Energy investigators penalized Sandia National Laboratories' contractor Sandia Corp. $577,500 for the unauthorized release of classified documents and nuclear weapons data.

That fine wasn't reduced. It stemmed from an unidentified Sandia employee creating various versions of a presentation involving classified material over 15 years without proper reviews and storing it on an unclassified server.