docs/research/history-marshall-gap-2026-10-23.md +55 −0
@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+# Marshall Islands: cannabis cases, asset seizure and reporting duties — 23 October 2026
+
+Adds four events, revises two, adds one article and rewrites the two existing law articles. All thirteen profile blocks now have inline citations. The six scores remain unchanged at **11 overall**, as do recreational `illegal` and access 0. Medical classification is corrected from `none` to `limited`. Categories and tags follow the current writing/data rules.
+
+Local PDFs, catalogue pages, text extractions, OCR, images, the batch and exact source objects are retained in `tmp/history-marshall-gap-2026-10-23/`. Public text distinguishes an enacted date from a reporting date and preserves fines/suspended sentences as distinct from immediate custody.
+
+## The 1989 marijuana appeal
+
+The judiciary’s **Marshall Islands Law Reports, volume 1**, was downloaded (`court1.pdf/.txt`). **Republic v Sakaio**, Supreme Court criminal appeal 88-01, **18 October 1989**, occupies printed pp. **182–191**. The full relevant judgment was read, including the facts, missing trial record, police/court advice duties, informed guilty plea, waiver of counsel, requested withdrawal and disposition. It is the primary source, not the headnote alone.
+
+George Sakaio pleaded guilty to marijuana possession under P.L. 1987-11 without a lawyer and immediately received two years. He asked to withdraw the plea and was refused. At a hearing five days later, the Public Defender was refused permission to represent him because he had already been convicted. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded for further action. It found denial of legal assistance and insufficient assurance that the plea/waiver were understood. It did not acquit him, grant a cannabis exemption or change the substantive penalty ladder. Quantity and conviction history are not supplied in this opinion, so the two years are not described as the standard punishment for a first small amount. The event is case-specific enforcement under existing constitutional rights, tagged court/sentencing/police powers, rather than a new score step.
+
+## Signed 2020 and 2025 amendments
+
+The official parliament index and public-law library supplied the original scans. A file advertised as the initial 1987 version (`initial-version.pdf`) actually includes the 2020 amendment; it is not treated as the original enactment. Guessed older amendment paths returned 404 and were not cited as recovered sources.
+
+**P.L. 2020-12** was recovered through the parliament’s 2020 download link (`amend2020.pdf`). Its preamble, definitions, possession/control wording, marijuana penalty scale, seizure provisions, minor-supply rule and effective-date/certification clauses were reviewed with local Vision OCR (`amend2020-ocr.txt`). The final certificate was visually checked: parliamentary passage **21 May 2020**, certification **4 June 2020**. The operative clause makes certification the commencement date.
+
+The amendment renames the law, expressly covers methamphetamine, MDMA and synthetic cathinones, and adds cash to drug-transport/import/export seizure powers. It republishes the separate marijuana and concentrate ladders and the penalties for supplying minors. Its preamble refers to changing proof burdens, but the public text does not turn that statement into a broader unsupported description of the operative owner-recovery procedure. It states the positive cash addition and the one-month recovery procedure. The event is `tightening`, with an explicit unscored reason: this property rule is not evidence of a whole-point change to ordinary adult possession/use/supply scores. It does not claim this was the first forfeiture authority.
+
+**P.L. 2025-37** was downloaded from the parliament’s amending-act folder (`amend2025.pdf`). All three pages were read through OCR, with the certificate visually checked. This caught an OCR error that rendered the day as 1: the signed date is **6 October 2025**, after passage **19 September 2025**. Section 103 commences the Act on certification. The existing year-only history event is corrected to **2025-10-06**. The existing reporting-duty article is rewritten around the recovered original, including the definition addition omitted from its earlier account.
+
+The amendment does two things: it expressly adds marijuana and marijuana concentrate to the prohibited-drug definition, and creates section 912A’s reporting duty. The latter requires people who witness activities involving drugs to report to national or local police, protects good-faith reporters against criminal/civil penalties, guarantees confidentiality of the information and sets a $1,000 fine for non-compliance. The public text follows that wording; it does not invent a reasonable-suspicion standard, reporting deadline or witness immunity beyond good faith.
+
+The explicit definition addition matters because the 2020 revision’s new prohibited-drug list did not expressly name cannabis even though marijuana definitions, the older deeming clause, penalty bands and minor-supply rules remained. No binding decision establishing a legal cannabis interval was recovered. No decriminalisation interval is invented from that drafting issue, and the 2025 addition is not called the first cannabis prohibition. The reporting duty concerns witnesses; it and the definition clarification have a documented unscored reason.
+
+## A reported personal-import sentence
+
+The publisher’s **Marshall Islands Journal issue of 3 January 2020**, printed p. **15**, was opened and its full short item **“Gandhi fined $1,000 for marijuana import”** read in the publisher’s FlipHTML5 text version. Direct shell download returned 403; the browser-search tool’s opened page and text version were readable. The viewer’s **5 February upload date** is not confused with the printed newspaper date.
+
+The report names Gandhi Heine, Chief Justice Carl Ingram, Chief Public Defender Russell Kun and Assistant Attorney General Meuton Laiden. It describes a guilty plea under a negotiated agreement, a **six-month sentence entirely suspended**, a **$1,000 fine**, probation conditions and marijuana found in an envelope at the Uliga post office. The relief-of-back-pain explanation is attributed to the defence lawyer; no valid prescription or medical exemption is inferred. The new entry uses **3 January 2020 as the reporting date**, explicitly stating that it is a newspaper report. The relative Friday reference is not converted into an exact judgment date without the court order. The original order and any later probation outcome remain retrieval tasks.
+
+Fewer than 200 derived words from this newspaper item are used across its event, the profile and the rewritten 1987 article. The remaining legal claims are supported by the actual statutes or court judgment.
+
+## School survey evidence
+
+The Ministry of Health and Human Services’ **Rapid High School Survey 2022**, hosted by PIHOA, was downloaded (`survey2022.pdf/.txt`). The ministry introduction, **methodology p. 7**, sample section and **marijuana findings p. 13** were read. Fieldwork was **March–May 2022**, covering public/private high schools and pupils in grades 9–12 who were present on survey days. Substance-use responses were completed confidentially and submitted anonymously.
+
+The report gives **13.8%** reporting marijuana use in the preceding thirty days. The culture event is dated to the **2022 fieldwork**, not the later hosting date. Public text consistently refers to participating high school students, not all residents, all youth or a clinical diagnosis. The report has conflicting sample totals in its contents and sample heading (2,621 versus 2,811), so neither is promoted as an independently resolved denominator. No sex/atoll comparisons or trend claims are needed. Fewer than 200 derived words from this report are used across the event, profile and reporting-duty article. The study supplies historical context; it is not asserted to have caused the 2025 amendment.
+
+## Profile, original-law article and remaining gaps
+
+The current parliament consolidation (`current.pdf/.txt`) was read for definitions, prohibitions, medical/professional exceptions, licensing/records, penalties, forfeiture and reporting. It retains commencement **20 March 1987**, but carries 1991, 1992, 2020 and 2025 changes. No modern band is backdated wholesale to 1987. The rewritten article links the early Sakaio prosecution to later dated amendments and identifies the current/2020 scales as later versions. Its stale static score statement is removed.
+
+The profile replaces unsourced “None” production/product text and the unsupported comparison with local incomes. It describes the separate concentrate bands, government-controlled professional channel, prescribed possession and ordinary prohibitions. Section 902(2) expressly extends the relevant medical/professional provisions to marijuana and concentrates, and the current prohibited-drug definition also explicitly includes both. This legal authority fits the schema’s `limited` category, which includes non-operating frameworks, so medical is corrected from `none` to `limited`. No operating patient service or issued cannabis licence was verified; access stays 0. The correction does not date a new programme or infer actual dispensing from a generic exception. Small-case fines and suspended custody are case-specific, not a national sentencing distribution. Clubs and visitors statuses remain unchanged; seed/cutting restrictions are tied to the actual broad plant definition and control provisions.
+
+The pre-1987 history remains open. **Trust Territory v Bermudes**, 7 TTR 80 (1974), was retrieved from the CNMI Law Revision Commission (`1974-case.pdf/.txt`). It concerns the **Mariana Islands District**, regulatory delegation and unequal marijuana penalties under territorial law. It is not automatically transplanted into a dated Marshall Islands legalisation or first-ban entry. Reconstructing the relevant Trust Territory law, its Marshall Islands application, the 1974 ruling’s scope and later replacements is still necessary. The existing 1987 FREE-before editorial baseline is preserved, **not treated as proof that the islands were unregulated until 1987**. An earlier first restriction must be added and the trajectory rebased when the applicable sources are established.
+
+Likewise, the original **1991 and 1992 amending instruments** were not recovered. Consolidated section notes identify those changes, but do not safely establish every earlier clause or penalty before them; no guessed first forfeiture or penalty increase is created. Micronesian Seminar’s older field report was retrieved as a lead but not used in public claims. A 2025 judiciary-report search lead is not used as a cannabis conviction count without reading and reconciling the full report.
+
+## Verification and commit scope
+
+The batch verifier checks four additions, two revisions, tags/categories, source use, citation punctuation, article lengths and links, all thirteen profile blocks, unchanged numeric scores/recreational classification and the corrected limited medical classification. Articles contain 419, 419 and 423 words with four sections each. The country chain remains 100 → 11 at the existing first event with no direction warning. The full production build and rendered citation/API/export checks are run before committing; the generated `site/` directory is then deleted. Only these six history IDs, the Marshall Islands profile, three article files and this memo are committed; unrelated shared-file objects and index entries are preserved.
+
+Verification completed: four additions, two revised entries, one new article and two rewritten articles pass tag/category/source/inline-link checks; all three article files meet the 350–500-word/four-section requirements. Thirteen profile blocks resolve their keyed citations. The production build passed with 3,912 pages. Rendered checks validated 68 citation links, tag/internal links, clean machine exports and matching API/CSV score 11 with the corrected Limited medical classification. The country chain has no direction warnings, and `git diff --check` passed. The generated `tmp/history-marshall-gap-2026-10-23/site/` directory was deleted after verification.