Judge gives Corinna woman 2 years on marijuana charges

A Corinna woman was sentenced to two years and one month in jail Thursday at federal court in Bangor for growing marijuana and tampering with a witness.

Lynne Ritchie, 40, also was ordered to four years of supervised release. Her sentence was stayed until July 26, when she must report to a federal corrections facility.

She was indicted in May 1992, a month after Maine Drug Enforcement Agency and Maine State Police searched her home and found 311 plants, seeds, dried marijuana, and an elaborate cultivation system.

Ritchie pleaded guilty under a plea agreement to growing marijuana and tampering with a witness in September 1992, while a third charge, furnishing marijuana to a minor, was dismissed Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Morton A. Brody granted a government prosecutor’s request to depart from federal sentencing guidelines and give her a lesser prison term because of her “substantial assistance.”

Ritchie had faced a mandatory five-year sentence with a maximum of almost six years. Her cooperation with the government wasn’t described during the hearing.

Timothy Wing, assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case, said the case was still being investigated.

Brody said he was aware that Ritchie “is not public enemy number one” and her criminal record was “nonexistant.” He said, however, that he had to consider general deterrence as a factor in the sentence.

Ritchie told the judge she had lost respect in the community, lost her job, and was forfeiting her home to the government.

“I know I made a bad decision,” she said.

Brody asked the defendant why she continued with the indoor growing operation, and Ritchie answered she did it “to get my electric bill paid.” She said she considered taking the marijuana to the town dump, but “I thought I would get caught with it.”

Asking for a reduction in Ritchie’s sentence, Wing said the defendant had admitted growing marijuana at the time of the search. He said the woman had been encouraged to grow the marijuana by her future son-in-law, Robert Evans, a co-defendant awaiting sentencing.

The prosecutor said Ritchie received $600 from an unnamed source to pay her electricity bill, and had expected to make $3,000. “She profited not at all,” but “it certainly was her intent … to make some money,” he said.

Wing said Ritchie also asked a juvenile witness to lie for her during a suppression hearing, wrote a letter to the witness detailing what he should say, and furnished four marijuana cigarettes to the juvenile.

Asking for probation, Ritchie’s attorney, Angelo Catanzaro of Ashland, Mass., said his client had been “totally ignorant of the magnitude of the criminality.” Catanzaro said Ritchie had allowed a former lover to bring the equipment into her house, and then was encouraged by Evans to continue.

“She went from having someone who was a lover egging her on to having someone in the family egging her on,” he said, adding that she was “very much a pawn.”

Catanzaro told the judge that Ritchie deserved “the biggest of breaks” because she had been used by other people. But Brody said he couldn’t understand how Catanzaro could ask for probation “with a straight face.”

Brody said that Ritchie was getting “a significant break” with the judge’s departure from the federal sentencing guidelines.