Jury finds Sangerville nurse guilty in pot case

DOVER-FOXCROFT – A registered nurse was found guilty Tuesday of marijuana cultivation and was sentenced to 45 days in jail.

A Piscataquis County Superior Court jury found Joanne Lynn Hegarty, 54, of Sangerville guilty of the Class C felony charge.

Hegarty was arrested in February after deputies from the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Department executed a search warrant at her East Sangerville home. The search of the nurse’s home was prompted by information provided by a concerned citizen.

Police reportedly seized 33 mature plants, 110 starter plants, seven packages of 1-ounce bags of dried marijuana that were stored in a safe and three plastic baggies of marijuana. They also confiscated drug paraphernalia, including grow lights.

Presiding over the daylong trial was Superior Court Chief Justice Nancy Mills, who meted out the sentence and ordered restitution of $200.

“We were disappointed with the felony conviction; we had expected a misdemeanor conviction,” Chris Smith of Dover-Foxcroft, Hegarty’s attorney, said Tuesday. He was unsure if Hegarty would appeal the conviction.

Contacted Tuesday, a Maine State Board of Nursing spokesman said Hegarty is still a registered nurse. She no longer is employed, however, by Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft.

Virginia deLorimier, nursing board assistant executive director, said the state board held an informal conference with Hegarty on July 28 and later offered her a consent agreement. The official declined to reveal the details of the consent agreement. The board tabled the marijuana issue pending the outcome of the court case and will now invite Hegarty back to the board to discuss the issue, deLorimier said.

Hegarty admitted during her trial that she had possessed at least 30 adult plants, but disputed that the small seedlings were marijuana plants, according to Smith. Hegarty, who took the witness stand, testified that she had other plants in the small pots, he said.

Six of the small seedlings were sent to the Maine State Police crime laboratory for analysis, according to Smith. The testing of five of the plants was inclusive because they could not detect any controlled substances, he said. The sixth one indicated a presence of marijuana, but the quantity was insufficient to be sure, he said.

Although the state put a lot of physical evidence before the jurors such as lights and paraphernalia, Smith said photographs rather than the live seedlings were presented to the jurors for their inspection.

Piscataquis County District Attorney R. Christopher Almy, who prosecuted the case, was pleased with the conviction.

“It’s another instance of a pretty large marijuana cultivation, and people just need to realize when they get caught with big amounts like this, they’re going to face a jail sentence,” he said Tuesday.

“The Sheriff’s Department continues to receive more and more undercover information about these grows, and their enforcement efforts are just going to get wider and wider, and more and more growers are going to be vulnerable to prosecution,” Almy said after the trial.

According to a police report filed by Deputy Jamie Kane, Hegarty told police that she was growing the marijuana plants just to see if she could. She told police that she didn’t know what she was going to do with them but that some were for her personal use. She said she smoked the drug very infrequently and only to help her sleep at night.

It also was noted in the police report that Hegarty had received a suspended sentence for a narcotic charge in 1969.