NOT A DRUG DEALER

It's time for reasonable and compassionate thinking to prevail in the judicially muddled misadventure of Ed Rosenthal.

Rosenthal will be sentenced Wednesday, possibly to prison for five years, for cultivating and conspiring to grow marijuana in a West Oakland warehouse. But if the 58-year-old Rosenthal, soft-spoken and bespectacled, defies the image of a drug dealer, it is because he's not.

Instead, he has become the latest and perhaps the biggest casualty so far in a thinly veiled attack on Proposition 215, the state's medical marijuana law that federal prosecutors hope to obliterate.

Rosenthal was convicted in January despite being deputized by Oakland as an "officer" to cultivate pot for a city program that, by state law, allows patients with a doctor's approval to grow and use marijuana.

But during the trial, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer disallowed testimony about medical marijuana or Rosenthal being authorized to grow and distribute it to city-sanctioned cooperatives for the desperately ill.

Jurors later said they would not have convicted him if they had known all the facts. One juror, Marney Craig, called it what it was -- an injustice: "It seems like we made a horrible mistake," she said.

Even Judge Breyer agreed to extend Rosenthal's bail by noting "this is an extraordinary case. It comes in the context of Proposition 215, the vote of citizens of this state, and the relationship of the defendant and the city of Oakland."

Breyer should again consider these complexities, along with Rosenthal's character, when he metes out his sentence. It's wrong to imprison Rosenthal. In this case, the letter of the federal law must be weighed against common sense, humanity and the spirit of a voter-approved initiative.