Former UH coach
gets 7 years
for growing pot
A former part-time University of Hawaii-Hilo tennis coach had been on supervised release from federal prison for less than a year when he began cultivating marijuana on a patch of national park land on the Big Island, prosecutors say.
Because committing a crime while on supervised release is also a crime, Laron Kortgaard was charged with both cultivating marijuana and violating supervised release.
U.S. District Judge Alan Kay yesterday doubled the maximum total sentences for both offenses to seven years and eight months in federal prison. He also ordered Kortgaard to serve a total of seven years and three months on supervised release.
A federal jury found Kortgaard, of Volcano, guilty in June 2002 of cultivating 63 marijuana plants in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
Kortgaard, 46, had maintained at trial that he had stumbled onto the patch. However, park rangers had set up surveillance and video cameras around the area and observed him on numerous occasions three months before his arrest on March 13.
David Klein, attorney for Kortgaard, said they plan to appeal.
In January 2001, Kortgaard was released from prison early for good behavior after serving eight years of a 10-year sentence for importing more than 100 grams of heroin. He immediately began serving eight years of supervised release.
National park rangers discovered Kortgaard's marijuana operation on Dec. 27, 2001, off the Mauna Loa Strip Road.
In court yesterday, Michael Kawahara, assistant U.S. attorney, argued that a sentence on the higher end of federal guidelines was appropriate in light of Kortgaard's "flagrant" attitude toward the law and for the protection of society. Sentencing him to 10 years in the heroin case apparently was not a deterrent, Kawahara argued.
A month before his arrest in March, Kortgaard had tested positive in a urine sample. He shifted the blame to students that he coached, saying he had ingested marijuana-laced brownies served at a party by members of his tennis team, Kawahara said.
Kortgaard was fired by the university in April 2002.
Kortgaard has other convictions on the mainland and in Canada. From 1975 to 1988, he accumulated five drug-trafficking convictions, for which he spent 6 1/2 years in prison, and an additional 5 1/2 years for four breaking-and-entering and theft convictions. He has spent half his adult life since 1974 incarcerated in U.S. prisons, Kawahara said.