The Press’s Prejudice against Fowlie’s Unjust Drug Charges
By Justice Mendez
The public must trust the press as a source of accurate information. So it is particularly egregious when media accounts of events are based on faulty or inadequate research. Then, reporting’s air of informative objectivity simply ensnares our understandings in misinformation, and the resulting “news” piece becomes idle chatter that panders to the sensationalism that sells newspapers. The worst cases of media misinformation result when unfounded reports actually malign the character of individuals and, thereby, foster public prejudice: adverse opinions or leanings directed against individuals or their supposed characteristics without due knowledge or examination. The press then becomes responsible for these unjustified, unfavorable opinions of others that result in the public adopting irrational stances of hostility toward lambasted individuals. The most sinister aspect of this type of reporting is that it becomes next to impossible to counter the media’s erroneous statements because people tend to believe the “facts” the media reports.
Such unwelcome prejudice appears in the press’s continual treatment of Daniel Fowlie. Consider the Orange County Resister’s article (13 February 2008) about Fowlie’s “[f]ormer drug ranch” which “was a haven for a convicted marijuana and cocaine smuggler.” The article explains that in 1979 “Daniel Fowlie, a suspected pot kingpin linked to drug guru Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of [Eternal] Love, builds a house on Rancho del Rio” and that in 1985 “investigators raid the ranch [but] Fowlie escapes.”i Simply by reading the article, we have adopted an unfavorable opinion of Fowlie and his supposed kingpin characteristics without having the actual facts with which to render sound judgment.
In reality, these “reports” about Fowlie comprise nothing more than prejudicial fictions. Fiction number one: Fowlie was convicted of marijuana conspiracy charges; no charges or evidence in his case states that he was involved with cocaine or cocaine smuggling—contrary to the article’s unequivocal declaration. Second, though many stories have been told about Fowlie, this article takes first prize for the most wildly imaginative claim that Fowlie was linked to “Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of [Eternal] Love.” Readers should remain leery of this unfavorable rumor when it offers no supporting evidence and appears nowhere in Fowlie’s case- or court records. Nor did Fowlie “escape” the Sheriff’s raid as the article asserts (giving readers a third fiction that elicits an adverse opinion of Fowlie). Fowlie was not even in the country at the time of the California raid.
Not only do the article’s “facts” constitute pure prejudice against Fowlie; the actual case against Fowlie was on many accounts unjustified as well. In fact, it was originally thrown out of California courts “in the interest of justice.” Fowlie’s case began in 1985 when the local authorities recovered less than an ounce of marijuana in an illegal raid of Fowlie’s 214-acre ranch (Rancho Del Rio) on the Riverside section of the border between Orange County and Riverside County: illegal because the property was just outside the department’s jurisdiction, and probable cause remained questionable in later appeals. Fowlie, who lived in Costa Rica at the time, only visited the ranch several weeks each year and was visiting Mexico when he heard that his ranch had been raided. Since many friends and workers of Fowlie occupied the seven houses on the ranch at the time of the raid, it’s likelier that the small amount of marijuana belonged to them than to Fowlie. Amazingly, this single ounce found in California was the only hard evidence of marijuana ever brought against Fowlie.
The other “evidence” presented against Fowlie was the purchased testimonies of jailhouse informants—paid by the prosecution with reduced jail sentences, money, and/or immunity from prosecution. (Since the Singleton Case, the justice system has begun rescinding the questionable practice of buying testimonies from informants, a practice which gives informants a self-interested incentive to lie in order to avoid punishment). The prosecution also presented testimony of an officer who claimed that twenty boxes were found on the California ranch with marijuana residue in them. However, the prosecution could never produce the boxes or lab results to confirm that the residue was cannabis. Fowlie attested that he used the boxes to collect grapes on his vineyard. Later assertions that Fowlie possessed tons of marijuana were merely induced from the capacity of these empty, elusive boxes.
In light of all these facts, in 1986 Judge McBride threw Fowlie’s case out of California courts “in the interest of justice”—leaving Fowlie free and clear from all charges.
Yet nothing but injustice was then served against Fowlie when the local authorities found a federal prosecutor to bring the discarded dry-conspiracy case to a federal judge, who allowed the illegal search in court. The federal court convicted Fowlie on the single ounce of pot, alleged (but never produced) boxes or lab tests, and the paid testimonies of informants. In 1987, Fowlie was convicted for marijuana-conspiracy charges in US federal courts, was then incarcerated in Mexico at the request of the US, extradited in 1990 to federal prison on Terminal Island, California, and then released in 2004 after serving eighteen years of a thirty-year sentence (a maximum sentence with good behavior at that time).
During his imprisonment, the authorities seized and manned Fowlie’s property for three years—living in Fowlie’s house, auctioning or looting all of his antiques, and shooting up all of Gus Fowlie’s Volkswagens, cars which Gus, Dan’s son, planned to restore into off-road racecars. Not only did Fowlie lose his ranch, now worth an estimated $22.5 million; he also lost nearly all his land in Pavones, Costa Rica, to illegal squatting during his imprisonment, land which Fowlie has been forced to win back through slow and costly legal processes.
As if Fowlie has not endured enough, uninformed Costa Rican and American newspapers continue to vilify him with their prejudicial, sensationalistic depictions of him as a former drug lord in California and Pavones. After all, Fowlie already maxed out a thirty-year- (and more-than-likely-unjust) sentence. Fowlie has more than paid his debt to society for less than one ounce of marijuana (found on a ranch he owned but did not occupy) and for the conspiracy inferred from paid informants and boxes that the prosecution lost. Continuing to misrepresent Fowlie’s case for the sake of selling newspapers not only conceals the reality of these events from readers—to their detriment—but seduces readers into prejudicially adopting irrational stances of hostility toward others—to the advantage of no one.
i. Collins, Jeff. “Former Drug Ranch Resurfaces as Luxury Retreat.” Orange County Register. 13 February 2008. Accessible at <http://www.ocregister.com/articles/property-county-million-1979456-orange-schwartz>. [Last accessed 10 April 2008].