Moonshine suspect offers plea

Moonshine suspect offers plea
Health issues of man, 59, cited after $100 fine for possession of marijuana
Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010

By JOHN WHARTON

Staff writer

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A Valley Lee man arrested last summer after law officers found a moonshine still and a marijuana plant outside his home was fined $100 Friday on his guilty plea to the possession of marijuana.

District court charges against 59-year-old Peter John Antonovich of possessing untaxed alcoholic beverages and evading payment of alcohol taxes were dismissed before grand jurors indicted him on charges including the manufacture of marijuana and possessing a firearm while engaged in drug trafficking.

Those charges also were dropped last week upon Antonovich's guilty plea to the misdemeanor marijuana possession charge, and he agreed to forfeit weapons seized from his home. St. Mary's detectives reported last August that they found 25 firearms at the residence.

Antonovich said after his arrest that he used marijuana to combat the ill effects from dialysis treatments, and that he had no plans to sell the homemade liquor that he felt was carrying on a longtime St. Mary's tradition.

"He has substantial health issues," Daniel Slade, Antonovich's lawyer, said this week. "He was a hard-working guy. He was a Vietnam veteran."

Slade said that his client's kidney problems included his body's rejection of a kidney transplant in 2006, and that any marijuana that he had was for personal use.

"He never sold it," Slade said. "He [used] it because it helped alleviate the nausea" from his ongoing medical treatment.

St. Mary's State's Attorney Richard Fritz concurred that Antonovich had "heroically served" his country in wartime, and that there were no indications that the marijuana or moonshine were being sold.

"We have no evidence that he was distributing any of it," the prosecutor said Tuesday. "He is at the end stages of renal failure. He was just smoking [the marijuana] to relieve the misery of his medical condition."

jwharton@somdnews.com

http://www.somdnews.com/stories/01272010/entetop161109_32200.shtml