SKOWHEGAN — A California man arrested in one of the dozens of law enforcement raids on cannabis grow houses in 2024 will avoid jail time and pay a $10,000 fine.
The plea deal for Dongming Liao, 43, who the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office arrested after searching a residence on Cooley Road in Harmony in April 2024, came amid a series of motion hearings scheduled this week and next in other similar cases that have been lingering on the court’s docket. Most of the cases, like Liao’s, date back to arrests two years ago.
Wednesday’s proceeding at the Somerset County Superior Court was set to be a hearing on a motion to suppress evidence.
Instead, Liao, of Monterey Park, California, pleaded guilty to Class B marijuana cultivation, and Superior Court Chief Justice Robert E. Mullen ordered him to pay the $10,000 fine by April 29. The Class B offense is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Liao, who was assisted by Cantonese-English interpreters but answered questions from Mullen and spoke with his attorney in English, also agreed to forfeit $1,882 in cash seized during the search of the Harmony residence. Prosecutors agreed to dismiss the forfeiture of a 2017 Ford Transit van and return it to Liao.
District Attorney Maeghan Maloney, the elected top prosecutor for Somerset and Kennebec counties, said the plea agreement included a cap on the requested sentence. She argued for a sentence of three years in prison, with all but six months suspended, and three years of probation, as well as a $10,000 fine.
After the hearing, Maloney said that offer has been on the table for about a year in all other similar cases pending.
“I’m always comfortable with leaving the ultimate sentencing decision with the court,” Maloney said. “That is the court’s responsibility. My responsibility is to bring forward the case and to ask for the sentence that I believe to be correct.”
Liao’s attorney Darrick X. Banda, of the Augusta law firm Bourget & Banda, argued for no jail or probation time and a $5,000 fine.
He said after the hearing that Maloney’s offer of jail time was “too harsh.”
“The Legislature is OK with us having pot stores on every corner and two or three on the same street, and they need to go back and readdress the marijuana laws,” said Banda, who added that he personally believes cannabis should be illegal.
“If growing marijuana is not that big of a deal, then it shouldn’t be a Class B felony to have 500 plants,” he continued. “I understand that we want people to be licensed, we want people to comply with the law, but those criminal statutes were in place long before we decided to legalize marijuana.”
Mullen, the judge, settled on the $10,000 fine as the sentence, noting that although the 3,400 plants seized from Liao’s property were much more than the 500-plant threshold for the Class B offense, Liao had no criminal record, took responsibility for his crime and appeared to have low potential to reoffend.
Neither prison time nor probation would be likely to have any real effect, Mullen said.
California man walks with $10K fine in Harmony marijuana grow house case
