A federal judge has tentatively ordered dismissal of a $12 million lawsuit against the U.S. government, filed by a former deputy marshal who said he was unknowingly drugged with LSD as part of a CIA mind-control program before trying to hold up a San Francisco bar nearly a half century ago.
In earlier rulings, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel rejected the government's attempts to dismiss Wayne Ritchie's suit and said he had shown that a CIA mind-control experiment code-named MKULTRA was operating in San Francisco in December 1957, when Ritchie says he was drugged.
During the program, which lasted at least a decade at the height of the Cold War, hundreds of unwitting Americans were given LSD and other drugs to study their possible use in behavioral control.
But after hearing Ritchie and other witnesses testify on his behalf at a nonjury trial last week, Patel ruled that Ritchie had failed to prove that LSD led to his criminal and psychological problems.
"It is not clear by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Ritchie was administered LSD,'' the judge said at Friday's hearing, according to a transcript obtained Tuesday. "It may be what happened. But this is a court of law. We don't operate on hunches. We have to operate on the facts.''
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