How Türkiye proves cannabis cultivation: the engineer's report and the plant count

The destruction is not an irregularity. Article 23 of Law no. 2313 provides for it: cannabis grown without permission is destroyed on the order of the senior civil administrator of the district, carried out by the police or gendarmerie, on a report from agricultural engineers of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, or from agricultural technicians where no engineer is available. The third paragraph then recovers the cost of that destruction from the person who planted, as a public receivable under Law no. 6183. Article 22 provides separately that esrar is seized immediately wherever it is found.

The prosecution case is therefore assembled before any defence lawyer has seen a page of it. What reaches the court is the search decision or order, the seizure record, the engineer's report, the photographs, the sampling record and the destruction record. Those documents are the plants now. If the count in them is loose, if the plants were never sexed, if no yield figure was produced, none of it can be cured later by examining the crop, because there is no crop. The lawfulness of the search that produced them is a separate question with its own requirements, and it is answered from the same file.

The engineer's report is what turns a photograph of a room into a criminal charge. Six things in it do the work.

The middle rows are not formalities. A report that says nothing about the sex of the plants and nothing about whether they were suitable for producing esrar leaves the conviction without the finding it has to rest on, and a fresh examination is the first thing the defence asks for. A male plant, a seedling that never developed, a crop killed by its own conditions: each is a question of fact the report either answered or left open, and a report that leaves it open is not a stronger case for the prosecution but an incomplete one.

Anything already harvested travels on a different track. Dried material is sent for laboratory analysis and comes back as a forensic drug report naming the substance and its weight, founding a separate Penal Code charge. The rules governing that laboratory report are not the rules governing the field report, and the two are routinely confused inside one file.

Where nothing was still standing, the growing has to be proved by something physical. The Court of Cassation has held that a suspect's bare admission that the esrar in the house came from plants they grew themselves is not enough on its own to convict for growing. Roots left in the ground, harvest residue, an actual record of a crop: the offence is proved by evidence of growing, not by a sentence in a statement.

No paragraph of article 23 turns on a number. The fifth paragraph separates four to twelve years from one to three by purpose, and purpose is drawn from the whole file. The Court of Cassation's case-law sets out what is weighed, expressly as a non-exhaustive list:

• whether any step was taken towards selling, transferring or supplying, and whether there is an admission on that point;
• the number of roots, the place of cultivation, and the size and condition of the plants;
• the quantity of esrar obtainable, and whether it could support a supply charge;
• whether harvested plants were found alongside the standing ones;
• whether a supply prosecution was made out or reduced to possession for use;
• whether the grower tested positive.

One rule constrains how the count is used. The assessment is made on the situation at the date of the offence — the plants as they were found — not on a yield assumed had they been grown on. In the case that produced those criteria the trial court had reasoned that twenty-eight young plants would eventually reach two metres and yield far beyond personal use, and that reasoning was rejected as speculation. In the same file the expert report put the esrar obtainable from the twenty-eight potted plants at 324 grams net, with a further 46 grams already harvested, and the majority held the personal-use sentence applied, over dissent. That was one file decided on its whole content. It is not a threshold, and nobody can read a sentence off a plant count.

The engineer's report is an expert report, and the Criminal Procedure Code governs it like any other. The decision appointing an expert must state the questions requiring expertise, the subject of the examination and the period for completing it, and that period cannot exceed three months, extendable once by up to three further months on a reasoned decision. Read the questions first. A report answers what it was asked, so if nobody asked about sex, suitability or obtainable quantity, the silence is an instruction rather than a finding. Before sealed items are handed to an expert, a list and a count of them must be made and recorded.

There is a limit on what the report may say. An expert may not go beyond matters requiring special or technical knowledge, and may not make the legal characterisations that belong to the judge. An agricultural engineer may state how many roots there were and how much esrar they would yield. Whether that indicates growing for supply rather than for own use is the court's question, and a report that answers it has gone past the article. The same limit, and the way it is used against a laboratory, is set out under the forensic report and how it is challenged.

The window to say so is short. Once the examinations are complete a period is fixed in which the defence may object or ask for a fresh expert examination, and a refusal must be reasoned in writing within three days. The defence may also obtain a scientific opinion from a specialist of its own, who can then be summoned to explain it at the hearing on the same terms as the court-appointed expert; no additional time may be requested on that ground alone, so the instruction is given while the examination is still running rather than after the report lands.

A point never put leaves nothing behind. A refusal that was asked for and reasoned is something an appeal can be built on; a first complaint about the report made after conviction is a much weaker one. The offence itself, the two sentences in article 23, the destruction procedure and how these files are defended are set out on our page on growing cannabis in Türkiye.