An attorney for a Polk County man who advocates marijuana for medicinal purposes has filed motions in his criminal case that say the Polk County Sheriff’s Office used false information to obtain a search warrant.
Steve Marlowe, 59, of Mill Spring was arrested in November 2007 and charged with possession of drug paraphernalia, maintaining a vehicle or dwelling for the use or sale of marijuana and manufacturing marijuana.
Marlowe’s attorney, Ben Scales of Asheville, has filed motions that claim the Polk County Sheriff’s Office forced an informant to give investigators information to obtain a search warrant.
The motions are slated to be heard Monday in Polk County Superior Court. “The search warrant was executed by the Polk County Sheriff’s Department on November 13, 2007,” Scales said in his motion. “The warrant was issued upon information contained in the affidavit of Lt. Matt Prince, which in turn is based upon a statement by a formerly confidential informant named Charles Grady Shehan Jr.”
According to the search warrant, Lt. Prince relied on statements made by Shehan.
“Mr. Shehan, it is alleged, visited the defendant’s (Marlowe) residence just prior to the issuance of the warrant and saw marijuana plants growing and other contraband therein,” Scales said in his motion. “(Mr. Marlowe) will show that by Shehan’s own admission, he was never inside the defendant’s residence, and had not been inside that dwelling in at least eight years, but that he was induced by Lt. Trent Carswell and Prince and others to make and sign a false statement that he had seen illegal activity occurring in the defendant’s residence.”
On Feb. 18, 2008, Shehan called Marlowe and spoke with him for the first time in a number of years, according to the motion.
“In the conversation, Shehan told the defendant that the sheriff’s deputies were pressuring him to testify against Marlowe before the grand jury, but that he was refusing, because the deputies were asking him to lie,” Scales said in the court documents. “Shehan told the defendant that the deputies were threatening him and harassing him on a near daily basis, and he asked Marlowe if he could help end the harassment.”
Shortly after Shehan and Marlowe talked, Marlowe’s ex-wife, Jean, contacted Shehan and asked him to repeat the same story he told Mr. Marlowe on videotape.
“In his video statement, Shehan unequivocally makes clear that the statements he gave to the deputies upon which the search warrants were based were not true,” Scales said.
Scales said in his motion that he cannot understand why the Sheriff’s Office would force Shehan to make false statements.
“One such guess is that the Sheriff harbors a personal animus against the defendant and Jean Marlowe, because of the Marlowes’ activism on the issues related to access to cannabis as medicine, which dates back to at least 1994,” Scales said. “Another potential reason is the Sheriff’s own embarrassing personal legal difficulties as he faces trial for sexual offenses. Yet another reason could be that the Sheriff’s legal problems have allowed a rouge element to develop within the Sheriff’s department who feel emboldened to act on their on personal vendettas.”
Scales was referring to Polk County Sheriff Chris Abril’s arrest on Aug. 28, 2006, and being charged with five counts of first-degree statutory rape and one count of first-degree sexual offense. The alleged sexual assaults involved girls who were 10 and 12 years old when the offenses are alleged to have happened, in 1988 and 1989.
