Cop Rats Out His Daughter-in-Law After Helping Her Grow Marijuana for His Cancer-Stricken Granddaughter

After
her 7-year-old daughter, Liza, was diagnosed with an aggressive and
generally fatal kind of brain tumor in 2011, Jennifer Scherr
decided to treat the cancer with cannabis oil. At the time
marijuana was not legal for medical use in Illinois, although a law
authorizing a pilot
program took effect this year. Scherr’s father-in-law, Curtis
Scherr, a Chicago police officer, nevertheless agreed to help her
grow marijuana in the hope of prolonging his granddaughter’s life.
He obtained the high-intensity light bulbs Jennifer needed and
stopped by the house periodically to check on the grow operation.
But about a week after Liza died in July 2012, Curtis ratted out
her grieving mother, filing a search warrant application in which
he reported having seen 50 marijuana plants in Jennifer’s basement.
A state judge issued a warrant, which a dozen or so DEA agents used
to search Jennifer’s house on July 19. They did not find any
contraband, since Jennifer had discarded the plants after Liza’s
death.

Between Curtis’s marijuana cultivation assistance and his
appalling betrayal of his daughter-in-law there was considerable
acrimony over funeral plans, which seems to have been the officer’s
motive in seeking the search warrant. But according to a
ruling issued last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the 7th Circuit, the search did not violate Jennifer’s Fourth
Amendment rights. Regardless of his motive, the court said, Curtis
had probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be
discovered in a search of Jennifer’s home, since marijuana was at
the time illegal for all uses under both state and federal law.

Judge Richard Posner conceded that “Curtis’s behavior,
which culminated in the DEA’s search of his daughter-in-law’s
house, was, if it was as the complaint describes it, atrocious.”
Furthermore, the officer’s failure to disclose his relationship to
the suspect made his warrant application “misleadingly incomplete.”
Had Curtis been more forthcoming, Posner suggested, the search
probably never would have happened:

Curtis was concealing from the judge asked to issue the search
warrant information that if disclosed in the affidavit might well
have doomed the application. Had the affidavit stated that the
suspected possessor of the 50 marijuana plants was the affiant’s
own daughter-in-law, the judge would almost certainly have asked
Curtis what was going on that would induce him to accuse his own
daughter-in-law of criminal behavior, and upon learning the details
the judge probably would have told Curtis to “work things
out” privately—that this wasn’t a proper matter for a criminal
proceeding.

Still, Posner wrote, “the law is settled…that a police
officer’s motive in applying for a warrant does not invalidate the
warrant.” He called that “a sensible rule, though distasteful when
applied in a case like this.” He added that Jennifer probably would
have more success in pressing a state claim against Curtis for
intentional infliction of emotional distress, since “there is
little doubt (always assuming the truth of the allegations in the
complaint) that Curtis Scherr intended to inflict severe emotional
distress on his daughter-in-law and succeeded in doing so.”