WENDELL — The Wendell couple whose crop of medical marijuana plants was seized by state police in September have filed a civil lawsuit over the incident in Franklin Superior Court.
Patricia Scutari and Francesco “Apollo” Compagnone are asking the Massachusetts State Police to return the 10 medical marijuana plants that were taken during a Sept. 13 raid. Police used a helicopter to spot the plants and a ground team of state police and national guardsmen to cut them out of the backyard garden they were growing in.
The couple is being represented by Northampton lawyer Marvin Cable. They’re also asking for reimbursement of legal fees and money for damages related to the raid, and they demanded a jury trial.
Both Scutari and Compagnone are registered medical marijuana patients and use the substance for stress, cancer-related symptoms, and a back injury.
“We want to get our medicine back. I grew this for my woman who had cancer and all of a sudden a year’s medicine is gone so we’re going to try to get it back,” Compagnone said of the lawsuit Thursday. “We’re definitely going forward with it. We want to make people aware of marijuana as a sacred plant.”
State police said recently that the manner in which they were growing the marijuana — outdoors and in an area that was not securely fenced in — was not in compliance with the state’s medical marijuana law. State police said the plants were spotted by a trained spotter in the helicopter and could be considered “in plain view.”
Police did not present a warrant for the seizure and did not charge the pair with any crime.
Compagnone and Scutari disputed the state police’s rationale for the raid — the lawsuit said the plants were surrounded in metal wire in a yard with an eight-foot-tall fence.
“Growing the plants on a property with an eight-foot lockable fence around the property, and growing the plants inside rigid metal-wire scaffolding reasonably complies with the requirement of growing the plants in an ‘Enclosed, Locked Area,’” Cable wrote in the complaint.
The complaint also claims the helicopter was flying lower than allowed, so the area in which the plants were spotted could not be considered public. Since both residents have medical marijuana cards, they were not committing criminal activities and thus the officers had no probable cause for the raid, it read.
“The actions of the Massachusetts State Police were fundamentally wrong and unconstitutional. They violated the basic notions of privacy as granted by our state and national constitutions. Their actions lacked the prudence, reasonableness, and caution as also required by our constitutions,” Cable said in a statement Thursday morning. “They came onto lawful citizens’ land and seized property with no probable cause, no search warrant, no satisfactory exception to the search warrant requirement. This is what our nation’s founders were seeking to avoid. This case is not just about medical marijuana, it’s about the government not respecting important civil rights.”
The complaint said the Massachusetts National Guard, whose helicopter was used for the raid, and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency could be named as potential defendants in the case as well.
The state police did not return a phone message left at their headquarters by press time Thursday.
“They go after the sick people who just want a little relief from pain,” Compagnone said of the raid. “I wasn’t bothering anybody, but they bothered me. So now I’m gonna talk up.”