SMITHFIELD – The town has agreed to pay $600,000 to a former cannabis grower to settle a federal lawsuit alleging that police lied about having a confidential informant to obtain a warrant and search his warehouse grow.
Defense lawyer Megan E. Sheehan, who represented Joseph Ricci in the seven-year-old case said, "I hope what comes out of this case at the very least is the state is going to put all the police departments in Rhode Island on notice that they can’t frame people and get away with it."
Background on the case
In October 2017, Ricci was a registered medical marijuana patient who grew the drug inside his Putnam Pike warehouse for himself and two other patients as a licensed “caregiver.”
That month, local police raided his warehouse. Police officer Joseph M. Marcello said in his affidavit supporting a search warrant request that he "had received information from a confidential informant" that Ricci was cultivating large amounts of cannabis and possibly selling it on the black market.
Drug charges against Ricci were eventually dismissed. But he did plead no contest to a misdemeanor charge of "visiting a common nuisance," which Sheehan described as "essentially being at a property where there is drug activity occurring."
Last year Ricci told The Journal that he'd pleaded to the misdemeanor because he wanted to put the episode behind him. He received a "filing," meaning his record would be expunged if he remained law-abiding for a year.
No evidence of a confidential informant
After his arrest, Ricci filed suit in U.S. District Court alleging that police had violated his constitutional rights against unlawful searches by lying about having a confidential informant to establish probable cause for the warrant.
The case dragged on for years as Ricci also challenged the subsequent confiscation by the state of all his personal property in the warehouse, including all his tools and supplies as a contractor. (The state settled that case in May, returning Ricci’s property.)
In a pre-trial motion last summer, Ricci’s federal lawsuit got a significant boost of support when U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy said there was a “strong” inference that police had indeed lied.
She said Marcello’s affidavit for the warrant “was clearly false,” because when put under oath during a deposition, Marcello “denied having any personal contact with an informant,” the judge wrote.
Further, wrote McElroy, “while Marcello said he knew that his [department] supervisor, defendant Michael Smith, had been the one to actually talk to the informant because Smith told him that he met with the informant, that was not accurate either, as Smith also denied under oath having personal contact with the informant.”
In fact, McElroy said there was no evidence anywhere “that anyone in the department had contact with the putative informant.”
More to the story?
Over the last year, town officials have repeatedly referred reporter questions about both the state and federal cases to the town’s lawyers, who declined comment, saying they were still pending.
On Monday, Town Manager Randy Rossi said the town continued the federal litigation so long because it felt "the town and the police department were in a good place since Mr. Ricci had pled to criminal charges, but unfortunately the judge did not see it that way. And the case was settled in the end."
Rossi added: "It's unfortunate" the way the case may have been received in the public based on “the information that was in the courts. There is always more to a story.” He would not elaborate.
Asked if Marcello had been disciplined for his actions, Rossi said he could not comment, “because it is truly a personnel matter. All of the actions of everyone involved have been reviewed.”
Defense lawyer Sheehan said the case should be “embarrassing” to the Town of Smithfield. “My client didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I don’t know how you can employ a police officer who has completely lied about an informant. How could you possibly ever trust him to provide accurate information and testify under oath? I hope there are some serious changes internally at the Smithfield Police Department, but I’m also not holding my breath," Sheehan said.
What's changed?
In a statement to The Journal, Smithfield Police Chief Richard P. St. Sauveur Jr. said, “Joe Marcello is a hard-working, reliable, trustworthy, and valuable member of the Smithfield Police Department. He continues to be assigned to the detective division as a detective sergeant.”
As a result of the Ricci case, the chief said his supervisory officers within the detective division reviewed the department’s policy “relative to the preparation of search warrant applications.”
The department also plans to include new training, he said, “that focuses on using accurate identifiers when applying for search warrants.”
Smithfield Town Councilman Sean M. Kilduff called the case “an unfortunate stain on our great police department.”
“I will say that an abuse of investigative authority and falsifying information is not acceptable,” said Kilduff. “It belittles our justice system and is beneath the expectations we set on the fine officers of Smithfield.”
Contact Tom Mooney at tmooney@providencejournal.com.
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