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Up in Wood County, it apparently doesn’t take much to get a far-reaching search warrant if investigators suspect a marijuana growing operation.

The Court of Appeals, however, ruled Thursday that what police and a judge relied on did not amount to probable cause, and granted Timothy Bender’s motion to suppress evidence that led to pot and gun convictions.

That even after police went on Bender’s property without permission to install surveillance cameras to help them develop probable cause.

Bender and his mother lived on 39 acres. According to the opinion, a confidential informant told Marshfield police officer James Cramm he had seen some pot plants growing among other vegetation somewhere near Bender’s land. (Cramm went to see the plants and told a judge that county land records showed the plants were on Bender’s property. That was later shown to be wrong.)

Another informant told police Bender seemed secretive, didn’t have a job, and that Bender’s mother, who lived with him, never went to his locked shed or the basement.

Police, who knew Bender had a previous pot conviction, put some cameras on his land that showed him walking on the property, 800 feet from the pot plants.

That was enough to get a warrant and they searched Bender’s house, barn and 38 acres and found marijuana, items related to its cultivation and guns.

When Bender first attacked the basis of the search warrant, the judge agreed “Bender proved by a preponderance of the evidence that Officer Cramm had made several false statements and material omissions and that he had done so in reckless disregard of the truth.”

But the judge considered “revised allegations” in support of the warrant and found them to be sufficient, and denied Bender’s motion to suppress.

Bender pleaded no contest to two counts and appealed.

The District 4 panel of the Court of Appeals decided even the revised allegations fell well short of probable cause for a search, and ruled Bender’s motion to suppress the evidence found on his property should have been granted.

Regarding the plants seen by Cramm:

“ . . . The cultivator or cultivators of these five plants concealed amid this apparently typical rural Wisconsin landscape came and went from any direction, and there is no reason to conclude from the revised allegations that the plants could not be accessed by anyone intending to cultivate a small, secret marijuana plot on farm land.”

“On a separate topic, the State suggests that the fact in itself that two confidential informants without apparent stakes in the matter ‘felt,’ to use the State’s word, that Bender might be involved in marijuana cultivation and took the initiative to share their suspicions with police carries some independent weight. However, mere suspicious feelings do not matter.

The photos of Bender walking on his own property, 800 feet from the plants, didn’t add anything either, the court held, and so it didn’t even address Bender’s separate claim that police violated his constitutional rights when they placed cameras on his property without consent or a warrant.