Lee County judge tosses sex journals

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DIXON - Some of the rape and molestation case against retired local Boy Scouts administrator Charles L. Bickerstaff, 57, could be tossed after a ruling Monday in Lee County court. Judge Stephen Pemberton said prosecutors must shelve six of Bickerstaff's handwritten journals and a scrap of legal paper that Lee County sheriff's deputies seized in April 2007. Potential evidence derived from those journals now also could be invalid. Deputies searched Bickerstaff's Dixon home for child pornography, under a search warrant that specified they were looking for computer images, DVDs and magazines. According to police testimony, one deputy thumbed through a notebook he found on the kitchen counter, tucked between a Bible and a stack of newspapers. After three or four pages, he stumbled onto a graphic passage and handed the notebook to his superior, who immediately recognized the name of one of Bickerstaff's accusers, investigators testified. Some passages in the journals appeared to detail sex acts between the two, as well as Bickerstaff's erotic longing for the boy, investigators said. Pemberton ruled that the deputy's decision to peruse Bickerstaff's handwriting exceeded the terms of the warrant, so the seizure was unconstitutional. "To say that the officers could be looking for photos is to go out on a limb. To say that the officers could read the journals and seize them is to go too far," Pemberton said. Rolfe Ehrmann, Bickerstaff's lead defense attorney, praised Pemberton's decision and said his ruling demonstrates a commitment to privacy protections and the U.S. Constitution. "We just had a court rule whether the Constitution allows a piece of evidence in a court of law. That's what we want the courts to rule on," Ehrmann said. "That's law enforcement in action." Paul Whitcombe, Lee County state's attorney, said the ruling will have little overall impact on his case, and that Pemberton "did an excellent job of taking into account all sides of the argument." Whitcombe also lauded sheriff's deputies for offering an accurate narrative of the search, a story that would have been easy to mischaracterize and bend in their favor. "It would have been very easy for them to have testified just a little bit differently, and [the journals] would have been admitted," Whitcombe said. "But there's no case worth our integrity." Overwhelmingly, the journals contain little more than the mundane details of Bickerstaff's life, such as the daily weather and breakfast choices, Ehrmann said. He is now considering whether more of the state's case should be called into question. With the first notebook in hand, officers expanded their search and found five more journals, all of which opened new leads in the ongoing investigation. Evidence derived from Bickerstaff's illegally seized writings also could be unconstitutional, Ehrmann said. "It remains to be seen whether police based their investigation on the journals or if they found some things with other techniques," Ehrmann said. "Unfortunately, I do not have access to the methods they used in the investigation." This is the first time in his career as a defense attorney that the issue has come up, he said. "I've been practicing law for 30 years, and this is the first time I think I've come across a case that actually deals with fruit of the poisonous tree." Bickerstaff has pleaded not guilty to four counts of criminal sexual assault and four counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving a 16-year-old Ogle County boy. He is in Lee County jail on $4 million bond. His next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 4.