HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ 1/HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ.iso/drugs/misfires.in.wod

Internet Message Format | 1996-05-06 | 12.7 KB

Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: ,alt.law-enforcement,alt.society.civil-liberties,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,talk.politics.drugs
From: [e-mail]
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1993 21:19:43 UTC
Subject: Misfires in the War on Drugs

  I know there are objections to be made against reprinting copyrighted
stories on the net, but I am going to take the chance in assuming that
the author would probably approve of the wide distribution of his
story that the net offers.  When I read this story, I found it to
be as angering as the Pittsburg Press series that shows up from time
to time.

  I would be interested in seeing how pro-WoD "law and order"
people like Steve Fischer and others would respond to this article.


    ========================================================

                     MISFIRES IN WAR ON DRUGS

By JOE HALLINAN; NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

   As evening descended on this community near San Diego, so, too, did a squad
of federal drug agents.

   They were looking for the home of a man named Donald Carlson, a man an
informant said was a drug dealer.

   The agents watched as Carlson pulled into his garage, put his golf clubs in
the trunk of his Ford, shut the door, turned off the lights and went inside to
bed.

   Then, shortly after midnight, the agents stormed his house. Carlson, thinking
he was being robbed, grabbed a pistol. It is unclear who fired first, but when
the shooting stopped Carlson lay bleeding on his bedroom floor, three bullet
holes in his body.

   But Carlson, 41, was not a drug dealer. He was not a criminal of any kind.
He was just an innocent victim of this country's war on drugs.

   What happened to Carlson, although extreme, is not unusual. Police in their
quest for drugs are raiding the homes of innocent people.

   "It happens every day in this business," said Capt. Art Binder of the
Cumberland County (N.C.) sheriff's department, whose own officers recently
raided two wrong houses before hitting the right one.

   Last year alone, police killed at least three innocent people during drug
searches, wounded another and traumatized countless more.

   The survivors of these raids report months of counseling, trouble with their
children, and nightmares so intense that some have moved just to get away from
the memories.

   Carlson, for instance, now lives in Nebraska, as far from the nation's drug
wars as he figures he can find. His hospital bills have topped $350,000 and he
still walks around with bullet fragments in his body, some 13 months after the
shooting. What happened to him, Carlson said, "borders on the criminal."

   But if this happens to you, there is little you can do about it. It's almost
impossible to sue, even if your door is kicked in, your family roughed up or
your pets killed.

   "When I used to hear about this stuff, I thought, 'Oh well, it's rare and
these people probably deserve it,' said Sina Brush, 46, whose home was raided in
1991. "I thought, 'The government knows what it's doing.' Well, I got news for
them: It can happen to anybody. If somebody says you're dealing in drugs, you're
a target.'

   In Brush's case, drug agents flying over her property had spotted "unknown
green vegetation" in a nearby garden. The next thing she knew, she said, she and
her daughter, 15, were handcuffed and forced to kneel for 45 minutes in their
underwear. To this day, she said, she has nightmares about the incident.

   Brush's ordeal began shortly on the morning of Sept. 5, 1991, as she and her
daughter lay sleeping in a home in the foothills of New Mexico's Monzano
Mountains.

   Brush heard a car door slam and then the sound of running feet - lots of
running feet - and thought to herself: "Good grief, what is going on?"

   Wearing only underpants, Brush got up to peek out the door. She got halfway
across the room, she said, "When all of the sudden these people kicked in the
door."

   They were camouflaged, she remembers, with painted faces and guns -
everywhere she saw guns.

   "There I was with nothing on, and these guys are there and they're yelling at
me and screaming at me, and my daughter had woken up and I just couldn't believe
my eyes."

   In an instant, she said, the men had both of them face down on the floor,
their hands cuffed behind their backs.

   "I thought they were going to kill us," she said.

   What was going on, as Brush found out, was a sweeping raid by some 60 agents
of the Drug Enforcement Administration, National Guard and other agencies. It
was late summer in the Monzano Mountains -  marijuana  harvesting time - and
agents, some riding in an armored personnel carrier, were raiding a half-dozen
homes and ranches where they believed  marijuana  was being grown.

   Brush said the agents made her and her daughter kneel in the center of the
main room. They were guarded, Brush said, by a man "I could remember in a
million years."

   "He placed himself at an angle where he could see my whole body exposed and
he was just leering at me," she said. "He was sitting there with his hands
behind his head and his feet stretched out in a chair. ... And I felt that was a
violation of my female self."

   The search continued for two hours, but in the end, agents found not a single
 marijuana  plant. After scouring 72 acres, they called off their search and
told Brush she was free to go.

   No one knows how often this scenario is repeated around the country. A
computerized search of publicized accounts turned up 54 such raids in the past
four years, but that is probably an undercount.

   In an interview after the New Mexico raid, Tom Smith, the assistant special
agent in charge of the DEA's Albuquerque office, said it was not unusual to come
up empty-handed.

   "It happens all the time," he told the Albuquerque Journal.

   Despite this frequency, the plight of people like Sina Brush has received
little attention. No outraged civil libertarians hold news conferences, no think
tanks issue studies, no groups call for a congressional hearing.

   Why these cases happen is open to debate. Police most often place the blame
on human error, when they place blame at all.

   "Was it (the information) dated?" asked agent Smith. "Are they (the
informants) neglecting to tell us that the information they gave us was from
July? Were they just making it up? Did we go to the wrong farm? We have no way
of knowing."

   But defense lawyers point to another reason: the declining levels of probable
cause.

   Probable cause is what police need to get a warrant to search your home.
This term means different things to different people, but it generally means
police must have enough evidence to convince a judge that a crime has been
committed.

   Sometimes, all it takes is a whiff of air.

   G.H. Libbey of the Lake Worth, Texas, police department was driving down
Hiawatha Trail one May morning in 1989 when he smelled what he thought was the
odor of an amphetamine laboratory.

   He called several other investigators and they thought they smelled the same
thing. The odor seemed to be coming from the home of Charlene and Ken
Leatherman, who lived there with their two sons and two dogs.

   In addition to the smell, the police had only one other piece of "evidence":
The Leathermans' windows were covered.

   With no more probable cause than this, the police were able to obtain a
warrant to search the Leathermans' home.

   As Mrs. Leatherman and her son Travis, 12, pulled out of their driveway, the
police sprang into action.

   "One's on my son's side and one's on my side," Mrs. Leatherman recalled.
"They are pointing guns at us and the one guy says, 'Put your hands on the
steering wheel and don't move!'

   They remained like this for several minutes, she said. At one point she heard
the squawk of a policeman's radio. A few minutes later a policeman approached
her.

   "He said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you: The dogs have been shot.'

   Both dogs - a Doberman named Ninja and a mutt named Shakespeare - had been
killed.

   Police apparently removed Ninja's body before the Leathermans entered their
home. Before the shooting, Mrs. Leatherman said, the dog must have run back to
her son's bedroom "and laid on the bed where he was safe."

   "I was going to sit down on the bed and watch the TV," said Travis, "and I
pulled back the sheet and there was a big pool of blood and pieces of brain. "

   At that point, said Mrs. Leatherman, "I started shaking and crying and my
husband took us to his mother's house and we stayed three days."

   No drugs were found at the Leatherman residence, and a police check showed
neither had a criminal record.

   Van Thompson, the county attorney assigned to the Leatherman case, said the
dogs weren't the sweet animals Mrs. Leatherman portrayed them to be.

   "In my opinion," he said, "a Doberman pinscher named Ninja ain't no household
pet."

   Both dogs menaced the officers, he said, leaving them little choice but to
shoot.

   "What's the guy going to do?" asked Thompson. "Get bit by a dog? I'm not."

   For many, the trauma of the raids lingers long after the police have gone.
Honoria Chinn said she still has nightmares, some three years after Seattle
police raided the home she shares with her husband, Warren, a restaurant owner
who at the time was a state racing commissioner.

   Just before 1 a.m., nine police with a battering ram crashed through their
front door, terrifying Mrs. Chinn, who was on the phone, and waking her mother,
91.

   Other than some bruises and scrapes from being forced to the floor, Mrs.
Chinn wasn't physically harmed. But Chinn said his wife has never been the same.

   Any time there was a noise in the yard, he said, his wife would wake him and
make him go outside and tell her what was there.

   "Every night!" he said. "And sometimes she'd wake up and cry because she
thought somebody was trying to kill her."

   Mrs. Chinn's reaction was nearly identical to Sina Brush's. To this day,
Brush said, she has nightmares about the incident.

   Not the same nightmare over and over, she said, "But the theme is the same:
It's usually about being attacked unreasonably and being helpless - and being
shot in the back of the head."

   Now, she said, she sleeps with a gun by her bed.

   The Leathermans, too, report lasting trauma from their ordeal. The impact has
been especially hard on her son Travis, who was 12 at the time, they said.

   The Leathermans, like others, say police are slow to repair the damage they
cause, if they repair it at all.

   After the raid, Mrs. Leatherman said her family expected the city might
apologize and offer to replace their animals.

   "I figured ... they would say: 'Hey, sorry about that. We'll get you some new
dogs from the pound,' she said. "And we probably would have been happy with
that."

   But the family received no such offer, she said. The Chinns, too, say they
received no apology - until a local paper printed their story on the front page.
Only then, they say, did the city offer to fix their door.

   But Wayne Barnett didn't even get that. The same night federal agents shot
Don Carlson, they also kicked in the door to a brand-new home a few miles away
in Poway, Calif., that was owned by Barnett's company. But when Barnett asked
them to pay his $1,200 repair bill, he said, the agency balked.

   "Their words," he said, "were something like, 'Take us to court.'

   That leaves emotional damages. But, as Bob and Rosemary Ford learned, those
don't count for much either. Their front door was bashed in last year during a
night-time raid by La Mesa, Calif., police.

   The police admit they got the wrong house, but declined to give the reasons
for the error, citing "privacy concerns" of the informant involved in the case.

   Ford, 78, a retired school principal, said he and his wife agonized over what
to do.

   "We honor the police," he said. "We think it's a very difficult job. "But at
the same time we thought that their behavior was so unacceptable and so
incompetent that we wondered if there was some penalty for this kind of
behavior."

   So they sued. But when it came time for court, their lawyer had disappointing
news.

   "She told us, 'Well, the judge says unless you can show scars, unless you can
show you were injured in some way, that there was blood or something like that,
he doesn't think that you have a real strong case.'

   The Fords dropped their case and settled out of court - a resolution that
their lawyer says is too common.

   "There's no deterrent," she said. "It just keeps happening."

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