Enforcement
Scandals
Lead
to
Death
and
False
Convictions
2/11/00
Two separate but related scandals this week illustrate how prosecution of the drug war has helped to undermine the credibility of the American justice system. In the first case, police raided a home in Denver on the basis of a faulty warrant, killing an innocent father of nine. In the second, an informant who has been paid an aggregate of several million dollars for testimony helpful to numerous prosecutions was suspended by the DEA after a newspaper investigation revealed he had lied on the stand in as many as 300 cases for the agency. DEATH BY SWAT TEAM During the early afternoon of September 29, 1999, 13 SWAT team members stormed the upstairs apartment at 3738 High Street in Denver, Colorado, looking for drugs. They were executing a so-called "no-knock" raid, one of about 200 such warrants issued by the Denver PD last year. In such raids, the SWAT team simply breaks down the suspect's door, unannounced. Ismael Mena, 45, the occupant of the apartment, worked the night shift at the local Coca-Cola bottling plant and normally slept during the day. After breaking open the front door and entering the apartment, the SWAT team officers found the door to Mena's room latched, and kicked it in. According to the officers, they found Mena, armed with an 8-shot .22 revolver, standing on his bed. Officers screamed "police!" and "drop the gun!" repeatedly, at which point, they attest, Mena started to put the gun down, asking, "policia?" At that moment, Sgt. Anthony Iacovetta emerged from behind a wall and moved to disarm Mena, at which point Mena once again raised the gun at police. Colorado law allows police to use deadly force if they believe there is imminent danger to their lives; officer Kenneth Overman, standing at the top of the stairs facing Mena's bedroom door, opened fire, followed by officer Mark Haney. Mena allegedly fell back into a sitting position and, bleeding from head and chest wounds, lifted his gun again and fired at the police, precipitating more gunfire. Mena was hit by eight bullets in all. No drugs were found on Mena's person or in his apartment. But the primary controversy in this case is not the conduct of the police during the raid, although protesters and commentators have certainly challenged that conduct. The issue, according to Denver officials, is that the day following the raid, SWAT team officers learned they had raided the wrong residence -- they should have gone next door, to 3742 High Street. Officer Joseph Bini, the five-year veteran of the Denver police department who wrote and applied for the warrant to raid Mena's apartment, is currently facing a felonious charge of first-degree perjury for his alleged fabrication of evidence to obtain the no-knock warrant. He faces a sentence of two to six years. Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas, was appointed as special prosecutor on December 2nd, and spent two months investigating the Mena incident before officially charging Bini on February 5th. Thomas exculpated the SWAT officers, saying they were justified in killing Mena during the raid because he brandished a gun at them, but his investigation revealed that the warrant to raid Mena's house was fraudulently obtained. "At the heart of the whole incident is the search warrant," Thomas said. "It relates to an individual officer, Joseph Bini, making what we allege are false statements under oath, knowing they were false." Thomas charges that Bini lied about the following things: That he received information that Mena's apartment was a crack house; that he saw (in person) his informant go to the house; that the informant went into the apartment with a suspect; and that drugs were bought at the apartment. Because Bini had not personally observed what he attested to in the warrant, Bini used the wrong address on the search warrant, apparently because he didn't know any better. His court date is Feb. 18. "They felt extraordinarily threatened and felt very afraid of being shot," Thomas said in exonerating the SWAT officers. Denver Mayor Wellington Webb insisted that the SWAT team acted properly, and commented that, "if Mena did not have a gun or point it at police officers, he'd be alive today." Nonetheless, Mayor Webb ordered a review of the process by which search warrants are granted. He requested that Police Chief Tom Sanchez and Denver DA Bill Ritter study the criteria for issuing search warrants, the process by which requests for no-knock warrants are reviewed, and the frequency and effectiveness of no-knock warrants. The report is due in two months. Reacting to Thomas' findings, however, about 250 protesters demonstrated on the steps of the Denver City and County building on Saturday, Feb. 6. The Justice for Mena Committee insists that the incident is still being covered up by the police and that Mena's gun was planted. DEA PAYS LYING INFORMANT MILLIONS Following an investigative report by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) this week suspended its highest-paid undercover informant, Andrew Chambers, 42. The Post-Dispatch's four-month investigation found that Chambers was paid to lie in court dozens of times, to the tune of $2.2 million from the DEA over a period of years. The investigation also found that DEA agents across the country continued to rely on Chambers as an informant despite three US appellate court opinions ruling him a liar, and admonitions from numerous federal prosecutors that he is untrustworthy. Chambers, like many others, is a professional informant; it is what he does for a living. One would think that, by nature, an informant's information is incidental to his specific case. It is arrived at by the accident of the informant's involvement in illegal dealings. But not for Chambers. The Post-Dispatch estimates his total earnings, often paid in cash, over 16 years from all government sources total close to $4 million. H. Dean Steward, an assistant federal public defender in California, filed a complaint with the DEA about Chambers' lies. Steward said that Chambers has been involved in over 300 investigations and "has lied under oath virtually every time he has been put on the witness stand. I can document the lies... he lies about his criminal history, his educational background, his aliases, where he is from, and just about every personal detail you could imagine," reported the Post-Dispatch. Steward's investigative efforts have had some success, though. As of last September, the DEA is no longer allowed to use Chambers without revealing his full history to prosecutors, who must then disclose their evidence to the defense in trials. Max LeMieux, executive director of the Eastern Missouri American Civil Liberties Union, called for an independent group to investigate the DEA, and stated that a "trial can't be fair when people who testify lie on the stand."
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