Springfield Alderman Frank McNeil says he
plans to ask the Illinois Labor Relations board to fast-track its
decision regarding a citizen police review board, in light of
another complaint filed last week against three Springfield Police
Department detectives.
Defense attorney Bruce Locher signed an
affidavit April 13 accusing Detectives Paul Carpenter, Jim Graham,
and Steve Welsh of misconduct. Discovery of this misconduct
resulted in the dismissal of several felony charges and at least
one person being released from prison.
Locher says he decided to file a complaint
after reading an Illinois Times story reporting that private investigator
Bill Clutter had accused Carpenter and Graham of misconduct in the
November 2004 murder trial of Anthony Grimm [“Credibility
question” Feb. 24]. Clutter filed a complaint with internal
affairs alleging that the detectives concealed reports and
intimidated a witness, and accusing Graham of committing perjury.
Grimm, charged with first degree murder in the 1994 death of Tonia
Smith, was acquitted.
Locher’s complaint pertains to three cases
resolved in 2001, and he tried to have the officers investigated that
year. In a May 4, 2001 letter to then-Mayor Karen Hasara, Locher wrote
that he was “astounded” to see Welsh still on the job after
a federal appeals court had issued a strongly-worded opinion saying
that a group of officers including Carpenter and Welsh had lied. In
fact, the court concluded the case so “replete with inaccuracies,
to put it mildly,” that it found the defendant — accused
drug dealer Marcellus Mitchum — “is more credible than the
officers.”
Mitchum and another man, Huey Whitley, had
been found in possession of a significant amount of cocaine at the
Stevenson Inn. They were among several targets of a drug task
force, to which both Carpenter and Welsh were assigned.
On the night of their arrest, Carpenter had
been assigned to watch the motel rooms, when he saw a female enter
and leave. As she drove away, she neglected to signal a lane change
and other officers executed a traffic stop and then searched her
purse. They found more than 20 baggies of marijuana, but the woman
told officers she had not gotten the marijuana at the motel.
Nevertheless, Welsh — who was at police headquarters, preparing
documents to request a search warrant for Whitley’s motel room
— wrote an affidavit that stated the woman told police
“that she got the cannabis from a room at the hotel . . . .
” This affidavit began, “I was advised by Officer Paul
Carpenter . . . .”
In court, Welsh testified he couldn’t
remember who told him, and Carpenter testified he had not been the
source of the bad information.
But the affidavit wasn’t the only
problem. When the officers went to conduct the search, they
discovered that Whitley and Mitchum were in two separate motel
rooms, and their search warrant covered only Whitley’s room.
Welsh and another officer testified that they simply knocked on
Mitchum’s door and he permitted them to enter and search his
room, and that they had never used magnetic keys to open the door.
But prosecutors later went to the motel and learned that motel
employees had given the officers a magnetic key to Mitchum’s
room, and that the key had been used at precisely the moment the
search warrant was executed. As a result, prosecutors dropped
charges against Mitchum, and Whitley’s conviction was
overturned.
In another federal court case, Carpenter, Graham and Welsh obtained a search warrant
through an affidavit stating they had found evidence of drugs in the
trash left curbside by Locher’s client, Reco Faine. But Locher
says a private investigator confirmed that Faine didn’t have a
contract with a trash hauler, and did not leave trash by the curb.
After federal prosecutors sent their own investigators to verify
Faine’s story, charges were dropped.
Locher says now that he fully expected the
officers to be fired for making false statements.
“I assumed too much, and I assumed
wrong,” he says. “I assumed they would, at a minimum,
go through a disciplinary procedure. And because the offenses,
including perjury, would be crimes, I mean, I assumed that would
result in termination.”
This time, to make sure his complaint was
taken seriously, he took his story to the State Journal-Register,
first on Feb. 27, and then again last week. “I felt it was
time to put a little sunshine on the process,” he says.
“If they suffer no consequences as a result of lying, why not
do it again? And seeing what happens, what’s to keep another
police officer from saying hey, I’ll do the same
thing?”
McNeil has the same concerns. “Are
there more cases out there that have the same trappings? And if so,
what liability may befall the city?” he asks.
This article appears in Apr 21-27, 2005.
