A woman listed as a witness who identified a suspect last year in a drive-by shooting says she didn’t see the crime and never told police officers that she had, according to court documents filed last week.
The woman’s affidavit raises more questions about the work of Paul Carpenter, a former detective in Springfield Police Department’s major-case unit. Carpenter has been on paid administrative leave since Oct. 4, 2005; his partner, Jim Graham, has been on leave since January. The Illinois State Police has been investigating allegations that the two detectives may have violated SPD?policie
The woman’s statement about the shooting is contained in a sworn affidavit attached to a motion to quash a search warrant and suppress evidence in the case of Micah Morgan, a Springfield man accused of shooting at two acquaintances in the 1900 block of East Cedar on Feb. 15, 2005. No one was injured in the shooting. The two alleged targets, who had an ongoing feud with Morgan, told Carpenter that Morgan and his brothers Stanley Morgan and Ryan Roberson had driven by in Stanley Morgan’s car and shot at them.
Carpenter obtained a warrant to search Micah Morgan’s residence on the basis of the word of the would-be victims plus that of a “confidential source” and a woman who lived nearby.
According to Carpenter’s sworn statement made in application for a search warrant, he showed the woman a photo lineup and she picked out Micah Morgan as the shooter. But in an affidavit filed last week, the woman asserts that she told Carpenter she could not identify a shooter: “I said that I knew two people from those photographs. I did not identify either of these individuals as the shooter in this incident. I never told any police officer that I saw Micah Morgan or Stanley Morgan shooting a gun on February 15, 2005.”
Furthermore, she claims that the photo-lineup form was blank when she signed it and notes that whoever completed the form misspelled her name. Aside from the woman’s signature, the handwriting on the form appears to match Carpenter’s.
The motion to suppress evidence also questions the reliability of the “confidential source” who supposedly told Carpenter that the gun used in the shooting could be found in Micah Morgan’s residence. The source had never been registered as an informant, as is required by SPD policy. Yet Carpenter’s sworn statement described the informant as someone who had provided valuable and reliable information on a weekly basis for more than two years.
The city of Springfield’s legal department produced only four other case files supposedly related to this informant. When Sangamon County Circuit Judge Robert Eggers asked the city of Springfield to identify the source and make the informant available for a private interview, the informant failed to show up and eventually sent word that he wouldn’t talk to the judge.
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Aug 31 – Sep 6, 2006.
