Skip to main content

Another Sad Tale of Drug War Mania Corrupting Our Judicial System


Santiago Esparza and Doug Guthrie / The Detroit News

DETROIT -- A former assistant Wayne County prosecutor, two Inkster police officers and a retired Wayne County circuit judge were charged with misconduct for their roles in allegedly hiding the relationship of a police informant who was a witness in a 2005 drug trial.

Karen Plants, the assistant prosecutor who retired in November, was charged by 36th District Court Magistrate Sidney Barthwell Jr. with five counts of misconduct and one count of conspiring to commit perjury.

Barthwell charged Inkster police officers Scott Rechtzigel and Robert McArthur with two counts each of conspiring to commit perjury and one count each of misconduct.

Former Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Mary Waterstone was charged with three counts of misconduct.

All are free on $25,000 personal bonds. The perjury charges carry a sentence of up to life in prison, the misconduct charges each carry a maximum of five years in prison.

"It is a sad day because law enforcement professionals are involved as defendants," State Attorney General Mike Cox said. "Nonetheless, this case is important because the allegations here undermine the credibility of our justice system."

The defendants were flanked by six lawyers and were charged in front of a packed courtroom. Their preliminary exams are set for April 28.

Cox filed a request for charges this morning. His office investigated the case after prosecutors from four counties declined to serve as a special prosecutor. The cases are expected to be lengthy and complex.

The officers are accused of lying to conceal the role of an informant in a March 11, 2005, cocaine bust. When the case made its way to circuit court in September 2005, Waterstone is accused of knowing of the cover-up and allowing the officers to testify that the informant did not have a connection to the police.

Waterstone also signed orders banning the defendants' attorneys from access to the informant's cellular telephone records because they would have showed he talked to one of the officers.

Plants is accused of never having corrected the testimony of the officers. Although the judge was informed of the perjury, the attorneys for the defendants arrested in the bust were not told, according to the report.


Credit to Jonathan Turley for the story.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

Soda tax debate reveals fundamental progressive assertions about your lack of individual rights and the "responsiblities" of the State

I thought it would be at least amusing to use the Delawareliberal comments as sub-headings regarding each category of what is wrong with the proposed tax on sodas and juice drinks. But there are so many different little strands of each comment that it would be impossible to pull them all out. So, instead, I'm going to let you read them in more or less the order they appeared, and note the assumptions. pandora: I’m perfectly okay with taxing sodas and juice drinks. Mainly because they’re total crap, and one of the main reasons our country’s children are overweight. They are also dirt cheap. Assumptions here: (1) Because "I" am perfectly okay with a new tax it should be imposed on everybody; (2) it is the government's responsibility to keep children from being obese; (3) the cheapness of the product to be taxed justifies charging people more for it. John Manifold: Soda fattens your kids [and you and your husband], shortens their lives, costs more than water [a...
31 comments
Read more