THE BORDER REPORT
A U.S. magistrate in Tucson has ruled that federal agents can lie under oath and it won't be viewed by her court as an act of bad faith.
And if they manage to forget details relevant to a case, like, say, discovering pieces of evidence that they lose first, well, that's okay too.
I'll give you Judge Jennifer Guerin's words pulled from her review of a defendant's motion to dismiss and then the back story on the drug trafficking case.
"Whether Agent Gonzalez was untruthful or absent-minded in his response to questioning at the October hearing about the whereabouts of the bolt seal is not determinative of the issue of bad faith."
This is what happened:
Last June, a truck driver, Osmin Alas, was pulled over at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Southern Arizona. The truck was locked up with a bolt seal which is basically a lock with an identifying number for federal agents to check loads with. The basic idea is that the driver is simply a transporter and the bolt seal ensures that he doesn't have access to the cargo. The only ones who do have access are whoever loaded the truck, federal agents who need to open the truck and whoever's on the delivery end waiting for the shipment.
The Feds like them because it keeps things orderly, drivers like them because it's supposed to absolve them of whatever it is they're hauling. Win-win, right?
Wrong.
A drug sniffing dog found 808 keys of weed in the trailer of the truck, some 1,700 pounds, about $1.2 million at Tucson schwag prices.
Four agents, Gonzalez, Blaine, Nunley, and Haymore, couldn't figure out how to open the bolt seal so they cut it off, letting it fall to the ground. Alas was arrested, the bolt seal stayed in the dirt.
The agents told the judge they didn't think the bolt seal was evidence or that it needed to be preserved.
And that's about as much as everybody can agree on in this debacle.
At an October hearing, Agent Gonzalez testified that he saw some ID numbers on the bolt seal but that he didn't know much about bolt seals. Earlier, he had testified that he didn't remember what had happened with the bolt seal.
Two months later, Dec. 2, Gonzalez remembered what he did with the thing.
The morning after the bust:
"He picked up the bolt seal and put it in his pocket, intending to keep it as a souvenir of the drug bust. He took the bolt seal home and kept it in his night-stand drawer. Agent Gonzalez testified that he forgot he had picked the bolt seal up until Nov. 11 when government counsel contacted him … "
When the Feds called, Agent Gonzalez remembered what he had done with the thing and brought it to court.
Then another problem came up.
The shipping documents said the bolt seal used was ID number SS3394284. The bolt seal Gonzalez brought in had ID number SS3394845.
You can guess what happened next: the Feds say, basically, that Alas tried to use a fake bolt seal to get inside the trailer and stash the weed. The defense argued that the agents should have kept better track of key pieces of evidence like the bolt seal, instead of tossing them on the ground and picking up them as souvenirs.
The judge ruled that unless the agents had purposefully hid evidence, there was nothing suspect in the entire matter.
"Mere negligent destruction of evidence does not constitute an act of bad faith," she wrote in her decision.
Awesome.
It gets a little better because ineptitude is apparently not something that judges worry about with federal agents.
"Prior to Defendant's June 10, 2008 arrest, none of the agents had ever been involved in the removal of a bolt seal from a trailer during a search. Although each of the agents was aware of the procedure for preserving evidence, none of the agents had been instructed to preserve bolts, locks or seals," the judge wrote.
And that gets us back to the somewhat creepy issue at hand. The agent had never dealt with a bolt seal before, cut it off, forgot about it, then took it home the next day as a souvenir and forgot about it again for four months.
Then it turned out, he brought the wrong one to court. How many of these things are they cutting off anyway? I thought the idea was to leave them on.
All which gets us back to Geurin's original point: "Whether Agent Gonzalez was untruthful or absent-minded in his response to questioning at the October hearing about the whereabouts of the bolt seal is not determinative of the issue of bad faith. Agent Gonzalez' subsequent production of what he believed to be the bolt seal demonstrates that he did not intend to deprive the Defendant of potentially exculpatory evidence," she wrote.
The message is clear. In Geurin's courtroom badly-trained agents can forget details, lie about them under oath, and lose evidence; there's no problem here.
Stay out of Tucson if you want to run dope; this judge will do anything she can to nail you otherwise.
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