DA's office deserves more scrutiny

Ruben Navarrette Jr.

DALLAS -- There is nothing new about secrecy in government. And yet, it does feel like more and more of those paid to serve us hold in particularly low regard the public's right to know what they do in our name -- and on our nickel.

The latest example comes from North Texas, where Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill continues to go to extreme lengths to not release material related to a fake drug scandal where dozens of Mexican immigrants were saddled with drug evidence that turned out to be bogus.

The material at issue includes lab reports sent to police and prosecutors, perhaps as early as August 2001.

Those reports were first sought through the Texas Public Information Act by The Dallas Morning News in 2002. A few months ago, a Dallas private investigator also went after the lab reports. In both cases, the DA's office refused to provide them and asked the state attorney general's office for legal cover. Its argument was that the law doesn't require disclosure of the documents at issue.

A spokeswoman for the DA's office told me that releasing the documents might hurt the FBI investigation into the scandal. Trouble is, that investigation seems to be exhausted and has been since mid-November, when a federal jury cleared Dallas narcotics officer Mark Delapaz in the only criminal trial in the case.

What's important about these lab reports? It is the dates.

They could tell us what prosecutors knew and when they knew it -- or at least should have known it. And that will tell us whether some prosecutors committed what would have been serious ethical breaches -- arranging plea agreements in cases where they had been told that the drugs were fake; not knowing one way or another because they failed to look at lab reports; putting Delapaz on the stand in drug cases several months after prosecutors had established doubts about his credibility; and not letting on that they knew that large quantities of drugs were bogus as early as August 2001, even though they didn't start dismissing most of the cases until January 2002.

Such a gap in time would mean that innocent people cooled their heels in jail five months longer than they had to. And that would mean that some of the civil suits now making their way through the deposition process should be aimed not just at the Dallas Police Department, but also at Dallas County.

And speaking of depositions, it is thanks to one of them that we know even this much. This week, the News obtained a copy of the civil deposition of Mike Carnes, the DA's second-in-command. Not that it was easy. Both the city of Dallas and the DA's office had filed motions asking a federal judge to restrict public disclosure of the document. The judge declined.

You see the problem. Here you have a public official being deposed about his conduct while on the public payroll, with the deposition occurring in a public building -- the DA's office -- and on public time, and yet authorities try to keep it all hidden from the public.

The deposition meanders through three main areas: the timeline produced by the DA's office (actually by Carnes himself) as to when prosecutors first became aware of the fake drugs; the lab reports, and what prosecutors took from them; and the foot-dragging by the Dallas Police Department when prosecutors asked for documents as it was trying to determine the extent of the problem. (That's right. Ironically, the DA's office knows what it is like to be at the other end of requests to a non-responsive agency.)

And what did Carnes say? Well, once you get past "I don't recall" and "not to my knowledge," it seems the No. 2 kept better notes about things that make his office look good than about things that might make it look bad. He could say exactly when prosecutors started letting the innocent go free. He was just fuzzy on exactly when he and his colleagues found out the drugs were fake.

No more games. We have to put to rest this idea that poor, innocent, gullible prosecutors were snookered by big, bad policemen. In this system, it is prosecutors who have the discretion; if they doubt evidence, they can dismiss cases or reduce charges. The prosecutors went along in these cases. They got their convictions and their accolades. And if they did anything wrong, it's time they got their lumps.

Ruben Navarrette's e-mail address is rnavarrette@dallasnews.com.