XPost: co.general, alt.law-enforcement, alt.law-enforcement.corruption 
 From: nobody@tatooine.homelinux.net 
  
 April 2, 2004, 10:17AM 
 Timeline scrutinized in fake drug arrests 
 Associated Press 
  
 DALLAS  -- Two men who oversaw narcotics officers and prosecutors when 
 more than two dozen felony drug cases unraveled into a scandal have 
 provided conflicting accounts in recent depositions for a federal lawsuit 
 of when and how the agencies communicated. 
  
 Transcripts of the depositions by Dallas County Assistant District 
 Attorney Gregg Long and police Lt. Craig Miller, obtained by The Dallas 
 Morning News for today's editions, suggest that, even with intense 
 questioning under oath, the full truth about how top prosecutors and 
 narcotics supervisors dealt with the unraveling of the bad drug cases in 
 fall 2001 remains unclear. 
  
 More than two years after a series of bogus drug arrests in Dallas, the 
 two key players in the district attorney's office and Police Department 
 still don't agree on when prosecutors first expressed concern about the 
 problem, according to recent testimony which has not yet been made public. 
  
 According to the transcripts, Long testified that his warning about 
 concerns on several large cases came a month before Miller remembered 
 receiving it. Long oversaw drug courts at the time while Miller was a 
 narcotics supervisor. 
  
 A federal judge ruled last month that two police officers at the center of 
 the city's fake drugs scandal are not immune from a civil rights lawsuit 
 filed by a woman who said she was falsely arrested. U.S. District Judge Ed 
 Kinkeade's decision allowed the case to proceed and could mean that Senior 
 Cpl. Mark De La Paz and Officer Eddie Herrera may testify. 
  
 A federal jury acquitted De La Paz, the only police officer charged in the 
 scandal, in November. 
  
 In the deposition, Long testified that he was concerned because police 
 reports in several cases indicated that narcotics officers who were 
 involved in several busts received positive results for cocaine or 
 methamphetamine using field test kits after the seizures. But subsequent 
 laboratory tests showed that the white, powdery substance actually was 
 billiards chalk with little or no drugs mixed in. 
  
 Long testified that after he talked to lower-ranking officers in the weeks 
 before, he called Miller on Oct. 26, 2001 -- almost two months after his 
 office began receiving negative test reports from the Southwestern 
 Institute for Forensic Sciences on drug evidence in the Dallas police cases. 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)