A 30-defendant multistate sex-trafficking ring involving Somali gangs and underage girls sounds like a good get for a prosecutor.

But then-U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones rejected it before federal prosecutors in Tennessee took it.

And in the wake of a federal appeals decision last week excoriating the case and the investigator who pushed it, Jones’ decision appears to have been solid. Related Articles St. Paul cop under investigation in case that ‘may be fictitious’

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“Generally speaking, it wasn’t a caseload issue, it was a quality issue. The quality of the case,” Jones said Friday. “And we decided to punt.”

Federal prosecutors in Nashville picked up the case. A jury acquitted six defendants, and the trial judge acquitted three others convicted by the jury of some charges. Federal prosecutors appealed after the trial judge set aside the convictions.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld those acquittals, blasted the handling of the case and called into question the credibility of the alleged victims.

The court also underscored the district court’s findings that the lead investigator, St. Paul police Sgt. Heather Weyker, “likely exaggerated or fabricated important aspects” of an alleged victim’s story, that she lied to a grand jury and later during a detention hearing, and that she lied on an application to a victim compensation fund saying one of the girls had been abducted, when the alleged victim “flatly denied an abduction.”

But the answer to why Weyker allegedly lied might not be a simplistic “bad cop” explanation.

“I don’t think it’s evil. It’s what we refer to as ‘noble cause’ corruption,” said Dr. Maki Haberfeld, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who specializes in police integrity and police training. “That defines situations in which police officers are tempted to fabricate facts in order to move their case forward, because if they don’t, then an otherwise guilty person will go free.”

In other words: The end justifies the means.

“We see this in police culture very frequently,” Haberfeld said.

Reading the court’s decision, one might mistakenly believe Weyker was the only investigator on the case. But she was part of an investigative group involving more than one federal agency.

“She spent a considerable amount of time working closely with the Department of Homeland Security and federal prosecutors in Nashville,” Steve Linders, spokesman for the St. Paul Police Department, said. “The (St. Paul police) chief was told numerous times what a great job she was doing. So the chief is curious how one officer working so closely with a federal agency can be solely responsible for a case of this magnitude falling apart.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville said that, based on the court decision, it would drop the case against the remaining defendants.

“We’ve conducted a thorough review of the 6th Circuit’s recent opinions and have considered all possible options for moving forward with this case in light of those opinions,” David Boling, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, said Tuesday. “After much consideration, we have determined that the best course of action is to dismiss the charges against all remaining defendants.”

Weyker has been placed on leave from the St. Paul Police Department.

She could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Ramsey County prosecutors and defense attorneys have said they will review cases on which Weyker worked.

Her credibility and future as a cop are in question.

“We give officers so much credibility. They walk into a courtroom and usually a jury, judges will credit their testimony without question. With this baggage, I think it is going to be difficult to re-establish that credibility,” said Teresa Nelson, legal director of American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. “As peace officers, they receive special training and they take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States or the state of Minnesota. So when they lie under oath, it’s all the more troubling.”

The bigger picture, though, is that when cops lie, it hurts the entire profession, because it can be a symptom of poor training or a lack of oversight or loose accountability, Haberfeld said.

And law enforcement in this country is already dealing with a public relations problem.

“There are credibility questions about the law enforcement system. And that’s unfortunate,” Jones said. “It’s just another rock in the pack of public opinion about law enforcement.”

The case also raises questions about responsibility. Is it the investigator’s fault? Her supervising agency? The prosecutors who pursued the case?

So far, none of the agencies involved in the investigation have claimed a supervisory role.

“To me, (it’s) the organization in which she served,” Haberfeld said. “This is where it started. Everything else was a sort of a spinoff of her desire to pursue this in a way that was problematic. Other organizations don’t necessarily have the resources, the time, to look at each and every case that is brought their way to see if every detail was handled properly. In an ideal world, every detail would be reviewed. But we know the criminal justice system is overloaded and broken.”

Nelson, of the ACLU, said the prosecutors should also be held accountable, though they enjoy a certain amount of protection.

“I think there should be repercussions for prosecutors. Their officers are given a special responsibility and special trust, and if they are taking testimony they aren’t sure about, that they suspect may be false, then yeah, absolutely they should pay some repercussions as officers of the court. That’s absolutely not appropriate for them to do,” Nelson said. “In terms of legal liability, prosecutors are given absolute immunity in terms of their prosecutorial decisions. It’s very difficult to bring repercussions from the outside, it has to come from the inside.”

To recover from a public admonishment like this, there needs to be an added “measure of accountability,” Nelson said.

“The criminal justice system and the police depend on the public’s trust. But they also have to earn it,” Nelson said. “They have to convince the public that, yes, they can be trusted. … Until we see real accountability for that kind of misconduct, we’re going to continue to have the public’s trust eroded. And I think we all agree that’s a problem.”