California District Attorney Lisa Green “Investigates” Corrupt Cops’ Cases

October 18, 2016 (Fault Lines) – Last week, the Kern County District Attorney, in Bakersfield, California, announced her office was sending out letters to defense attorneys in cases handled by two criminal investigators who turned out to be less investigator and more criminal. While D.A. Lisa Green is quite proud of herself and her office, is she doing enough in this situation?

These cops, Detective Damacio Diaz and Detective Patrick Mara, are pretty bad guys.

Diaz and Mara, onetime police partners at the BPD, have publicly admitted to committing various felonies while working as investigators. Some of the crimes admitted by one or both defendants have included taking bribes, distribution of large amounts of methamphetamine — some of it stolen from the BPD’s evidence room — working in partnership with a known drug dealer and other unlawful activities.

This matters for the same reason it matters when a regular criminal gets busted. Bribe-taking, dope-dealing troublemakers are not to be trusted, obviously. That’s what triggers your overwhelming need to hop on the Internets when someone gets arrested and comment about how we shouldn’t waste time with a trial or just take them out and hang them. Being a cop before and during your criminal shenanigans doesn’t make you a special criminal. Bribery and selling drugs makes you a common criminal.

Of course, that’s not how it really works. Cops, even dirty cops, get special treatment. When Diaz was sentenced to five years in federal prison earlier this month, federal judge Lawrence O’Neill treated his case a little differently than the run of the mill drug dealer.

“There is no shame in admitting that this case has kept me awake at night, and few do,” O’Neill said to the packed courtroom.

Nice to know the judge sleeps well after sentencing people to draconian mandatory minimums all day long. But tosses and turns when a dirty cop shows up. So what made this case so different? The U.S. Attorney on the case noted that Diaz did both good and bad things.

Diaz did a lot of “good things,” [Assistant U.S. Attorney] Delaney said. He also committed “serious, reprehensible crimes. It’s hard to understand how he could do both.”

Not that hard to understand, if you handle criminal cases. People are rarely evil to the core. But they are weak. And lazy. And those two things have a lot to do with how people find themselves standing in a courtroom waiting for a judge to tell them how long they are going to be warehoused in a prison.

That does this have to do with Green’s announcement last week? Like most prosecutors, Green seems unconcerned with cases based on criminals, as long as they are her criminals. Like Cinderella and the pumpkin, there is magic when a villain decides to cooperate with the police. As long as he toes the party line, all is forgiven kind of. Without a doubt, believability has gone way up from when he was just a regular old non-cooperating criminal.

To be fair, Green doesn’t exactly support these cops.

“The disgraceful behavior of Diaz and Mara has greatly impacted the Bakersfield Police Department and the people in our community,” Green said. “They have brought dishonor to their badge and to our community as a whole that they were sworn to serve and protect.”

But at the same time, she doesn’t seem too worried about the past. Her office has investigated the problem, decided there isn’t any reason to question cases made by the drug-dealing, corrupt cops, and has announced her intentions to fight anybody who says different.

“We will be litigating any cases in which motions for new trials or motions to withdraw pleas are filed on behalf of these defendants who receive the letters,” Green said.

Well, that is interesting. Green is taking the position that she should get a pat on the back for reviewing potentially tainted cases, while at the same time promising defendants a kick in the ass if they try to actually do anything about those potentially tainted cases. Her reasoning? Duh. Too much work.

“Honestly, it’s been a huge disruption,” Green said. “You think about all the prosecutorial resources that were spent on litigating these cases in the first place, all the attorneys in my office, the defense attorneys, the judges — and at least 100 hours have been spent on the review of these cases. We did not take this review lightly, we did not enter into it lightly. “Then consider having to draft the letters, send out the letters and relitigate these issues,” she said. “All this for an office, my office, which has been given less prosecutorial resources this year than in any other year in the past five years.

Green’s office, I am sure, believed everything these cops were selling them, right up to the second they got busted for meth and taking bribes. Now that same office has to deal with the inconvenience of making sure these two assholes didn’t railroad any innocent people during the time their little mini-cartel was reigning over the streets of Bakersfield.

Think about the inconvenience of having to draft 64 letters. And then, since the letters involve dirty cops, you actually have to send those letters out. How disruptive. There is little you can imagine that could be more disruptive.

Well, actually, there are a few things.

How about sitting in a prison cell because a meth-dealing, bribe-taking criminal put you there? How about being labeled a felon because a couple of jackasses had to take time out of their drug empire to do their actual real jobs? Do you think for a second a police officer who got in bed with a drug kingpin gives a shit about faking an affidavit or shading some testimony or maybe shoring up a case with a little planted evidence? When there is meth to sell, who has time to do a decent investigation on other crimes?

That question is important, because police are treated differently in the criminal justice system.

The credibility of a police investigation is crucial in criminal cases. Most lawyers agree that reports, evidence and testimony provided by trained police officers are given a lot of weight by judges and juries, as well as by supervising D.A.s in deciding when to file charges. In addition, defense attorneys are limited in their ability to question the veracity of police officers in court.

One hundred hours of review for a narcotics division being run by a couple of drug dealers is nonsense. For the same reason police officers get special credibility, drug dealers have little credibility. And wearing a badge while you sell drugs doesn’t make you any less of a drug dealer. Green’s position on the inconvenience that comes from letting two cops run wild on the street, and probably run wild in a courtroom, is laughable.

“This is an extreme burden on my office, but it’s one, ethically, as I’ve said, we have to undertake. It’s absolutely the right thing to do.”

All Green seems to talk about is how much work this is, and then offer excuses for why she isn’t going to do it. Because who has time to draft and send a letter? Every defendant these two cops put away should have their case revisited. And if Green doesn’t like that, she is no better than the lying, thieving cops who put them there in the first place.

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