DRUG TASK FORCE QUESTIONS REMAIN

Few Believe Murray Lee Dyer's Case Will Ever Come To Trial.

Like most of the felony drug charges filed after a spring 1999 Hays County
Narcotics Task Force sting in Wimberley, Dyer's case will likely be
dropped, local defense attorneys say.

Why? Because integral to the case is the testimony of Roy Parrish, a
48-year-old habitual felon and ex-con who, witnesses say, peddled pills,
alcohol and marijuana to area teens and adults to make friends and
eventually persuade them to sell him dope.

The problem is, Parrish wasn't one of the defendants arrested in the sting;
he was working as an informant for the police.

"There were 16, 17-year-old girls he was giving pills and marijuana," said
San Marcos defense attorney David Morris, who represented two
felony-charged defendants after the bust. Both felonies were dismissed.
"When you have an informant out there on the street actually contributing
alcohol and drugs to minors, it goes way beyond law enforcement."

Whether dismissed or tried, Dyer's case will likely be the punctuation
mark, the final chapter of a story with more twists than a clove hitch, and
of an investigation local law enforcement officials would probably just as
soon forget.

The four-month marijuana sting was marred from day one by the high-profile
shooting death of 25-year-old Alexander "Rusty" Windle, who was killed on
his front porch in Wimberley after leveling a rifle at warrant-serving Task
Force agents in the pre-dawn hours of May 24, 1999.

Windle had twice reportedly delivered half ounce baggies of pot to Parrish
- -- just enough to make the crime a state jail felony.

But the raid-style manner in which the warrants were served -- a Texas
Rangers report presents conflicting testimony on as police -- was way
overboard for the seriousness of the offenses and probably contributed to
Windle's reaction and the violence that ensued, critics say.

After the sting, local defense attorneys banded together and uncovered
dovetailing evidence on Parrish and his "questionable" behavior in the
field, evidence most believe will keep him from ever taking the stand in
Hays County.

Windle's case aside, of the 14 filed felonies resulting from the sting and
tracked through district court, 10 were dismissed or reduced to
misdemeanors by the district attorney's office. Three defendants pled
guilty, mostly due to concurrent or pre-existing offenses and the last,
Dyer's, is scheduled for jury trial next February.

The disposition of cases filed against two additional indicted defendants
could not be retrieved from district court records.

The high number of dismissals and reduced charges were probably a
disappointment given the time and manpower invested by the core 12-member
Task Force unit, which includes five officers from the San Marcos Police
Department, six from the Hays County Sheriff's Department and one federally
funded agent from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

Each department pays only for the salaries and equipment used by its
officers, with operating expenses -- around $4,000 used in the Wimberley
investigation -- coming from asset forfeitures from prior drug convictions
awarded by a court of law.

It was this money, officials say, that was used to set up Parrish at the
7-A Ranch Resort in Wimberley, supply him with money for drugs, and make
him the life of the party.

"They gave him pills and drugs and money and sent him out to party," San
Marcos defense attorney Billy McNaab said. "He was dishing out pills and
narcotics to kids, our kids, and the people need to know about it."

The Daily Record independently confirmed similar allegations made by
management at the 7-A Ranch Resort -- persons not arrested in the drug
sting -- who say Parrish's cabin was party central on the high school
circuit, and the source of numerous complaints by neighboring tenants.

Though officials maintain they have no "verifiable evidence" to back up
these allegations, Task Force Commander Regis DeArza that because
informants provide a vital link between the drug world and law enforcement,
anything could have taken place.

"We're certainly not going to knowingly ply alcohol to a minor to get them
to go do something, that's just not reality," DeArza said. "But in that
kind of environment, it's plausible a minor could be drinking, smoking
marijuana, using methamphetamine, cocaine, all those things could be taking
place."

DeArza declined a follow up interview, but in a written statement, said
informants were required to follow certain guidelines in the field, and
that visual surveillance was "always" maintained when they purchase drugs.

While the allegations of Parrish's contributions to the delinquency of
minors is discounted by law enforcement officials, other evidence
supporting his "questionable" behavior in the field is more clear cut.

On April 22, 1999, about a month before Windle's death, Parrish embarked on
a road trip unbeknownst to Hays County Detectives, when he was stopped for
a traffic violation by a Gonzales County Sheriff's Deputy near Interstate
10, a leaked Task Force memo reads.

A search of Parrish's vehicle turned up around four grams of pot -- a cache
complete with a rolled joint, roach clip and rolling papers.

After informing Gonzales officials he was working as a confidential
informant, and confirming it with a phone call, Hays County Task Force
officials negotiated his release.

The memo states Parrish unsuccessfully tried to contact Task Force
officials about the contraband, but then drove straight past Task Force
headquarters in San Marcos -- the route to I-10 from Wimberley -- on his
way to a supposed doctor's appointment in Houston. His true destination is
not known.

That situation, and knowledge of it by defense attorneys, put most of the
indictments from the investigation on shaky ground, many agree.

"The DA ought to be protecting our children from slimebags like that, not
sending them out into the community," local defense attorney David Sergi
said. Sergi will represent Dyer if his case comes to trial. "Two wrongs
don't make a right, but we're ready to go. Put him on the stand." Though
the use of informants is by no means a new tactic in drug investigations,
the pairing of such characters with law enforcement to set up drug busts
has come under heavy fire in the past year.

Most notable perhaps, is the case of Andrew Chambers, an informant whom the
Drug Enforcement Administration has paid over $2.2 million since 1984 for
his work helping to imprison 475 people on drug charges, more than 50 in
the Houston, Beaumont and Port Arthur area.

But in some 16 cases, Chambers was found to have lied on the stand about
his arrest record, aliases, education and failure to pay income taxes on
his DEA earnings, according to an Aug. 7, 2000 article in the Houston
Chronicle.

At least a dozen people convicted on his testimony are now appealing their
cases and prosecutors have dropped charges against14 others since Chambers
was "deactivated" this February.

But according to Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy
Foundation in Washington, DC, Chambers is a fundamentally different type of
informant than Parrish.

Chambers, despite his blunders, was a professional informant, who earned a
living setting up dealers. Parrish was essentially a felon looking to get
out of hard jail time -- a more feasible investigative tool for rural law
enforcement agencies without DEA or big city crime prevention budgets.

Sterling, a top level crime and drug policy analyst who helped develop the
Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 and the Drug Abuse Acts of 1986,
said use of informants in general has steadily increased since 1980, along
with drug enforcement overall. More than 1.5 million people have been
arrested on drug charges annually in the United States for the last four
years, Sterling said, compared to around 700,000 annual arrests for violent
criminal offense during the same period.

Though the use of professional informants has its caveats, putting
criminals facing hard time in law enforcement positions is a recipe for
disaster, some contend.

"In those situations, the people who are making the decisions about who
gets investigated, prosecuted and imprisoned are often criminal defendants
facing stiff penalties. They're less sophisticated than professional
informants," Sterling said. "That kind of situation is rife for abuse
because they're often devoid of good judgment and character."

Pointing to informant-driven investigations in scores of U.S. cities where
inaccurate or outright wrong information has led to Task Force shooting
deaths of innocent people, Sterling said witness credibility should be of
paramount concern.

"With informants we've got governments bringing together the informant and
the arresting officer together for the commission of the crime," Sterling
said. "It's a complete turnaround from traditional law enforcement."

Often facing drug charges themselves, informants sign on with law
enforcement entities to provide an important service, drug enforcement
officials contend -- an inside view on an often dangerous world police
would not be able to penetrate through traditional means.

Depending on the quality of their information, informants may be given
reward money from asset forfeiture funds, or may negotiate for lighter
sentences, though the agreement reached between Parrish and Hays County
officials is not available. "People don't grow up to be confidential
informants," McNaab said. "They used him because he's a felon and he did it
for the money and to get himself out of trouble."

Though a number of misdemeanor convictions came out of the Wimberley sting,
most resulting in probated sentences, Hays County is hardly lacking for
enforcement of such low level drug offenses.

According to The Texas Judicial Council -- a statewide tracking agency for
county and district court cases -- some 2,000 misdemeanor drug charges
were filed through the county court system here over the past five years
from 1994 to 1999, around 450 cases per year.

And the county wasn't doing too badly with felony drug arrests either.

During that same period some 469 indictments for drug possession were
handed down and 97 indictments for drug sale or manufacture.

Though the Task Force was reformed under newly elected Hays County Sheriff
Don Montague and San Marcos Police Chief Steve Griffith in 1998 after a
similar unit disbanding in 1994, its work during its first year yielded
minimal results. The Wimberley investigation in 1999 was the first of its
kind for the new Task Force.

Montague, who is up for re-election this year, did not return numerous
phone calls requesting interviews for this article, nor did he respond to a
faxed list of questions regarding possible policy reforms relating to the
use of informants in Hays County.

Hays County Assistant District Attorney Cathy Compton however, backed Task
Force Commander DeArza in discounting the allegations made against
Parrish, though no investigation into them was conducted by her office.

Though Compton acknowledged "it is a fine line" involving informants in
criminal activity for law enforcement purposes, she said she had confidence
the policies in place had little room for improvement.

"There's no need for any reform in the way we use informants," Compton
said. "I'm perfectly satisfied with the procedures we have. Ninety-nine
point nine percent of these allegations are completely unfounded...and we
don't have the resources to follow up on every allegation made in these cases."

Compton said she was aware Parrish had been involved in a traffic stop in
Gonzales County while working for the task force, but refused to comment
on the incident.

Defense attorneys say they've seen no change in the Task Force's use of
confidential informants.

Some, like local attorney Norman Lanford -- who spent 13 years as a deputy
sheriff in Harris County and 12 years as a criminal court district judge --
say the overall risks to private citizens by continuing such operations far
outweigh any perceived gains made in the war on drugs.

"They should have treated it (Wimberley sting) like a training exercise,
dropped the cases and looked at what they did right and what they did
wrong," Lanford said. "It's not worth putting anyone at peril, not for
these minuscule amounts of dope."