D.A. HILL ADMITS ACTION TOO SLOW ON FAKE-DRUGS SCANDAL

In the fake-drugs scandal of 2001, crooked informants planted phony drugs
on innocent people, and police supervisors failed to monitor some officers'
work.

District Attorney Bill Hill's staff wasn't directly involved in the
misdeeds, but prosecutors did pursue some defendants in cases where they
knew the drugs were fake - and Mr. Hill acknowledges they should have
spotted the problems sooner and taken action. In two of at least 24 cases
connected to the 2001 scandal, innocent people pleaded guilty to lesser
criminal charges just so they could get out of jail, where they had been
held for months awaiting trial.

Attorney Bill Stovall's client, Jaime Siguenza, agreed to a plea bargain
for the time he served while awaiting trial and was deported - just so he
could go free. Mr. Stovall said Dallas County prosecutors did tell him that
lab results showed a 12,000-gram seizure of "drugs" planted unknowingly on
his client was mostly fake. The tests showed just 26 grams of real cocaine.
But he says he remains bitter about the plea agreement because prosecutors
didn't tell him that others had been arrested based on fake evidence, too.

"There was no mention of any other lab results - they had to have known by
then," he said. His client's conviction has since been thrown out.

By the time of the Nov. 12, 2001, plea bargain with Mr. Stovall's client,
more than a dozen lab tests had revealed that drugs found during other
large busts by Dallas police were phony.

Indeed, in early fall 2001, prosecutor Gregg Long, the former supervisor of
the district attorney's organized crime division, was concerned enough
about the number of fake drugs cases linked to Dallas officer Mark Delapaz
that he asked police to investigate. He also sent a prosecutor to the
county drug lab to confer with scientists. But Mr. Long did not call a
meeting of prosecutors under his supervision to discuss his concerns,
according to records from the city's investigation of the scandal.

Mr. Long later told city investigators that part of the problem was that
Officer Delapaz continued to assure him that his confidential informant was
truthful and had passed a polygraph. "My concern was, is the [informant]
scamming somebody, and he assured me that his [informant] was honest," Mr.
Long said. "Delapaz said the bad stuff was being switched in San Antonio
and the [informant] was not involved."

Even after prosecutors became aware that lab results showed that drugs in
many cases were fake, they continued to pursue some defendants on the
lesser charge of "delivery of a simulated controlled substance." Legal
experts say prosecutors may charge someone with a lesser offense of selling
fake drugs if authorities believe that the person is a drug dealer.

A week after Mr. Siguenza accepted his plea agreement and nearly a month
after Mr. Long says he developed concerns, prosecutors held a preliminary
hearing in the case of Yvonne Gwyn. She had originally been charged with
selling cocaine but once lab tests revealed the drugs in the case to be
fake, the District Attorney's office decided to prosecute her on the lesser
charge.

At the hearing, Officer Delapaz testified that the drugs found when Yvonne
Gwyn was arrested were less than 1 percent real. Prosecutors did not
question him about the string of other fake drug cases that had emerged by
then, and Ms. Gwyn's defense attorney was not told about the other lab results.

She was subsequently indicted for selling fake drugs. In January, all
charges against her were dismissed.

District Attorney Hill says that his staff should have spotted problems
with the fake-drugs arrests sooner. Had they seen a pattern in the lab
reports earlier, he said, prosecutors would not have pushed for guilty
pleas on the lesser criminal charges.

At the time, prosecutors did not test the drugs used as evidence in a
criminal case unless a trial was imminent - and never in plea-bargain
cases. Mr. Hill's office now requires testing of drugs in drug cases before
evidence is presented to a grand jury. The office also keeps detailed
records of confidential informants, information formerly controlled by police.

"I think it's more about being naive and trusting and too narrowly
focused," he said in a June interview. "I know it was not intentional to
prosecute anybody knowingly who had drugs planted on them."

Mr. Hill says his staff worked swiftly once they realized there was a
problem with the cases. He notes that he was the one who asked the FBI to
investigate and ordered all of his employees to cooperate fully. That
investigation found no wrong doing by prosecutors.

By March 2002, more than 80 drug cases were dismissed because they were
linked to the officers or informants involved in the fake-drugs scandal. A
recently released city investigation into the scandal found that
communication between police and prosecutors was inadequate on drug cases,
and no one, including prosecutors, displayed a sense of urgency when the
problem cases began to emerge.

Mr. Hill demoted Mr. Long and one other high-level prosecutor who oversaw
the drug courts soon after the scandal became public, but officially for
reasons unrelated to the scandal. He said he wanted a "fresh perspective"
in the supervision of the drug courts.

In December 2003, Mr. Hill appointed Dan Hagood as special prosecutor to
examine the fake-drugs scandal.

A report on the court system's role in the scandal is being prepared, Mr.
Hagood said, but a release date has not been set.

Three police informants have pleaded guilty to federal charges of civil
rights violations connected to the scandal; they and two other informants
still face state charges.

In November 2003, Mr. Delapaz was acquitted on federal civil rights charges
but will go on trial Monday on state charges of evidence tampering. Three
other Dallas police officers also face state charges that include tampering
with physical evidence in connection with the scandal. Mr. Hagood is
prosecuting these cases.