TIMELINE STILL FUZZY IN FAKE-DRUG CASE

Testimony Differs On When DA Raised Concerns Over Evidence

More than two years after a series of bogus drug arrests
in Dallas, 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.

Two men who oversaw narcotics officers and prosecutors in the fall of
2001 - when more than two dozen felony drug cases unraveled into a
scandal - gave conflicting accounts in recent depositions for a
federal lawsuit of when and how the agencies communicated.

Transcripts of the depositions, which are not yet public, were
recently obtained by The Dallas Morning News.

The dispute centers on when Assistant District Attorney Gregg Long,
who oversaw drug courts at the time, told Lt. Craig Miller, a
narcotics supervisor, that the district attorney's office had concerns
about several big cases.

Mr. Long testified that his warning came a month before Lt. Miller
remembers receiving it.

The depositions of Mr. Long and Lt. Miller 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 cases in late 2001 remains unclear.

Also unclear from the depositions is whether wrongly accused people
might have been freed from jail sooner if the agencies had reacted
differently. Mr. 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.

Subsequent laboratory tests showed that the white, powdery substance
actually was billiards chalk with little or no drugs mixed in. In his
testimony, Mr. Long said that after he talked to lower-ranking
officers in the weeks before, he called Lt. Miller on Oct. 26, 2001.
This was 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.

Also Online Of note in the deposition of Lt. Craig Miller, a Dallas
police narcotics supervisor: A key remaining question in the fake-drug
cases is why narcotics officers received false positive results when
they tested the fake drugs with their field kits. Lt. Miller said
narcotics supervisors realized on Nov. 20, 2001, that inadequate
training could be a cause.

But the department didn't organize a formal training session on how to
properly use the kits until months later, in April 2002, according to
Lt. Miller's testimony. Lt. Miller testified that he didn't think the
weapons displayed at former Chief Terrell Bolton's news conference on
fake drugs on New Year's Eve 2001 were seized in any of the bogus arrests.

He said Deputy Chief John Martinez, who heads the narcotics division,
asked him to supply guns from the police property room. Don Tittle, a
plaintiffs' attorney, queried, "Did you ask why?" and Lt. Miller
responded, "Sir, I work in a paramilitary organization. When I'm given
an order, I follow it." Mr. Tittle later asked, "Those guns were out
there just for show?" Lt. Miller replied, "I was asked to bring them."
Lt. Miller said the way narcotics officers filled out a voucher for
incremental payments totaling $50,000 to a confidential informant
deviated from the normal practice.

The informants received money from seized drug funds as rewards for
information. Lt. Miller testified that a separate form with a witness
signature should have been created for every payment.

Lt. Miller didn't supervise the officers at the time they made the
payments to the informant.

But had he been in charge, and the payment sheet came across his desk,
he testified that it would "absolutely" raise questions in his mind.
"It's not consistent with [how] the normal one would be done," he
said. Informants were required to sign such forms when they received
payments from officers. Lt. Miller testified that signatures on
payment sheets, supposedly by another confidential informant, didn't
appear consistent. "I'm not a handwriting expert; I'll qualify my
answer with that. On the surface, these signatures do appear to
deviate from one another." Mr. Tittle then asked, "Pretty
substantially, don't they?" Lt. Miller replied, "They do." Mr. Tittle
asked whether Lt. Miller still had faith in the "integrity and
credibility" of Senior Cpl. Mark Delapaz, the officer who made most of
the arrests that turned out to be for fake drugs, given what he now
knows about the cases.

Cpl. Delapaz, who was acquitted of federal charges last year, is on
leave from the department pending investigations by the city and a
special county prosecutor. Lt. Miller replied, "I believe Mark Delapaz
is a fine - was a fine narcotics detective.

I don't know the full parameters of what took place prior to my taking
over the squad [in October 2001]. Mark Delapaz is the same good
character person, in my mind, today that he was then."

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research