EARLY ON, FAKE-DRUG QUESTIONS

No. 2 In DA's Office Says Prosecutors Still Unsure If Police Tested Powder

Prosecutors were dissatisfied with explanations from Dallas police about a
series of bogus drug seizures in fall 2001 and remain unsure whether
officers ever performed field tests on the substances, according to
testimony from the district attorney's second-in-command.

Questions about the veracity of police detectives' accounts of the drug
cases are just one detail to emerge from daylong and often-contentious
questioning of First Assistant District Attorney Mike Carnes for a
deposition about the role of the district attorney's office in the
fake-drugs scandal.

A copy of the deposition, which has not been made public, was obtained
Tuesday by The Dallas Morning News.

In the October 2003 deposition, which is related to a lawsuit filed on
behalf of dozens of people falsely arrested on drug charges, Mr. Carnes
said prosecutors met in November 2001 with narcotics detectives who
performed field tests on the seized substances.

The purpose of the meeting was to determine how the detectives received
false positives on field tests, which are done immediately after drug
seizures. More thorough lab tests later found that large quantities of
powder packaged as cocaine or methamphetamine were bogus.

Under questioning by the plaintiffs' attorney, Don Tittle, Mr. Carnes said
he was dissatisfied with the detectives' explanation. And he said
prosecutors never did receive a satisfactory answer to how the false
positives occurred.

Mr. Carnes said in his deposition that he still could not explain the false
test results and that he did not know whether the field tests had, in fact,
been conducted.

The district attorney's office had asked a federal judge earlier this year
to restrict disclosure of the deposition, but the judge declined.

The district attorney's office had asked the FBI to take over the
fake-drugs investigation in January 2002.

Several confidential informants who worked with police detectives have
testified that they framed dozens of innocent people by planting fake drugs
on them and duping police into arresting the people.

Detective Mark Delapaz was acquitted of federal civil rights violations in
November. Prosecutors alleged that Senior Cpl. Delapaz lied on police
reports, leading to the incarceration of some of the falsely accused.

Separate inquiries by the city and by a special prosecutor for the district
attorney's office have begun since the not-guilty verdict.

In his deposition, Mr. Carnes also said prosecutors noticed handwriting
discrepancies on Police Department payment forms to the confidential
informants and realized that the bogus cases could involve more than just a
crooked informant.

Mr. Carnes said he had no direct knowledge of some statements in press
reports attributed to his office that were critical of the Police
Department's response to prosecutors' requests for information about the
problem cases.

He said several months passed before police officials provided prosecutors
with the information necessary for them to track down all of the cases
involving the two detectives and the informants who worked with them.

On Tuesday, District Attorney Bill Hill stood by his earlier criticism of
the Police Department's response to the scandal, saying police officials
were slow to act on his office's requests for key information. Mr. Carnes
also said a prosecutor began talking with Detective Delapaz about problems
with one large drug case in August 2001, a month earlier than previously
disclosed.

Most of those falsely arrested were indicted based solely on the officers'
reports and the preliminary field tests. But Mr. Carnes said in his
deposition that in at least one of the cases, a grand jury indicted a
small-business owner, Yvonne Gwyn, who was charged with possession of 30
kilograms of cocaine, or 66 pounds, after lab tests showed the substance
contained only trace amounts of cocaine.

The deposition is unclear about when police received the lab analysis and
whether they forwarded the report to prosecutors before the grand jury
indicted Ms. Gwyn.

In an interview Tuesday evening, Mr. Hill said that if prosecutors had
known the drugs were not real in Ms. Gwyn's case, they would not have
sought the first-degree felony drug charges against her.

After the results were known, Ms. Gwyn's bail was reduced and prosecutors
later recommended a lesser charge of delivery of a simulated controlled
substance.

The case was later dismissed.

In all but one case, Mr. Hill said, prosecutors quickly notified defense
attorneys about lab results that showed the evidence was not drugs. In the
case that was an exception, the prosecutor has said she mistakenly thought
a lab report in her file indicated the drugs were real and didn't examine
the document until the day of the trial.

Mr. Hill acknowledged that prosecutors did not communicate with each other
as they individually encountered the bogus drug cases and did not see a
pattern, partly because they were reassured by Detective Delapaz and police
officials that the innocent victims were drug dealers attempting to sell
fake drugs.

"We probably should have caught it quicker, and I'm sorry we didn't," Mr.
Hill said. "It wasn't like we were intentionally trying to do it."