DA DUMPS 33 CASES BECAUSE OF COPS' BUST

Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed dismissed 33 cases Friday she
said couldn't be prosecuted without the testimony of four officers busted
in last month's FBI sting.

All but one of the cases involved drugs, and 30 were handled by Bexar
County sheriff's Deputy Richard Rowlett Buchanan.

Assigned to the narcotics division last June, Buchanan worked as an
evidence technician and was responsible for transporting drug evidence for
measurement and analysis.

Buchanan was a key witness in so many dismissed cases because they hinged
on evidence that bore only his initials, First Assistant District Attorney
Michael Bernard said.

One of the cases lost Friday because of Buchanan's involvement was a
January traffic stop on Interstate 35 that yielded 44 pounds of marijuana
and two felony arrests.

"You don't like to have to do it, and it's a sad day when we have to do
something like that," Reed said. "It's important to me that when we proceed
on cases, we do it in good faith ... and I didn't want to put these guys on
the stand and vouch for them."

The other three dismissed cases were handled, one each, by San Antonio
Police Officers Lawrence Bustos, Arthur Gutierrez Jr. and David Anthony
Morales, according to a news release from Reed's office.

Buchanan, Bustos, Gutierrez and Morales were four in a group of 12 people,
most of them law officers, arrested in an FBI police corruption sting two
weeks ago.

Buchanan is the only defendant in the sting facing just a theft charge.
Charges against the other defendants include conspiracy, attempted
possession and distribution of cocaine and firearms violations.

Their arrests stemmed from an investigation begun in 1997 in which
undercover agents posed as drug traffickers.

Jim Kopp, chief of the intake section in the DA's office, signed the papers
to dismiss the cases. He said between four and six people were in jail last
week in connection with the cases set for dismissal; others were out on bond.

He declined Friday to reveal how many inmates — if any — would be released
from jail because of Friday's dismissals. Attempts to get that information
from Bexar County Jail were unsuccessful Friday.

All but two of the dismissals were felony drug cases. The remaining two
cases involved evading detention with a vehicle and possession of marijuana
up to 2 ounces, both misdemeanors, according to court records.

Nine of the dismissals are cases filed by law enforcement agencies that did
not include an arrest, Kopp said. The other 24 cases had been accepted by
the DA's office earlier and involved arrests but no indictments, he said.

Sheriff's Deputy Chief Ruben Garcia didn't dispute the number of cases tied
to Buchanan and said it's possible that every case the deputy handled while
assigned to narcotics had been dismissed.

He speculated that Buchanan's number of dropped cases would have been much
lower if he had been assigned to a division less "sensitive" than narcotics.

"Just the image of something being wrong, especially with this going on, is
going to raise a red flag," Garcia said.

"It's unfortunate that these cases are being dismissed," he said. "What if
the case against Buchanan is dismissed? Are they going to go and rearrest
these people?"

That's a question that had no immediate answer.

Stemming from the federal investigation, SAPD Sgt. Conrad Fragozo Jr. and
officers Patrick Bowron, Morales, Peter Saenz, Gutierrez, Bustos and Manuel
Cedillo Jr. were charged with attempting to possess and distribute cocaine.
Officer Alfred Valdes was charged with aiding the attempted possession and
distribution of cocaine.

Also on Friday, the DA dropped three cases handled by Balcones Heights
Police Officer John Beauford, a former supervisor with the Alamo Area
Narcotics Task Force, who was indicted in March on federal charges of
possession of cocaine, crack and stolen firearms in a case unrelated to the
FBI sting.

All the cases were scrubbed for practical reasons, Bernard said.

"We don't yet know whether we can vouch for these witnesses or not,"
Bernard said. "As a practical matter, frankly, they are unavailable
witnesses. Their lawyers will not let them take the witness stand."

Reed and Bernard have said their concern was finding pending cases that
could have been compromised. Their review went back two years and included
3,000 police reports from the San Antonio Police Department and an internal
review of cases in which Buchanan was a key witness.

They did not try to find cases that already have ended in convictions.

Word of the dismissals set off much speculation about how many convicts
will be able to appeal their cases in the wake of the FBI sting.

St. Mary's University School of Law Professor Gerald Reamey drew a
distinction between the crimes alleged against the San Antonio officers and
the corruption scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department Rampart
division last year.

Officers there were accused of lying under oath and planting evidence.
Those convictions led to hundreds of dismissals and overturned convictions.

Those aren't the same kinds of accusations being made in the San Antonio case.

"But there certainly is a cloud over a conviction where the case is based
on an officer's testimony and that officer's credibility is in doubt,"
Reamey said. "It's not a good foundation on which to build a strong case."

Staff Writer Amy Dorsett contributed to this report.