DRUG PROSECUTION HITS AN IMPASSE

Texas district attorneys are again threatening to ignore federal drug
busts along the U.S.-Mexico border unless Washington pays to prosecute
and jail the small-time smugglers.

The boycott likely would start next month when the new fiscal year
begins unless federal officials ante up, El Paso County District
Attorney Jaime Esparza said Thursday.

The challenge appears to rekindle an ongoing spat between federal and
county governments over who bears the burden of prosecuting small, but
numerous drug seizures made along or near the nation's southern border.

Traditionally, federal agents on international bridges and checkpoints
have turned over smaller busts to local prosecutors, but as border
enforcement increased, district attorneys have said they no longer can
afford the cases, which in El Paso number roughly 500 a year.

The conflict seemed temporarily settled this summer when lawmakers
passed a bill allocating $12 million for border courts from
Brownsville to San Diego, Calif. But Esparza and his colleagues said
the money came with too many strings attached.

Although Washington lawmakers enabled counties to recover expenses
related to hiring lawyers for indigents, building jails and a few
other areas, the money could not be used where district attorneys
believed it was needed most: to pay for jail cells and
prosecutors.

Regardless, neither the Justice Department nor Capitol lawmakers have
agreed to broadly interpret or to amend the bill, Esparza said, adding
that he recently wrote to President Clinton in hopes of reaching a
resolution.

"We're at an impasse," he said.

District attorneys from Texas' border counties are slated to decide
during a meeting next week whether to proceed with the boycott.

If the boycott goes forward, then caseloads are expected to quickly
and noticeably increase in the border's already swamped federal
courts, which handle by far the highest volume of cases in the nation.

U.S. Attorney Bill Blagg, who oversees federal prosecutions from Waco
to El Paso, said a boycott would force him to temporarily shuffle
prosecutors from San Antonio and Austin to courts in El Paso and
possibly Del Rio.

His prosecutors, in an effort to streamline caseloads, also would
charge small drug seizures as misdemeanors, rather than felonies, in
exchange for quick pleas of guilty.

Blagg said administrators in the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys
have determined that while some lawmakers meant to help pay for county
prosecutions and incarcerations on the border, the law does not read
that way.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who pushed hard for the
emergency allocation, blamed the Justice Department for the stalemate,
saying officials there were being needlessly stubborn.