In the war on drugs, many on the law enforcement side see lies as
legitimate weapons, a former prosecutor and defense attorney says.

A state trooper's admission that he and others routinely misled judges
about the circumstances surrounding highway drug busts angered a
federal magistrate in Tampa last week.

But it shouldn't have surprised her.

From Florida to California, officers have been caught telling
fractured versions of the truth.

It's most common in drug cases, researchers say, in which a tremendous
political and societal pressure to stop illicit drug sales fosters an
atmosphere in which lying is justified.

David J. Langum, a law professor at Samford University in Birmingham,
Ala., says law enforcement officers have a long tradition of lying
under oath.

``They have a word for it: `testi-lying,' '' he said.

Sometimes officers lie by omission - failing to mention, for example,
that a tip was behind a traffic stop that led to an arrest.

Less frequently, officers lie outright, spinning tales of undercover
drug buys that never happened in order to persuade judges to grant
search warrants or planting evidence and later lying about it in court.

Trooper Douglas Strickland stunned a Tampa courtroom Dec. 7 when he
testified he and other state troopers routinely filed incomplete
reports and misled judges to keep FBI investigations quiet and protect
agents and informants.

Maj. Ken Howes, a Florida Highway Patrol spokesman in Tallahassee,
defends Strickland and acknowledges that troopers sometimes omit facts.

``When we're called upon either by the FBI or the DEA or Customs or
any federal law enforcement agency to assist them in an investigation,
we're going to cooperate. There's a big difference between lying and
omitting certain information,'' Howes said. ``We're just trying to get
the bad guys in jail and stop the flow of illegal drugs on our highways.''

Strickland's bombshell prompted U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Jenkins to
rip into the highway patrol, FBI and federal prosecutors last week,
calling their conduct ``reprehensible.''

But it certainly isn't unprecedented.

Last year, federal public defenders in Sacramento accused the
California Highway Patrol of systematically hiding evidence from
defendants and their attorneys in drug cases.

THEY POINTED TO A section of the highway patrol manual that advises
officers how to conduct ``whisper stops'' to make drug arrests.

In cases in which another law enforcement agency has given the
California patrol a tip that a driver might be carrying drugs,
officers should find a reason to stop the vehicle and search it.

When such stops result in drug arrests, the manual advised, California
officers should tell only the prosecutor and, if necessary, the judge
about the tip that led to the stop.

Quin Denvir, the federal defender for the Eastern District of
California in Sacramento, says officers felt justified in part because
they weren't telling outright lies.

``Their hope out here was they'd never be asked the question that
would force them to lie,'' he said. ``It was the ends justifying the
means.''

Laurie Shanks, a professor at the Albany Law School at Union
University in New York, has seen criminal cases from both sides. She
worked briefly as a prosecutor and for nearly 20 years as a defense
attorney.

``When you start calling [it] a `war' on drugs,'' Shanks said, ``the
`soldiers' see themselves as the guys in the white hats, the only guys
in the white hats, who are single-handedly preventing bad guys from
taking over our world.

``They have been told that it is OK to lie to the bad guys, and have
learned it is also OK to lie to judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys
and anyone else who will stand in the way of convictions,'' Shanks
continued.

``Very few prosecutors, judges or politicians will stop this
widespread deceit for fear of being [labeled] soft on crime.''

SOME ATTORNEYS and law professors believe Trooper Strickland's
statements may jeopardize hundreds of drug convictions.

The controversy stems from the May 19, 1998, arrest of Orlando
motorist Michael Leonard Flynn, 40, on Interstate 4 near Lakeland.

Strickland suggested afterward in a sworn affidavit that he found 220
pounds of cocaine while trying to help Flynn, whose car had stalled.
Strickland said he grew suspicious because Flynn refused to let him
open the trunk, so he called in a drug-sniffing dog.

What Strickland didn't say was that he already knew the cocaine was in
the car, which had been deliberately disabled by a remote-controlled
device planted by the FBI. It was a reverse sting operation, and the
trooper had watched agents load the drugs earlier in the day.

An assistant state attorney discovered the misinformation and was so
outraged he refused to prosecute. Flynn was freed. A year later,
however, a federal grand jury indicted Flynn and two others, Norman
Dupont and Dewey Davis, on cocaine charges.

SAMFORD LAW PROFESSOR Deborah Young, a former assistant U.S. attorney
in Washington, D.C., doesn't buy into the idea that police deceit is
sometimes necessary.

``I worked on a number of drug investigations with task forces of the
FBI, DEA and local police,'' she said. ``I firmly believe a
well-designed and well-run criminal investigation does not use police
perjury in any context.''

Examples of police twisting the truth to further a case are
plentiful.

The Los Angeles Police Department is in the midst of a scandal
involving officers from an antigang unit planting evidence and lying
about it in court. Prosecutors and public defenders are reviewing more
than 3,000 questionable cases and expect the release of more inmates.

So far, prosecutors have gone to court to argue for the release of
four inmates who prosecutors concluded had been improperly convicted.
In addition, prosecutors have persuaded judges to vacate convictions
of seven other people who are no longer in custody.

In New York, a special prosecutor capped a four-year investigation
into the worst scandal in state police history by concluding in 1997
that troopers were able to plant evidence routinely in criminal cases
in rural New York because supervisors looked the other way.

After an exhaustive review of thousands of cases, the special
prosecutor found 36 between 1984 and 1992 in which six troopers
fabricated evidence, usually by planting fingerprints, and 10 other
cases that might have been tainted. ---