THE AIM OF NABBING DRUG TRAFFICKERS DOESN'T JUSTIFY LAWMEN LYING TO JUDGES

We have to give Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Douglas Strickland
credit. He may have intentionally misled state judges at the behest of
the FBI, but he knew enough to tell the truth at a hearing before a
federal magistrate Tuesday.

Strickland testified that it is routine practice for the highway
patrol's drug interdiction teams to make up stories in order to get
the bad guys. They have relied on the assurances of federal agents
who, while perhaps never telling the troopers to commit perjury,
implicitly encouraged them to tell partial stories to state judges and
file incomplete reports in federal drug cases.

In this world of make-believe, according to the FBI, the end justifies
the means. It's OK to subvert the judicial system so long as the drug
runners they set up are put away. Well, in our view it's not OK for
representatives of the federal government to trample on the rights of
citizens or to oblige impressionable patrol officers to break the law
for them.

THE CONTROVERSY STEMS from a May 19, 1998, car search. At the time,
Strickland and Trooper Bruce Hutheson told a Polk County judge that
they had pulled up alongside a broken-down Lincoln Continental stopped
on Interstate 4. They said they became suspicious of the driver,
Michael Flynn, because he would not give them access to the trunk so
they could check if a fuel shut-off switch had malfunctioned. When
they called over the police dog they just happened to have with them,
it homed in on the back of the car. Inside they ``discovered'' 220
pounds of cocaine. The state judge, on the basis of this evidence, set
bail at $1 million.

Trouble was, the troopers neglected to tell the judge they knew all
along that the car contained drugs. They had been with the FBI when
the car was loaded. The FBI, we now know, was conducting a reverse
sting and had used a remote control device planted in the car to make
it inoperable.

The troopers lied, Strickland testified, to keep an ongoing FBI
investigation quiet and to protect the lives of agents and informants.

We would know nothing about this had a Polk County prosecutor with
faith in our system of justice and respect for the law not revealed
it. When Bradford Copley learned about the false statements by the
troopers, he refused to prosecute Flynn and issued a blistering notice
explaining why.

``It is a matter of concern that the misstatements of fact in the
report were made at the express direction of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation,'' Copley wrote on May 26, 1998. ``The results in this
case should serve notice that the State Attorney's Office for the
Tenth Judicial Circuit will not initiate prosecutions based on false
or misleading affidavits.''

That warning, however, did not stop the FBI, which denied wrongdoing
and leaned on Polk State Attorney Jerry Hill, who at one point
threatened to arrest all of the troopers and FBI agents involved, to
issue a statement explaining there had been miscommunication between
their offices. (On Tuesday Copley stuck by his original
assessment.)

Flynn was released from jail, but last April, almost a year later, FBI
Special Agent Jesus Pegan filed another affidavit alleging the same
crimes during the same traffic stop. A federal grand jury indicted
Flynn and two other men.

Federal prosecutors concede that the troopers should not have lied but
insist they had enough evidence to justify the car search even without
the unfortunate affidavit. Perversely, they also declare that perjury
by law enforcement officers in state court is not conduct outrageous
enough to justify dismissing the case.

We do not mean to support the defendants in this matter. If the
indictments are accurate and based on truthful information - a big if
in this case - these men are guilty of serious crimes. But they are
still deserving of justice.

Defense attorney John May was correct when he argued Tuesday that the
government has left us with ``a situation where the defendants may
never know they have a basis for a motion to suppress evidence.''

THERE IS NOTHING to have prevented the troopers and agents from
telling the truth. If there was an ongoing investigation, that
information could have been revealed to the judge, who could have
ordered the records sealed. Arguably, defense lawyers would then have
been able to guess about further investigations, but they are not
entitled to that information until trial.

No one wants to see undercover agents jeopardized, but an
investigative tool that makes dupes of troopers and the FBI subverters
of the law should be stopped. The end does not justify the means.

We are now left to wonder how many other federal drug cases have been
tainted by lies to the judiciary.