WRONGLY ACCUSED

Cynthia and James Haywood were and remain regular taxpaying,
law-abiding and middle-class Salt Lake area residents. In March 1993,
they became something more: victims of the aggressive,
seat-of-your-pants and impetuous sort of law enforcement associated
with the drug war.

The astonished couple were arrested on drug charges. A week later, the
charges were dropped. They received nary a word of apology or an
admission by authorities that they had botched up.

In fact, the closest thing to an act of contrition on the part of the
trio of entities involved in their discomfiture was a $450,000
settlement -- $125,000 from the state of Utah, $125,000 from Salt Lake
City, and $200,000 from Salt Lake County -- on the eve of trial of the
federal civil rights suit they filed against the government entities.
James Haywood, who had worked as a corrections officer at the Utah
State Prison in Draper, got his job back along with his pension
benefits as part of the settlement, too.

What makes this case problematical is the fact that their arrest and
jailing for illegal drug dealing were based on the word of a paid
police informer and drug addict who later testified that the Metro
Narcotics Strike Force had pressured him into fingering a dirty prison
guard for them to prosecute.

The law enforcement officials involved in this case were too quick to
make arrests, to incarcerate and publicly promote their "coup" of
ferreting out a drug-dealing corrections officer. At the least, they
should have sought and found independent and corroborating evidence
backing up the allegations of their hireling.

If taxpayers think the $450,000 settlement could have been better
spent elsewhere, they are right. Their complaint, however, should not
be with the Haywoods, but with the government agencies whose employees
were responsible for this miscarriage of justice.