Two police officers in S.E accused of stealing from drug dealers
may be retried

ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO Prosecutors say they will consider retrying two San
Francisco police officers accused of stealing from drug dealers,
following a trial that resulted in a hung jury.

The trial was considered one of the biggest corruption cases in San
Francisco history.

Friday, jurors in San Francisco Superior Court said they were deadlocked
on the last four charges against Officers Gary Fagundes and Steven Landi.
Officer Jarnes Acevedo was acquitted of all three charges against him
earlier in the week.

Several jurors said yesterday that the prosecution didn't prove its case.
They also said they trusted the officers' declarations of innocence over
the word of the drug dealers.

"I thought 'it was a witch hunt," juror Mike Mitchell said. "The whole
way 'through the' trial, I thought, 'I'm not going to take the word of a
drug dealer over the word of (the officers).'"

Juror Katy Murphy agreed, saying, "Police officers are supposed to be
good and drug dealers are the antithesis. It was going against
everything you were brought up to believe."

Jurors saw hours of videotapes of attempted stings, including one in
which Fagundes pocketed money investigators had planted on top of a
dresser then put it back after apparently realizing he was being
taped.

The videotaped incident was one of the charges on which the jury
deadlocked.

San Francisco District Attorney

Terence Haiiinan said he would probably decide within a week whether to
retry Fagundes and Landi on the counts on which the jury could not
decide.

Altogether in the 3½month trial, jurors returned not guilty verdicts on
18 charges throughout more than a week of deliberations.

The officers, who've been suspended without pay, could face
departmental charges as well.

Fagundes, the central figure in the case who faced 14 charges, said he
was relieved that the trial was over.

"I'm going to borrow money from my father and take (my daughters) to
Disneyland," Fagundes said. "If I can get them out of school, thaA's when
I'm going to go."

Much of the prosecution's case asked jurors to believe the testimony of
drug dealers, who claimed that the three officers stole money and other
items from them while they worked on a speciaL narcotics investigation
team.

The trial began Jan.29 and involved hundreds of hours of testimony from
the alleged victims, from the accused officers and from other police
personnel.

Juror Ii)u Maunupau said the jury argued seriously over the remaining
charges, but he and other jurors could not be convinced beyond a
reasonable doubt without more evidence.

"Everything was a big argument and by the time we got to the end of
deliberations, the jury was truly fatigued," Maunupau said. "There was
nothing there decisively that, in my mind, could pinpoint things."

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