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Report: TX Police and DA's Office at Fault in Fake Drug Bust

By Jeralyn, Section Crime in the News
Posted on Wed Oct 20, 2004 at 05:18:59 PM EST
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Remember this case of informants setting up immigrants to be busted with fake drugs? It's quite a tale.

Today, an independent report was released that blames the police:

Poor supervision and disregard for police department rules contributed to a fake-drug scandal that landed two dozen innocent people in jail, an investigation found. The report released Wednesday said confidential informants used those lapses to frame people - mostly poor Mexican immigrants - with billiards chalk bundled like real drugs.

The report also blamed the Dallas County district attorney's office for waiting until trials to test drug evidence, a delay that meant wrongly arrested people languished in jail. That policy has been changed. ....Rachel Horton, spokeswoman for District Attorney Bill Hill, said, "We regret that it did allow people to stay wrongfully jailed for longer periods of time, but I do want to point out that in no way did our policy cause the fake drug scandal or the wrong jailing of anyone."

So what did cause it?

It's still unclear why officers reported getting positive test results on substances that later were proven to not be drugs. The investigators said the officers either did the tests incorrectly, lied about the results or never performed the tests.

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