Drug Task Force falsely arrests 2 separate people

[drug-bot]

[top]Drug Task Force falsely arrests 2 separate people

SEVIERVILLE - Twice in the past 18 months, agents from the 4th Judicial District Drug Task Force have moved to prosecute an innocent man or woman.
In both cases, agents mistakenly identified the accused as having sold drugs. In addition to what the wrongly accused have endured, the mistakes - along with the recent guilty plea of a task force agent who developed a drug habit and stole cash from suspects - have forced prosecutors to drop numerous charges against drug defendants in the district, which includes Sevier, Jefferson, Cocke and Grainger counties.
Attempts to interview the drug task force's director, Mack Smith, have been unsuccessful.
Both of the accused citizens, Patty Diane Yates, 38, of Morristown and James Russell Kitts, 44, of Seymour, are mulling legal action against the Drug Task Force, although the law generally doesn't provide much of a chance for citizens to collect damages when they are the victims of false arrests.
Kitts has received an apology. He had friends in law enforcement who came to his defense, and the charges against him were quickly dropped, allowing him to resume his career.
Kitts, a UPS worker and youth athletics coach, was arrested June 25 on multiple charges of trafficking in prescription painkillers. Smith later issued a public apology to Kitts and said a Drug Task Force agent had identified him as a drug dealer based on information that included 911 records and Tennessee motor vehicle registration records. The agent, who wasn't publicly identified, was booted from the task force.
Yates wasn't so fortunate. It took authorities nine months to drop the charges against her, during which she was suspended without pay from her $10.86-an-hour factory job. She and her husband ended up losing their house and have been forced into bankruptcy, she said.
"We lost everything," Yates said. "We're having to start all over. ... I lost so much money it's unreal. It should not have taken them that long to figure out they had the wrong person."
Yates, who says she has no criminal record to speak of other than traffic tickets, has received no apology or explanation of why she was handcuffed and taken to jail twice on bogus drug charges.
Many details of the investigations that led to Yates' arrests remain unclear.
On July 16, the News Sentinel filed a request with Smith under the authority of the state Public Records Act to review investigative files as well as the personnel records of several task force agents.
Smith replied in writing that he would be glad to comply with the terms of the request, but attempts to set up a meeting time have been unsuccessful. Smith also said that he doesn't maintain personnel files of the agents under his command.
Records provided by another source, however, raise questions about how a misidentification could have occurred in a case based on testimony from a lawman that was backed up by tape recordings.
Yates was first arrested in March 2007 at her job at Matsuo Industries in Jefferson City. She was accused of selling prescription narcotics on two occasions in September 2006 to a confidential informant who was accompanied by Drug Task Force Agent Neal Seals. One of those times, Seals claimed that he'd ridden in a car with Yates from a house in White Pine where she supposedly lived to Dandridge in order to pick up drugs.
After posting bond and being suspended from work, she and her husband ended up using up much of their dwindling financial resources to hire criminal defense attorney Scott Hodge. Then, police showed up at her home in November 2007 and took her to the Cocke County Jail on charges of selling prescription painkillers nearly a year earlier.
Documents that would presumably reveal more about the Cocke County allegations against Yates were among the records requested by the News Sentinel last month. The request is pending.
Yates' defense attorney established that the woman the police were after couldn't have been her, according to Bryan Delius, the civil attorney who is now representing Yates and Kitts.
According to Delius, Yates had never lived at the house in White Pine where authorities said she met Seals. Her timecards from the factory showed she was working during the times the drug transactions took place. Also, the voice of the woman on the tape was clearly not hers, Delius said.
All the charges against Yates were dropped in December 2007 and she was allowed to return to work.
Delius said the mixup is hard to understand, especially since the agent himself actually rode in the car with the woman who allegedly was dealing pills. "It's inexcusable," he said.
The assistant district attorney who prosecuted the Cocke County cases declined to comment.
Charles Murphy, the prosecutor who dropped the Jefferson County cases against Yates, said that Smith conducted an internal probe to determine if Yates had been misidentified.
Seals adamantly maintained that Yates was the woman who'd sold drugs, but Smith determined there might have been a different woman at the White Pine house named "Patty" who had children with the last name of "Yates," Murphy said.
"The only person who could have resolved the issue was the confidential informant, and that person disappeared and we couldn't locate that person," Murphy said. "It's amazing. ... I've been here for 10 years and no one has reported (a misidentification) happening in Jefferson County before this."
Seals, who was a Sevierville police officer from 1995 until he resigned in October 2007, couldn't be reached for comment. City spokesman Bob Stahlke declined to give a reason for his resignation.
In a separate case, a former Sevier County Sheriff's Department deputy who had been assigned to work for the Drug Task Force, is awaiting sentencing in Sevier County Circuit Court after pleading guilty to felony theft, according to prosecutors. Mark Victor Shults, 35, apparently became addicted to drugs and began stealing from both suspects and the task force itself, according to prosecutors.
As a result of Shults' misconduct, prosecutors have been forced to drop charges against several people whom Shults accused of being drug dealers, according to authorities.
J.J. Stambaugh may be reached at 865-342-6307.]

so they basically fucked 2 peoples life up (9 month investigation in which one lost there job and wages and her and her husband lost their house), on the info provided from a drug addict stealing pills from the suspect and police, and all they offered in return is an apology (what about monetary compansation), bullshit.

[JohnDeere]

Extreme bullshit, but more common place than one would think. There is a lot more "Training Day" and "Street Kings" scenarios going on than the govermnet would like you to know about.

[Panthers007]

Sure. In war there is an "acceptable risk of collateral-damage." What this form of double-speak means is: We fuck you and leave you - you got in our way. Shut up or we'll fuck you again.