Rick Roach: A bigger fool or hypocrite?

"If I'm ever a prosecutor again, which will never happen, I would be much less Rambo-ish and more compassionate in the way I handle an offense, particularly for users," meth-head Panhandle prosecutor Rick Roach told the New York Times in an extensive article.

It's hard to know if Roach is a bigger fool or a bigger hypocrite. You be the judge.

As evidence of foolishness, Roach told the Times he had contemplated a patent for mixing meth and "performance enhancing" prescription drugs to boost his libido, which he said had declined due to taking medicine cabinet full of drugs for depression he'd bought without prescriptions over the Internet.

"They were all debilitating on my libido, which created problems with my wife," he said. Viagra, he said, left him with a splitting headache. He said that in Breckenridge he had started injecting methamphetamine, finding eventually that, mixed with the sexual enhancer Levitra, it had the desired effect.

"I was going to patent it," he said with a hollow laugh. "I'm definitely a mixed-up person."

Still, though foolishness has made a strong case, I think hypocrisy might still win out. Check out the lead to the Times' story:

No one prosecuted the war on drugs in the Texas Panhandle more zealously than Richard James Roach. As the blustery and hot-tempered Republican district attorney for five counties overrun with methamphetamines, he had eked out an election victory in 2000 vowing a crackdown and was soon gleefully reeling off the harsh sentences he had wrung from juries: 36 years, 38 years, 40 years, 60 years, 75 years - even 99 years. "I think it's quite clear that the good citizens of this district are fed up with drugs," he said.

He had barely missed riding the issue to victory in an earlier race. "My campaign is centered around doing something with the dope dealers," he told a local newspaper in 1996, complaining that "it's kind of hard to fight drugs when you've got dirty law enforcement."

Hmmmm. Dirty law enforcement? Yeah, that'd be terrible.

Roach was one of the most aggressive pursuants of drug-related asset forfeiture cases among all District Attorneys in the state. Now, investigators want to know what happened to the money, reported the Times:

Officials also were looking into his handling of millions of dollars in cash confiscated from drug traffickers along the Interstate 40 corridor that skirts the sparsely populated counties of Gray, Wheeler, Roberts, Hemphill and Lipscomb, where only 33,500 people live, fewer than 8 per square mile.

Rick Roach isn't a typical prosecutor, but among officialdom he was a tolerated one. His employees knew he was taking drugs, the voters and his political opponents suspected it, but he was just re-elected in November. He'd still be prosecuting today if it hadn't turned out his secretary was a snitch for the DEA and the FBI.

For more see the links here. Via Talk Left

CLARIFICATION: A police officer friend emails to correct my usage of the word "snitch" regarding Roach's secretary: "A snitch is someone who provides information for a profit - either being for money, leniency, or favorable treatment. All other people are simply witnesses who have come forward for no personal gain." Point well taken.