Jailers claim immunity for Webb County Jail beating death

Sandra Bland's death in the Waller County Jail was remarkable mainly for the massive attention it has received compared to scores of other inmates who perished in anonymity. Most deaths in county jails are glossed over almost immediately and never aggressively investigated by the press. Unless family members can afford to investigate, hire attorneys and sue, at most a one-time small announcement in veiled language is all the public will ever hear of in-jail deaths. The UK Guardian published an op ed this month by the mother of Rafael Solis about his 2009 death in the Webb County Jail for which the family has aggressively sought redress. Here's a notable excerpt:

The truth, we now know from official reports, was that Rafael was put in handcuffs and shackles, held face down against the floor of his cell, stomped on and beaten until he died.

He had two fractured ribs, diaphragm contusions, hemorrhages on his back and chest and bruises and abrasions all over his body. A subsequent report from the Texas Rangers even noted there were cross-patterns on his body that matched the laces from a jailor’s boot and a bruise on his face that matched the pattern of the drain on the floor of his cell.

The jailers claim that Rafael was experiencing alcohol withdrawal, and jailors were just trying help by putting his pants on him so he could be transported to the hospital. But broken ribs aren’t a symptom of alcohol withdrawal. And bruises all over your body, or boot prints on your chest, don’t usually result from trying to get someone get dressed.

According to the coroner, the jailors’ “help” asphyxiated Rafael, and he died.

Yet when a court recently ruled that seven jailors implicated in Rafael’s death should stand trial in a case saying their excessive force killed my son, all seven appealed. Each now claims they have immunity from prosecution because, well, they were just doing their jobs, in their official capacity, at the Webb County jail. The appeal is pending as my family and I continue to wait for justice.

We may never know for sure what “doing their jobs” included, because the jailhouse cameras were – for a reason we still have not been told – not recording on the day Rafael died.

A group called Public Justice is spearheading the litigation. See more background here and here.

Medical examiners' work may be "void" for failure to file constitutional oaths, bribery statements

A controversy over the credentials of medical examiners raised by researcher David Fisher has counties around the state checking to see if their medical examiners have executed a written oath of office and a bribery statement, which seemingly most have failed to do. Reported KCBD-TV in Lubbock:

A legal challenge could unravel the validity of many murder cases in Texas, including some done in the past in Lubbock.  Former Lubbock County Deputy Medical Examiner Paul Schrode faces just such a challenge for the work he did as Chief Medical Examiner in El Paso.  In 2010, Schrode was fired from El Paso amid allegations that he falsified his resume while in Lubbock to get the El Paso Chief's job.

This newest challenge is not an allegation of lying but rather a failure to complete paperwork for public officers in Texas.  Schrode did not execute a written oath of office nor a bribery statement.  The Texas Constitution demands such paperwork for all public office holders.

Therein lies the rub.  Is a Medical Examiner a public office holder?

If so, the lack of such documentation could be used to challenge autopsies done by Schrode both in El Paso and in Lubbock.  Countless criminal cases involving an autopsy could suddenly be subject to tough legal questions.

Medical Examiners in Dallas, Tarrant, and other counties have recently executed written oaths of office and bribery statements.

By contrast, the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office said on Wednesday, "The Chief Medical Examiner serves at the pleasure of Commissioners court.  This is not a constitutional office; therefore, neither Chief Medical Examiner nor his appointed Assistant Medical Examiners are required to take an oath of office."

The man who has instigated some of these challenges statewide, David Fisher, is a document specialist who often works for defense attorneys.

Fisher says, "According to the state Constitution, all state and county elected and appointed officials must execute the bribery statement before taking the oath of office."  He also says, "Any public official who controls any portion of state sovereignty is subject to this requirement and this includes medical examiners."

Fisher cites an Attorney General legal opinion in support of his claims.  He also says, "It could affect 90 percent of the people on death row."

The same issue was raised earlier this summer in an El Paso case over essentially similar allegations. Notably, the National Academy of Sciences singled out medical examiners as facing a major talent shortage, and as a last bastion of un-examined junk science.  While the oath of office may seem like a technicality, it does speak to the loosey-goosey way in which medical examiners are regulated in Texas, or rather, how they are not. The Fort Worth Star Telegram reported in 2009 that the field had come under fire for a "lack of performance standards, poor documentation, a shortage of qualified personnel and lax oversight."

Besides Dallas and Tarrant, the medical examiner in Webb County (Laredo) also filed an oath and bribery statement just last week, though she's been in office since 2007. The Webb County Attorney had declared that "Until such time as she has taken the oath with the appointment as medical examiner then everything she did prior to that is void." Which raises the question, what happens to older cases that the medical examiner evaluated without the oath and bribery statement? Are they "void" as well? I can see why the Harris County medical examiner stuck to their guns: Filing the oath now implies the ME agrees they should have done so earlier, which potentially calls into question all their old cases. What a Grade A mess it will be if courts decide those cases are invalid. And yet, if Fisher's interpretation of the AG opinion is correct, that seems to be the law. The El Paso case will likely be the first place the theory is tested.

UPDATE: In the comments, David Fisher pointed to this document (pdf) from the Texas Association of Counties giving guidance on who must have an oath on file, and it includes county medical examiners.  He also pointed to this AG's opinion (pdf) which declared, "Local officers must sign the statement and retain it with the official records of the office," though the opinion doesn't specifically address medical examiners. The court precedent Fisher relies upon to claim medical examiners are public officers (Prieto Bail Bonds v. State) similarly doesn't specifically mention medical examiners, but it does read: "An individual is a public 'officer,' within meaning of constitutional provision requiring oaths of appointed officers, if any sovereign function of the government is conferred upon that individual to be exercised for the benefit of the public largely independent of the control of others; public officer is one who is authorized by law to independently exercise functions of either an executive, legislative, or judicial character.." I'd have to agree with Fisher that it'd be hard to conclude the state has not conferred upon medical examiners a "sovereign function of the government" that is "largely independent of the control of others." The courts will have to decide - and the pragmatic aspects of this issue may end up trumping - but Fisher's seems like a strong argument.

Webb County Sheriff's speculative jail scheme ignores risks

The Laredo Sun, in an article that reads mysteriously like a badly written press release, reports that the Webb County Sheriff is pushing county commissioners to build a speculative new jail in hopes of turning a profit by housing federal immigration prisoners:

If the county government built a new prison, the project would practically get paid on its own because the current jail could generate several million dollars if federal prisoners are housed in it.

"This building is just right for federal prisoners because the federal court is very close and U.S. Marshals would like to spend less on the transportation of prisoners and have more security," Sheriff Martin Cuellar informed.

He also mentioned that the federal government currently pays almost $50 per day for each federal prisoner, but there is no room in the county jail for these prisoners.

"'These are prisoners that generate revenue but we can not have many of them because we need the space for local and state prisoners, the jail easily reaches its capacity of 572 beds," he indicated.

Cuellar stressed that this new prison project should have been worked on, therefore he has requested the support from the Commissioners Court to find a suitable site.

Cuellar also plans to make improvements in the prison control center in order to offer greater security for employees and prisoners.

The next day, County Commissioners approved the Sheriff's request to seek donated property for the project and established a committee to study a new jail.

It would be a mistake, though, for Webb County to overbuild beyond its own needs or seek to turn a profit competing with private prison vendors. That can too easily backfire, just like it did in Cameron County, which overbuilt its jail, took on large federal detention contracts, and now gets paid $36.35 per day to house federal inmates and must pay $48 per day to house their own, local pretrial detainees three hours away in another county.

As it turns out, Webb County has problems staffing its jail at current inmate levels because the commissioners court hasn't hired enough guards. But a bigger jail with more jailers will cost less?

The Sheriff is selling Webb County commissioners a pig in a poke: There's no such thing as a free lunch or a free jail.

US Department of Agriculture needs to stay out of jail building business

I make an effort on this blog to track as comprehensively as possible all the various sources of expansion in incarceration capacity in Texas, from halfway houses and treatment centers to county jails, state prisons, federal lockups, immigration detention centers and privately run facilities. But the Texas Tribune's Julian Aguilar points to a source of incarceration funds being sought in South Texas that I'd never considered before: The US Department of Agriculture.

Usually voters must approve debt for new jails, but a South Texas political family wants the federal Ag Department to loan money for jail building without voter approval, reports the Tribune ("USDA Approved: Jail Construction," Dec. 14):

Some Texas sheriffs are looking to an unlikely source to get them out of the hole as private prisons win away federal contracts for inmates and put the financial squeeze on county jails.

Federal prisoners translate to dollars to local detention facilities — mainly county jails — which are reimbursed at a rate that can exceed $50 a day for each federal inmate they house. But competition from private prisons in Texas continues to shrink that potential pool of inmates for smaller, poorer counties, leading some local governments to ask help from an agency better known for its fever tick riders than building jails.

The Department of Agriculture is currently considering whether and how it will grant or loan Webb County about $5 million, said Sheriff Martin Cuellar, which will be used to build a new county-owned jail.

“We build another jail elsewhere and house the regular state prisoners [there],” said Cuellar. “We could also have the current jail filled with federal prisoners and that could be something very profitable to the county.”

County governments and the U.S. Marshals Service negotiate federal-prisoner contracts, some of which used to be a steady secondary source of revenue for Webb.

Somebody needs to step in and provide some adult supervision here: The US Department of Agriculture has absolutely no business loaning money to add onto county jail capacity. Pork is pork, but that's an absurd misuse of Ag funds; certainly there's little economic stimulus going on there, and it ignores the voters' usual role in approving county debt.

I've railed repeatedly against the short-sighted tactic of counties banking on revenue from federal immigration detainees to generate profit from incarceration. In Cameron County a similar arrangement has forced officials to ship local, pretrial detainees to other counties, while in Gregg County for a while they actually stopped making misdemeanor arrests after Hurricane Rita because their jail was full of contract detainees. It turns out the Webb County scheme makes no more sense just because a Congressman's brother might be able to swing federal Ag pork to finance it:

Local officials nonetheless hailed the facility as a job creator, and a source of revenue through utility contracts with Webb County. But Cuellar says the county is losing $500,000 annually because inmates are going to GEO instead of the county lockup.

Cuellar said it's helpful knowing people at the federal level, in this case, his older brother, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, who the sheriff said has helped guide the department in the right direction.

“Through what they call the Rural Communities Facilities Program there is a way that you can use funding to build community centers, you can build city halls or you can even build jails,” said Rep. Cuellar, a member of the House Agriculture Committee.

So naturally, given those options, Congressman Cuellar and his Sheriff-brother want to expand on a bad idea and add more beds to the revenue-losing jail instead of build a new city hall or a community center. What gives with that? Does anyone believe that would be the top priority for funding if the Congressman's brother weren't the Sheriff? This one doesn't pass the smell test.

Thanks to the Tribune and Aguilar, btw, for alerting me to the possibility of federal Ag loans for rural county jails. Knowing that, perhaps going forward it'll be necessary to monitor the EPA, Medicare, transportation grants, and other seemingly unrelated federal programs to make sure jail builders aren't making an end run around local voters to incur indebtedness and expand jail capacity.

Prosecution of "replaceable" cartel smugglers fail to reduce I-35 drug trafficking

Guilty pleas last week by drug traffickers working for Los Zetas, the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel drug trafficking organization, offer rare insight into the mechanics of drug smuggling up and down the I-35 corridor, the Dallas News reports ("Traffickers used I-35 buses to get drugs to Dallas, court records show," Aug. 11):

Raul Castillo, 31, and Jorge Rodriguez, 21, pleaded guilty a week ago in Laredo federal court to charges that they moved up to 600 kilograms of cocaine a week to Dallas between March 2007 and February.

After they were arrested this year, the two Laredo men admitted to federal agents that they worked for Miguel Treviño Morales, a fugitive who is the reputed commander of the Zetas in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Authorities say that locally, a kilogram of cocaine goes for about $25,000, meaning these men are responsible for well over a half-billion dollars worth of narcotics moving up I-35. ...

Mr. Castillo and Mr. Rodriguez both face up to life in prison and more than $4 million in fines.

Five other men also have pleaded guilty in the case: Roberto Camacho, 22, Arturo Palencia, 21, Gustavo Fabian Chapa, 22, and Rene "Rana" Garcia, 29, all of Laredo; and Eduardo "Negro" Carreon-Ibarra, 24, of Nuevo Laredo. Some of them admitted taking part in murders and attempted murders in South Texas.

Court records do not link the five to Dallas-area activity. Two other people allegedly worked with Mr. Castillo and Mr. Rodriguez on the Dallas connection, but their names remain sealed while authorities try to arrest them.

According to court papers, Mr. Castillo and Mr. Rodriguez admitted that they used El Conejo and Turimex passenger buses, as well as tractor-trailers, to transport the drugs from Laredo to Dallas.

When tractor-trailers were used, the men told authorities that they would meet the northbound rigs at a truck stop near Waxahachie. They would take the drugs to a nearby warehouse to a man identified in court papers only as Guero.

Using buses is more complicated, the man told authorities.

Once an El Conejo bus crossed the border into Laredo, the men would wait for it to exit I-35 about four miles inside the city and stop at a restaurant to let passengers eat, court documents say. While everyone was inside the restaurant, Mr. Rodriguez and an accomplice loaded the bus with suitcases brimming with bundles of cocaine.

Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Castillo would then follow the bus in separate vehicles to Dallas. Mr. Rodriguez would then take the bundles to a stash house in Irving.

When they used Turimex buses, the men would first put cocaine-laden suitcases in a Nissan Xterra, then leave it, locked, at a bus station in Laredo. They would leave the vehicle's keys in the fuel door, and, according to court papers, a Turimex employee – not named in court papers – would move the bags into the buses. ...

Mr. Castillo admitted to transporting drug-sale proceeds from Dallas back to Laredo. He said the money went to someone known as El Dentista, who took the money over the border to Mr. Treviño Morales, the reputed Zeta commander.

The Webb County Sheriff's Department caught the men in February taking $870,000 to Laredo, authorities say.

This news follows on the heels of revelations last month that a Collin County deputy constable was working as a snitch for Los Zetas. Last year authorities claimed to have arrested Los Zetas' Dallas-area cell leader and more than 30 others affiliated with the Gulf Cartel, but obviously that didn't slow down the organization, which continued to ship up to 600 kilograms of blow per week from Laredo to Dallas before and after last year's arrests.

Despite the massive amounts of dope involved, the federal prosecutor doesn't appear sanguine about the effectiveness of making these cases:

Jose Angel Moreno, the Laredo federal prosecutor on the case, said it's unclear whether cases like this make a big dent in drug trafficking.

"Everyone is replaceable in these organizations," he said. "We keep chasing them."

Mexican drug gangs hiring teen assassins in Texas

While I've been focused on the Texas Legislature I've paid less attention than usual to trafficking-related violence at the Mexican border, but stories from both sides of the Rio Grande knocked me out of my reverie this week to remind me that gang wars over drug routes aren't just Mexico's problem anymore.

The Houston Chronicle has a story this morning ("Drug cartel hires Texas teens as border hitmen," April 16) about the Gulf Cartel's notorious Los Zetas - a group of US-trained special forces troops who defected from the Mexican military to work for the Gulf Cartel - hiring Texas teenagers as assassins in their war with the Sinaloa gang led by Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman. The kids are known to law enforcement as Zetillas, or little Zetas. (See an overview here of who's who in the cartel wars.) Describing allegations against one such youth, reports the Chronicle:

In all, [Gabriel] Cardona, who is now 20, was charged with killing five people in the span of 10 months, including Garcia, Lopez and the Resendezes. So far, he's pleaded guilty to two murder charges and faces three more.

The Chronicle story implies potential wrongdoing on the part of a justice of the peace who reduced bail for Cardona and an accomplice, but falls short of alleging outright corruption:

The Chronicle investigation also revealed a pattern of bail reductions by a Webb County justice of the peace, Hector Liendo, on behalf of Cardona and an alleged accomplice, a young man named Jesse Gonzalez III, who is charged with three murders — two allegedly committed while he was out on bail. Gonzalez, who spent 11 days in jail on a murder charge before bonding out, remains a fugitive.

Whether that "pattern" stemmed from payoffs or rational judicial decisions wasn't confirmed either way by the story, but certainly in Mexico the practice of buying judges (and police, and prosecutors), not to mention widespread corruption on the US side of the border, raises the question of whether that's what's happening here. It IS odd - you don't often hear of anyone granting bail in Texas on capital murder charges. Even odder, or more accurately, scarier:

The profile of the Zetillas in Laredo has startled U.S. law enforcement authorities. They're American kids, born on the north side of the Rio Grande. They range in age from 17 to 24.

At least one, Rosalio Reta Jr., a 17-year-old Houston native, was trained at a Gulf Cartel camp in Mexico, law enforcement sources said. At an age when other kids learn how to tie sailor's knots at Boy Scout camps, he learned how to toss explosives.

Law enforcement sources said Cardona and his accomplices present some of the clearest evidence yet that Mexican drug gangs are recruiting and training U.S.-born hitmen to kill on the north side of the Rio Grande, representing a brutal escalation of drug-related border violence.

These revelations put a new face on the drug war at the Mexican border - an American one, meaning the problem can't just be deported back to Mexico and forgotten. American policies ignored or contributed for decades to drug-related violence in Colombia, Central America, then Mexico, and now the chickens are coming home to roost in our own backyard. If Mexican drug gangs are hiring assassins and manipulating judges within US borders, somehow I don't think labeling them Communists or arming death squads to exterminate them is going to work this time.

Indeed, it's probable that Texas law enforcement is the least of Los Zetas' worries. In Veracruz City where Kathy and I visited last summer, AP reports that a corpse was recently found wrapped in plastic bags, apparently a victim of cartel violence.

Next to the body was a note signed by Nueva Gente, purportedly a drug gang, threatening the Zetas, a gang of enforcers for the Gulf Cartel.

"Anybody who supports the Zetas will show up like this idiot," the note said and mentioned several names of people the gang would "talk to."

As President Calderon cracks down, violence in Mexico will almost inevitably escalate. Meanwhile all this is happening at a time when Governor Perry's multi-million dollar border surge isn't communicating with Texas mainline drug intelligence operations, leaving law enforcement working at cross purposes while the drug gangs carry out their dirty little war. One thing's for sure, with the arrival of the Zetillas in Texas, the border violence that's haunted Nuevo Laredo and the Mexican side of the river can no longer be counted on to stop at the water's edge.

RELATED: A Gulf Cartel bigwig was captured in Reynosa, reports Beyond the Border blog, a whopping 112 alleged corrupt police officers have been arrested in the state of Nuevo Leon, and a gun battle erupts between rival immigrant smuggling groups in Houston.

Operation Linebacker targeting immigrants, not crooks

I have to say, I've suspected as much:

Via Capitol Annex I ran across this excellent El Paso Times investigative report by Brandi Grissom. She crunched the data and found "border sheriffs are using federal dollars meant to fight drugs and violent crime to enforce federal immigration laws." For every one arrest made, she found, sheriffs' departments receiving Operation Linebacker funds reported seven suspected illegal immigrants to the US Border Patrol.

Great reporting job, Ms. Grissom. Operation Linebacker is the name of Governor Perry's election-year block grant program giving money to 16 local sheriffs departments along the Texas-Mexico border. I've actually been hoping someone would do this analysis; it just took a reporter willing to file some open records requests and do a bunch of grunt work. I'd encourage anyone interested in the subject to read the whole thing.

I've argued that those federal grant funds or any new border enforcement money should go first toward investigating police corruption before expanding patrols through short-term overtime. All the extra patrols in the world don't help if the supervisor directs them away from the drug loads. During the gubernatorial campaign it was revealed that claimed reductions in border crime were mostly statistical hoakum.

Aiming local law enforcement funds at immigrants instead of drug smuggling outfits at the border makes little sense - IMO it was an example of bad, hopefully tranistory election-year policy that the Governor won't continue ad infinitum. These data show the sheriffs' current use of Operation Linebacker funds is focusing very little on crime and mostly on immigrants. Grissom's analysis gives the Governor and the Legislature a fine excuse to shift grant money and other new border security fundstoward tracking down corruption and targeting drug cartels.

UPDATE: Via South Texas Chisme, the Laredo Morning Times followed up:

The Webb County Sheriff’s Department captured more than 700 undocumented immigrants and made 18 drug arrests in the first six months of Operation Linebacker, a state and federally funded program intended to bolster security and combat drug activity, violence and terrorism along the Texas-Mexico border.“We have 18 drug arrests and 700-something illegal immigrants?” said an incredulous County Judge Louis Bruni after hearing about the report.

BLOGVERSATION: Infamy or Praise offers thoughts on the Times analysis. So does Borderland Observer. Rio Maginot decries the dropoff in church attendance caused by the tightened border.

Drug enforcement broken down on border

Drug enfrorcement on the Texas-Mexico border has by all appearances utterly broken down. From one end of the Rio Grande to the other US cops frequently assist the smugglers rather than thwarting them - not most cops, by any measure, but enough to utterly stymie good faith efforts by the rest of them.

The morning papers bring a few additional tidbits about the latest example of Texas law enforcement complicity with Mexican drug cartels that Grits discussed yesterday: the just-arrested deputy director of the Laredo Multi-Agency Narcotics Task Force, Julio Lopez. Federal investigators say he was moonlighting escorting drug runners through Zapata County, even storing their drugs for them and doling out confidential police data. (See the DoJ press release.)

Before joining the task force, Lopez worked as an investigator for his brother Joe, who is the current Zapata County Attorney. Joe Lopez narrowly won a Democratic primary in March to become a district judge. Reports the Houston Chronicle:

Lopez is the brother of former Zapata County Attorney Joe Lopez, who recently won the Democratic nomination as judge of the 49th State District Court in Laredo. The judge could not be reached by phone at his office late Wednesday.

Julio Lopez, a former investigator for the Zapata county attorney's office, was hired by the Laredo Multi-Agency Narcotics Taskforce in January 2005, Perales-Garcia said.

Sounds to me like the feds ought to be extending their investigation to his former employer - how likely does it seem that this was the first time in a 20 year career this officer stepped over the line? If not, could the County Attorney really know nothing about extreme misconduct by his brother and employee in such a small agency? If I'm a federal anti-corruption investigator, it's sure worth a look. My advice: Follow the money.

I have to admit, it's a wonder to me how this task force is still going in the first place - I thought they'd lost their funding. The SA Express News reports that the task force had been "reinventing' itself recently after the money dried up:

The news came as the Laredo Multi-Agency Narcotics Task Force, administered by the Webb County district attorney's office, was reinventing itself.

In a reallocation of federal grants, Gov. Rick Perry ended funding for the task forces, instead sending that money to new law enforcement groups such as the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition.

In response, the drug task force is in the middle of changing names and missions — adding terrorism and violence to its list of duties — in an effort to receive funding from other sources, said Pete Garza, first assistant district attorney for Webb County.

Well, this oughtta look good on that next grant application, don't you think? I wonder what funding streams they were hoping to tap into? Whatever the source, this can't help.

I've argued for years these multi-agency task forces are structurally flawed - they're federally funded, state managed, locally staffed and doomed to fail. The lack of oversight that lets folks like Julio Lopez and Tom Coleman run amok is built right into the system - the problem isn't just in Texas, nor was this the first time this task force has been in the news over improprieties. The same bunch a few years back got in trouble for paying officers unwarranted overtime, reported the Express News:

This was not the first time the Laredo Multi-Agency Narcotics Task Force has been scrutinized.

In 2001 the Laredo Police Department investigated allegations that task force members were being paid for overtime not worked.

I guess if the government won't pay cops to do nothing, smugglers always will. (How will a wall stop that?) I suppose I'd rather have taxpayers pay for this fellow to do nothing than have him on organized crime's payroll, but can those be our only options? To hear Governor Perry tell it, all we need to secure the border is more, more, more money spent on the same failed strategies. I don't buy it and this example shows why - one corrupt cop can trump dozens of honest ones. You could raise taxes every day from here to December and never hire enough officers to solve that dilemma.

Just as the reason for Mexican immigration is US companies' high demand for labor, the bottom line cause of drug smuggling is US demand for drugs - it may just be impossible to stop illegal border crossings when there's that much money to be made.

It's easy to look at Texas' border woes and despair, but real solutions can't just focus there - at the end of the day, getting control of the border must involve reducing US drug demand, targeted investments that spur job growth in Mexico and Latin America (to provide alternate income sources for workers), and regulated, legal immigration sufficient to meet US labor demands. Even then you can't stop a crook from bribing a cop, if both are willing. I don't know how you get there, but what we're doing now isn't working.