Those who read this blog well know that the District Attorney (D.A.) is one of the most powerful people in a community. It is the D.A. who can indict, accuse someone of a crime, jail a person, not jail a person, control evidence, seek imprisonment or death, investigate, and set the standard of what will be tolerated and what will not be tolerated in a city. A bad D.A. sends one message and a good D.A. sends another. Here are some examples of what is wrong with where we live and the D.A.'s Office and what I think about it and how I plan to change things.

We recently watch in the news that the El Paso Police have gunned down and killed yet another mentally ill person in his home. This is not an isolated event in El Paso. Furthermore, the Police Department has been sued over and over and over again in recent memory for tragedies that have occurred due to lack of training. Some of these debacles have garnered national and international coverage, i.e. the Montwood police riots (national TV news networks), Mark Bittakis' arrest for laundry soap because the police thought it was cocaine (Associated Press reports), Brandon Moon's 17 year imprisonment for a rape he did not commit (Nationwide periodicles, as well as global, Taipei Times), the farce that was the investigation of Nancy Hollebeke's rape allegations against two cops (front page of the National New York Times section June 4, 2004),etc.--Despite the national shame of all this, in the latest incident, we see yet the same whitewashing pattern of conduct on the part of the local authorities. Chief Wiles has come out and said that his men acted correctly because the deceased used force. Then there is the usual silence from the employers of the cops in question, Mayor Cook and councilmen. Next we hear how District Attorney Jaime Esparza is going to "investigate." We see that his prior "investigations" into police shootings have not resulted in any meaningful changes. It doesn't help Esparza's "objectivity" that he has a signed contract to actually provide "legal services" to the police department and so they are in fact his clients. This DIMS contract has equated into millions of dollars over the years for the D.A. and his staff. Chief Wiles even appears with Esparza at city council to help get him this DIMS money not to mention the fact that they have been seen lunching together at a popular spot around town. So if Wiles says his men acted with honor in the shooting, what do you think Esparza is going to say? And how does any of this help us?

The father of the deceased, LTC Salguero, who has flown to El Paso from Germany, was in the news saying that law enforcement needs to learn how to address the mentally ill. And that he hopes this never happens again. As right on as he is, it is obvious he has no inkling as to what goes on in ths town. Should anyone tell him?

If watching that poor man on TV was not heart wrenching enough, the news then turned to another story. Officer Joseph Garcia, who is part of all things, the Sexual Assault Registration Task Force, was on TV talking about a police typo on a sex offender's address on the rolls. Instead of 920... it was 290... Who is Joseph Garcia? He is one of two Police Officers my client Nancy Hollebeke accused of sexually assaulting her while he was on duty. The other Officer was Albert Machorro, Jr. whose father did and does work at the D.A.'s office as an "investigator." The police department directed by Esparza's top dog Karen LaRose "investigated" the two officers. Somehow Garcia's and Machorro's clothing was not properly collected, fingernail scrapings were not taken, close up photos were not done of them, etc. The D.A. and the Police Department never properly or honestly investigated these officers for the sexual assault and they were never prosecuted for it. However, DA Esparza did throw Ms. Hollebeke in jail for having the temerity to report two officers for rape. (When DA Esparza and the COPS investigate cops the cops end up 911 heroes). However, I took the officers to a federal civil rights jury trial where the jury deliberated for more than 8 hours on the issue of rape even with a DA led investigation saying they were innocent. At one point the jury was hung and had to be given special instructions by the judge to either come to a decision or have to come back on Monday. It was Friday evening. The jury came back with no liability. It should be known that Officer Garcia had a very bad memory on the stand when it came to certain remarkable and damning moments of the night in question. Coincadentally, Officer Machorro had the same bad memory regarding the same moments. D.A. Esparza was subpoenaed to come to court to answer for his part in his so called "investigation" but he told the judge he couldn't make it because he was busy and judge Hudspeth told him that was quite alright and not to worry about the subpoenae. Now don't you try this yourself at home. It will have life altering consequences for you that will reach into the futures of your children. It is hard to pay for college tuitions from jail or with a criminal contempt conviction on your record.-- Anyway, you can just imagine what the tenor of that trial was like.

Now Officer Garcia is the sexual assault regsitration expert making TV appearances. Oh the irony of it all. And we have D.A. Esparza to thank for all of these things we see on TV because without his example and actions we would have none of it.

As D.A., I will expect proper training from law enforcement in all circumstances especially when discharging a weapon or making an arrest. It will also be my policy to ask an outide agency to investigate another law enforcement agency. For example, if someone accused police officers of rape, I will ask the Sheriff to investigate and vice versa. If there is nothing to hide, outside scrutiny should be welcomed. With an honest D.A., improper shootings of the citizenry will most likely be eliminated because those people will not continue on the force because the D.A. will not tolerate it. The good example starts from the top.

Every day we see examples of the mentally ill being misunderstood and therefore mishandled by law enforcement and then by the District Attorney's Office. One of the mainstays of my platform is that when elected to office, I will take this problem by the horns, address it and put safeguards for the community and the mentally ill into place.

What happens now and very often indeed, is that if there is a mentally ill person in a family and the family needs help controlling the individual there is really no one to call. If the family calls the authorities thinking they are going to get someone trained to deal with the mentally ill, they are woefully wrong. The El Paso police are infamous for shooting and killing the mentally ill. If the individual is not gunned down in his home or front yard he is more often than not taken into custody and charged with a garden variety of crimes, i.e. assault, criminal trespass, etc. The individual spends days, even months, in jail and if there is family, they try to get him out, sorry they ever called for help.

The person is then formally charged by the district attorney's office and it is now time to go to court. The family and the defense attorney explain to the assistant DA that the person is mentally ill and DID NOT POSSESS the requisite intelligence to knowingly or intentionally do anything. You show them doctors' orders, medical history, prescriptions for psychotropic drugs, and they don't care and amazingly they are not trained to understand the legal implications of mental illness on their case and even if they do understand, they are not going to get into trouble with their supervisors by doing the right thing and dismissing the case. They tell you to file your motions for a competency trial... and here we go on the merry go round.

You file your motion for a competency trial and by that time the individual has been in jail and on his meds long enough to understand his surroundings to pass a competency exam. The jury (that would be you) is hauled in and the doctor testifies as to how competent the person is to stand trial. The jury finds the defendant competent and here we go to the actual trial.

Another month or so passes and the individual is still in jail. Here comes the jury again, (that would be you) taken from jobs and out of their homes, and well what do you know. The DA's office dismisses the case because they know they can't win because the person was not on his meds when he got hauled into jail and cannot therefore be held accountable before the law and well, pluss, it's a stupid case and the family wants him home anyway. Here is your dismissal and thank you very much for doing business with us. They then thank you the jurors for coming down and explain to you what great Americans you are but that your services are no longer needed because "the case has been settled."

As District Attorney, I will set up a comprehensive special mental health unit staffed with professionals in the field including lawyers who have dual degrees to review just such cases, to avoid just such scenarios, to listen to what the defense attorney has and to listen to the family. We need to discern in the beginning of a case whether the individual had a criminal episode or a mental health episode and use our limited resources wisely. Why spend money housing someone in jail and bringing in hudreds of jurors when we can work with the County Attorney's office, which has a mental commitment unit (they won't take people with pending charges) to get them into a hospital which is where they belong and on meds?

El Pasoans can no longer afford to ignore this huge problem. With a poorly trained police force and no elected representatives addressing this issue and a sitting district attorney who is business as usual while the jail swells (and the DA himself coming out publicly asking the Sheriff to admit even more people, those who have not been seen by a magistrate...DIMS) with the mentally ill and the jurors are leaving behind work to come listen to a case that will in the end be dismissed because there was no crime, something has got to give.

This is not that difficult to try and fix. However, the problem requires an elected official who admits there is a problem (instead of hiding the mentally ill and chaining them to a radiator in the attic as does my opponent, to the terrible detriment of this community), understands the problem, and hires the right people to deal with it and uses available resources to do so.

Let there be no mistake about it. DIMS costs the taxpayers big bucks and is totally unnecessary. Every year Esparza is at two, the City and the County, taxing entities asking for tax dollars to pay his employees to do what they are already hired to do. If one looks at the different DIMS contracts over the years, the City has been asked to pay $300,000 and up every year since 1995. After Esparza gets his money at the City, he then scurries over to the County to ask for hundreds of thousands of more, pointing out that the City gave him money and since the City gave him money so should they.

Esparza always uses the same drone arguments to get our money. He says that DIMS is, yes, believe it or not, money saving! Now Esparza has no reports or accountant sheets to back up this assertion, but never mind that. Afterall, which city representative or county commissioner is even going to ask? When asked in deposition for financials proving that DIMS saves money, Esparza can produce none. But he figures the voting public will never find out about what goes on in these depositions and about all of the wild things he says in them.

Here is what Esparza does not want you to know. The City has always paid for magistrates to be available around the clock. There is always one down at the municipal court house at night, plus there are various sprinkled throughout the city. These magistrates are for the use of all law enforcement making arrests, Sheriff's office, DPS, Socorro PD, Anthony PD, EPPD, etc. Now Esparza is telling the community we will have to pay for magistrates as though this were a new cost and as though we would not have to if we continue with DIMS. We should ask him how we can do away with magistrates when only EPPD pays for the privilege of bypassing them by using DIMS. Where will the other law enforcement agencies go? And of course that would be assuming we are ready to do away with judges in this community like he wants us to do. Esparza says DIMS will save us the cost of the magistrate, yet another falsehood. Since EPPD is one of the only agencies to use DIMS, the magistrates are there no matter what. Secondly, the law requires magistrates. The law does not require DIMS attorneys. So who is costing us money?

But since DIMS gives Esparza the power to pass out "Who Goes to Jail Cards" and "Who Does Not Go to Jail Cards," he'll tell you whatever it takes to keep that power. Esparza is not called Pinnochio for nothing.

In the United States we have a long standing concept that is at the core of our democracy called the "Separation of Powers" doctrine. This stands for the notion that there are different branches of government for a reason. Each branch has a separate and distinct function not to be ruled over or controlled by another branch. The branches are to exist separately and equally and often in conflict with each other. Out of the tension of this conflict, wise and measured government is so supposed to spring forth.

For example, the US Congress and the Office of the President are two separate branches of government. For many years now because the President came from the same party as the majority of the members of the Congress, the Congress, out of party loyalty to the President, ceded many of its powers to the President. Instead of harshly scrutinizing the requests of the President, the Congress for years has given the President almost everything he has wanted. Along the way, the Congress has lost much of its power. This has not been a good thing for us, the People. Now we see the Congress, which has changed majority parties, challenge the President. The President is challenging the Congress back. This is healthy for our democracy and the fight is on.

On a local level, we have had a severe weakening of our democracy over the past twelve years due to an alternate legal system Jaime Esparza set up called DIMS. This program has resulted in a very dangerous blurring of the lines between two arms of government, that of the Prosecutor and that of the police, who have different roles, mandates and functions. The job of a prosecutor is normally to:

-review a case and see if a crime has been committed;
-if a crime has been committed, make sure that the right person is in fact the one being charged;
-make sure that the law has been followed (i.e. was the search properly conducted pursuant to search warrant or consent)
-take the case to court.

The El Paso Police have a job different from a prosecutor. Their job is to:
-investigate crimes;
-arrest people who violate the law, especially when they witness the violation;
-follow the law when making an arrest;
-write their report documenting the facts supporting the arrest;
-submit the documents to the Prosecutor for possible prosecution;
-be ready to testify if needed;
-go back out on the street and do the job all over again.

Although the police and the prosecutor work together on a certain level they are never to become one and the same. They are to be independent in making their respective decisions, to arrest or not, to prosecute or not.

Under his alternate legal system DIMS, Esparza was able to convince a bunch of people at the City to give him a whole lot of money (every year it goes up) to allow him to sit at their police station and tell the police to arrest or not arrest. Esparza convinced the Police to give him power that theretofore had been theirs.

Now the Police have to get Esparza's permission to arrest even when they witness the crime themselves. The police also have to submit their reports to the Asst. DA on DIMS duty for his review and approval. The DIMS attorney can tell the officer to make changes to the reports. As a result, the police, who for decades knew how to do their own reports, now have to hand them over to people who do not have the same function as they do, for approval.--Keep in mind that the police are subject to testifying in court about their reports. Through DIMS, Esparza has subjected his lawyers to coming to court along with the officers to testify to their participation in the report writing and arresting decision. Who actually did what, is now the question? Did the cops write this line or did the lawyer? Interestingly enough, Esparza wants the lawyers treated differently from the cops even though they are now doing much of the same work as the cops on the report end. But what is good for the goose is good for the gander...

Before the nightmare of DIMS, if the Police saw a crime they made the arrest and took it to an independent judge for review, not the prosecutor who has different goals when reviewing a case (i.e. can he win at trial which is a much higher burden of proof than just the probable cause burden necessary to make an arrest and get someone off the streets). Esparza has said publicly that his DIMS attorneys screen cases for trial. So if the cops arrest an individual for DWI because he committed some traffic infraction, smelled of alcohol, failed field sobriety tests, etc., they have proper probable cause even if at the station the arrestee blows under the legal limit. The cops are doing their job properly to remove this person, who is a potential danger, off the streets. Whether or not the case can be won at trial is another issue. When the above facts, which are from a real DWI case, were presented to the DIMS attorney who recognized that the individual was a newspaper reporter (who for now will remain unnamed) and the DIMS attorney told the cop to cut the defendant loose, what happened to the function of the policeman and the probable cause burden for arrest? A guy who the cops had in cuffs for being legally intoxicated is back out on the street driving home alongside your kids.

DPS, Sheriff's Office, Socorro PD, etc. do not use DIMS. They have declined to do so. It apears they want to keep their power and their role separate and not make the same mistake as the El Paso Police Department has.

The rank and file police do NOT like DIMS. They consider it a waste of their time. They want to make their arrests and take the case to a judge and get back out on the streets and certainly not argue with an attorney.

The lines between the police and the D.A.'s office have become too blurred. The separation which once existed between them, has been removed. My opponent has left El Paso in a terrible mess but he really doesn't care because the power is being concentrated in him instead of being dispersed as democracy requires. My opponent also appears to be blissfully oblivious to the fact that many of our families are here because they fled from leaders just like him in Latin America and Germany and Russia, some undersized dictator on a balcony, surrounded by lackies, telling us how we just need to keep writing the checks and paying him everlasting homage.

I will address this issue more and give the lawyers' point of view on the abuses of DIMS, one that was aptly pointed out by a poster on this site named XADA. The lawyers' complaints about DIMS are the same as the cops interestingly enough, lack of independence, too much intereference, etc. Stay tuned.

Keep in mind while reading this blog that according to log rolls, the El Paso Times is one of the biggest users/readers of my blog.--David Crowder at the El Paso Times has written two articles in a row about how Former El Paso Mayor Joe Wardy who was recenty detained at the airport by El Paso police for having a loaded gun in his carry on (SEE BLOGS FROM LAST WEEEK) is resigning from his over $200,000 a year job as head of the ReadyOne Company. Crowder goes on in the articles to say that the FBI is still investigating the gun issue. Wardy has never been arrested.

What is salient for the public to know is that it is against STATE law to have a gun at the secured area at the airport and it is my opponent who prosecutes state law violations, not the feds. My opponent has up to now declined to prosecute Mr. Wardy for an offense for which he has prosecuted countless other El Pasoans. David Crowder has yet to report this side of the story to you. He keeps referring to the feds who usually have nothing to do with these airport cases.

What David Crowder is also ignoring is that both the Feds and the state authorities have concurrent jurisdiction over the Joe Wardy case. This means that both governments can prosecute him at the same time for the same offense. I have written several blogs on this matter and provided documentation, (including a state indictment of an El Pasoan who was prosecuted by Esparza for having a gun at that airport) to show that this also a state violation. Mr. Crowder has written that Wardy was detained at the airport by the El Paso Police. You would think that that fact would jog Crowder into asking why the police were involved if it were just a federal matter. You would think he would ask why the police even have a station at the airport if the airport is only under federal jurisdiction and why they arrest people every day for having dope, guns, knives etc. at the airport. You would think Crowder would ask who at the police department and the DA's office decided to wash their hands of Wardy's case and kick it to the feds (who have yet to arrest any of the four people who have been lucky enough to be sent their way). You would think Crowder would ask for the names of those lucky three. You would think Crowder would ask my opponent why he prosecuted Mr. Mathew Neessen for possessing a gun at that airport and not his friend Joe Wardy who allegedly committed the exact same crime. You would think Crowder would do a little investigating and write about how Wardy, as mayor, approved giving Esparza approximately $700,000 of city tax money for his DIMS program, which in turn gives Esparza the power to decide who gets arrested and who does not (police have to clear arresting decisions with the DA under DIMS--Nice rigged little system) Nice investment Wardy made with our money? How come Dallas Cowboy Coach Barry Switzer was prosecuted by the Dallas DA for the exact same crime. Answer: No DIMS in Dallas. NO Esparza in Dallas. Probing press in Dallas.

Also keep in mind that I have for days put this information up here for all to read and to educate themselves. You would think that if Mr. Crowder were going to write on a legal issue he would properly inform himself so as to properly inform the public. Crowder has yet to talk about the very simple state law that makes firearms at the airport illegal. Furthermore, the El Paso Times even did an article on a client of mine who got arrested for having a knife in his backpack at the airport a couple of years ago and who was arrested and prosecuted by Esparza for that felony offense. Why does Crowder act like he doesn't even read his own paper?

What is more interesting is that according to the log rolls, the El Paso Times is one of the biggest users/readers of my blogs. Why do they ignore the information here to the detriment of their own credibility and the public's welfare? What else is interesting is that when I appeared on the David K radio show this Tuesday, there were people who called in who knew that Wardy should have been subjected to arrest and prosecution by Esparza. They knew they sure would have been arrested in the same circumstances. So how is it that Crowder continues to ignore this issue? Readers of this blog should call Crowder and his editors at the Times to ask why they repeatedly fail to inform the public on this issue. Interesting huh?