Ping
Baker to release internal Blinco's investigation report
By Ray Gronberg, The Herald-Sun
September 8, 2006 9:16 pm
DURHAM -- Elected officials have given City Manager Patrick Baker the green light to discuss the still-pending results of an internal-affairs investigation into the conduct earlier this summer of six off-duty Durham Police Department officers outside a Raleigh sports bar.
The unanimous City Council vote, taken Thursday, waives the usual personnel-privacy restraints imposed by state law and allows Baker to release information on any disciplinary action taken against the officers, including the reasons for those actions.
Baker said he expects to release the information next week.
Council members agreed that the move would help "maintain public confidence in the administration of city services," a phrase that mirrors the provision of state law that allows them to formally waive confidentiality in personnel matters when they and the manager deem it necessary.
The six officers are tied to an incident that occurred July 20 outside Blinco's Sports Restaurant and Bar, 6711 Glenwood Ave., Raleigh. A Blinco's cook has alleged that several men surrounded and assaulted him after an exchange of racial slurs.
The cook is black, and most of the current or former Police Department officers linked to the case are white.
Raleigh police have filed misdemeanor assault charges against two officers, Gary P. Lee, 38, and Scott C. Tanner, 33. They are scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 25. The other officers still on the Police Department payroll could face disciplinary action once administrators finish reviewing the findings of an Internal Affairs Unit investigation.
Thursday's council vote occurred at Baker's request and came two days after the manager said he was convinced that the circumstances surrounding the case merited disclosure of the investigation's results.
In addition to the alleged racial epithets -- the cook has said one of his assailants called him the N-word and "boy" -- the case has drawn notoriety because two of the officers caught up in it, Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and Officer Richard Clayton, are working on the Duke lacrosse rape case.
The other two officers whose disciplinary records were affected by Thursday's decision are James Griffin and Daniel Gomez.
Gomez, 35, is a former Durham Police Department officer who turned in his resignation July 19 and left the city payroll on Sept. 1.
The appearance of his name on Thursday's disclosure resolution cleared up the last mystery surrounding the identity of the men involved in the case.
It has been known for a while that seven current or former Durham officers were present that night, and that they were there to attend a going-away party for an officer who was leaving the department.
The remaining member of the group, James Kennedy, is a former motorcycle officer who left the department late last year. His identify and tie to the case was disclosed to The Herald-Sun in late July by his attorney.
URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-768137.html
Official explains bond foul-ups
By Ray Gronberg, The Herald-Sun
September 8, 2006 10:11 pm
DURHAM -- Severe understaffing and a balky computer system are two of the big reasons that account for the mistakes Durham magistrates sometimes make in setting bond for criminal defendants, the county's chief magistrate and his subordinates say.
Addressing members of the Durham Crime Cabinet Friday, Chief Magistrate Chet Dobies acknowledged that one of his magistrates erred recently in setting a $10,000 bond for a murder suspect who had been re-arrested on a charge of discharging a weapon into an occupied dwelling.
But Dobies said mistakes happen in part because Durham County has only 11 criminal and two civil magistrates to serve its 243,000 residents -- far fewer, proportionately, than the six counties that received permission and funding from the General Assembly this summer to hire additional magistrates.
"I apologize for that one error we committed," Dobies told the Crime Cabinet, which includes an array of elected officials, administrators and community activists. "We've committed a whole lot of other errors that nobody has paid attention to, but not intentionally or through stupidity. We just get overloaded. We deal with [cases involving] everything from mental illness to two cousins fighting on a couch over the television."
Another magistrate, Eric Van Vleet, echoed Dobies' comments on workload, noting that on one day recently he had to deal with 30 criminal defendants, 18 bail bondsmen, four or five mental-health commitment cases and two applications for search warrants.
Van Vleet said that out of all that, in only one case did a law-enforcement officer come to the magistrate's office with information to share about a defendant's prior criminal history. He added that while magistrates do have access to a computer network that in theory should allow them to conduct their own background checks, in practice the system is prone to breaking down.
The system's software is badly outdated, and its administrators frequently take it offline for maintenance on weekends, the peak work time for Durham's magistrates, Van Vleet said.
Dobies, Van Vleet and two other magistrates attended Friday's Crime Cabinet meeting to answer questions about bond policies that arose in the wake of published reports that three accused killers had been let out of jail on relatively low bonds after being arrested on new charges.
Two of the men, Anthony Liven Copeland and Roy Oswald Bodden, are back in jail and are each now being held in lieu of $1 million bonds.
But the third, Breon Jerrard Beatty, is free after posting $10,000 bond on the firing-into-a-dwelling charge.
Dobies said that while the other two men were given bonds that were more than in line with the policies established by Durham's chief judges, Beatty's bond, set by Van Vleet, was an error. Beatty should have received at least a $30,000 bond under local policy, Dobies said.
Beatty, an alleged member of the Folk Nation youth gang, is accused of killing Antonio Demetrius Dent on Jan. 11, 2005, after a quarrel between two groups of teenagers.
News of the three releases, temporary though two of them were, provoked complaints from activists and elected officials who said the incidents show that the court system is doing a poor job of dealing with repeat criminals.
One Crime Cabinet member, Newman Aguiar, said the Durham Roundtable Committee on Crime has been monitoring cases involving about 300 felons. Its tracking revealed that 41 were arrested on fresh charges, with 22 of those arrested and released more than five times and 10 arrested and released more than eight times.
"We're not going to reduce crime if our worst offenders are getting back out on the street and with impunity committing new crimes," Aguiar said. "Clearly, the message sent [to them] is that there's no accountability."
Aguiar and cabinet members, however, agreed with Dobies that something has to be done about staffing in the magistrate's office and that they should prepare an aid request for the 2007 session of the General Assembly.
Durham County this year won a long campaign for money to hire an additional district judge, but it missed out when the General Assembly gave Carteret, Greene, Alamance, Robeson, Montgomery and Gaston counties permission to add magistrates.
Durham has one magistrate for every 18,660 residents. All six of the counties that got additional magistrates from the General Assembly this year had better ratios, even before the vote. The high county, Alamance, now has one magistrate for every 11,711 residents. The low county, Greene, has one for every 4,005 residents.
Dobies and cabinet members agreed that the problem is political. "Cumberland County has 19 magistrates," Dobies said. "Why do they need 19 to do what we do with 13?"
"They have Tony Rand," answered cabinet member Matt Yarbrough, referring to the majority leader of the N.C. Senate, who represents Cumberland County in that chamber.
A Durham legislator interviewed after the meeting, however, said there's no mystery about the discrepancy and that the onus is on local officials to take the first steps to begin fixing it.
"The sooner the local courts and elected officials draw this to our attention, the sooner we can rectify the issue, simple as that," said state Rep. Paul Luebke, D-Durham. "The General Assembly is like any other elected body: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. When we in the Durham delegation learn from our local elected officials that they're concerned magistrate staffing, we can go to work."
URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-768151.html
http://forums.go.com/abclocal/WTVD/thread?threadID=129498
FROM CASH - Update on Gottlieb Ticket Controversy
Author: cashmichaels
reply
GREETINGS:
I see PJ has been keeping all of you busy in my absence. I've been reading it all - very interesting, verrry interesting.
Anyway, I'm not posting to start trouble, though the temptation to do so is quite commanding.
Instead I wanted to give all of you an exclusive...YES YOU...an exclusive update to a story that a poster, Leon, originally tipped me to and I followed up on (thanks Leon ). I know that Liestoppers or Durham-in-Wonderland made mention of it first (which I was unaware of when I started looking into the matter), but I believe I put some meat on the bone with my latest story about ethical questions in the Duke case (www.wilmingtonjournal.com) concerning Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and a traffic accident he had in Raleigh in March 2005, and can now put even more meat, EXCLUSIVELY JUST FOR YOU, now.
Why am I doing this? Because I got the heads up today that the News & Observer is now on the story too after my piece was published Thursday. So since I can't beat their new angle in my paper before next Thursday, I'll beat them here.
(snip)