| Viewing Single Post From: Shake up in Durham Police attorneys! | |
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| Tony Soprano | Jun 18 2008, 01:32 AM |
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. From Ray Gronberg / Herald-Sun... Toni Smith has chest deep in the Duke case and was in critical meetings pretty damn early in the case Baker plans transfer for 2 city lawyers By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun gronberg@heraldsun.com Jun 18, 2008 DURHAM -- City Manager Patrick Baker plans to reassign two lawyers who work in the Durham Police Department to the city attorney's office. The two police attorneys, Toni Smith and Arnetta Herring, now report to Police Chief Jose Lopez and are on the payroll to give legal advice to the chief and the department's officers and detectives. The impending move likely will mean they'll report to Baker instead, after City Manager-designate Tom Bonfield arrives later this summer and Baker takes over as city attorney. Baker said he would talk to Bonfield about the change before completing it. "I just want him to understand what we're doing," Baker said. "If he has concerns about it, we can address it with the council and make changes if need be." But the groundwork for the move is in place because the city's fiscal 2008-09 budget will shift the money allotted for Smith and Herring's salaries from the Police Department to the city attorney's office. Documents show that Mayor Bill Bell and City Councilman Farad Ali questioned the rationale for the move as council members were reviewing Baker's budget proposal. Baker answered that the police attorneys "need to report independent of the Police Department and [city manager's] administration," according to a "flagged item list" from the budget review. The city attorney in Durham and most other North Carolina towns works directly for the elected council, not the city manager. That means the manager has no hiring and firing authority over the attorney and his or her staff. Neither the transfer nor the announced rationale for it are unprecedented in North Carolina. Winston-Salem City Manager Lee Garrity ordered a similar shuffle in his city's organization last year in response to the findings of a report on the Winston-Salem Police Department's botched handling of the Darryl Hunt/Deborah Sykes murder case. Hunt spent almost 20 years in state prison after being falsely accused and eventually convicted of raping and killing Sykes, a newspaper copy editor. Eventually, DNA tests exonerated him and pointed to the guilt of another man. Winston-Salem officials have essentially conceded that a detective's inexperience and the poor supervision he received from his bosses contributed to Hunt's conviction. The supervisory reforms Garrity ordered last year included the reassignment of the Winston-Salem police force's lawyers, a move he said on Tuesday helped eliminate any "conflict about who their client is." But observers noted Tuesday that Durham's situation differs from Winston-Salem's. Baker's decision to alter the Durham police attorneys' chain of command comes as city officials try to fight off a trio of federal civil-rights lawsuits stemming from the Duke lacrosse case. Baker is a defendant in all three lawsuits. Smith was also a behind-the-scenes player in the early stages of the Durham police's spring 2006 investigation of what proved to be a stripper's false charges of rape. The former Police Department sergeant who supervised the lacrosse investigation, Mark Gottlieb, said in his case notes that Smith advised detectives to follow orders coming from former District Attorney Mike Nifong's office. Smith also attended at least one key meeting with the detectives, Baker and former Police Chief Steve Chalmers to discuss the investigation's progress. A local lawyer and frequent critic of the Police Department, Alex Charns, said attorneys for the Duke lacrosse players now suing the city are likely to probe the rationale for the change if the city fails to get the lawsuits dismissed. Charns said there were problems under other Durham city managers and police chiefs because there "was a perception the police attorney or the police attorneys were the personal attorneys of the police chief." That belief "led to officers and staff at the Police Department not necessarily trusting the police attorney when there was discord or problems within the department," he said. Altering the chain of command for the police attorneys could eliminate that worry, but given the current lawsuits it also could "lead to perceptions that there's a movement to get all the ducks in a row," Charns said. Charns added that he's reserving judgment. "In Durham, changes that seem like they'd be a step forward don't always work that way in practice," he said. "I hope it improves things over at the department, but after practicing here for 25 years and litigating with the city, I'll wait and see." Asked about the lacrosse tie-in, Baker said "the people that think that are going to think it anyway" and added that officials started debating the merits of the change during former City Manager Lamont Ewell's administration. Ewell favored assigning the police lawyers to the city attorney's office, but former City Attorney Henry Blinder preferred leaving them under the police chief, Baker said. http://heraldsun.southernheadlines.com/durham/4-959881.cfm? |
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| Shake up in Durham Police attorneys! · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
5:47 PM Dec 1
