11/03/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Will Gregg interview show, where I, your host, Scott Horton, interviews Will Gregg.
I interview Will Gregg.
There's no S belongs on there.
Anyway, he's got the eloquence.
I just, you know, have the record button.
Hey, Will, tell me about these corrupt cops in Utah.
I read your blog today, freedominourtime.blogspot.com, freedominourtime.blogspot.com, and I almost couldn't believe my eyeballs when I was reading.
And I read everything you write.
And so that's really saying something.
Go ahead and blow them all away with this thing.
Well, this is a case that defies credulity for anybody who's not dutifully following the antic parade of corruption that is law enforcement in the American Soyuz.
In Utah, as in most other states, there's an organization called the Fraternal Order of Police, which operates in most states like a police union.
There's an FOP here in Idaho.
It doesn't call itself a union, but in Utah, they call themselves a union.
They have got it in for Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, because in spite of the fact that he's a prosecutor, he seems to be postage to the idea that the law applies to everybody equally, including police officers, which is why earlier this year, he made an admirable but unsuccessful attempt to prosecute a former West Valley City narcotics detective by the name of Sean Coley.
I believe it's pronounced Cowley, actually, who a couple of years ago shot and killed Daniel Willard.
She was a 21 or 22 year old woman in the parking lot outside of an apartment complex in West Valley City during a botched drug investigation.
She was suspected of possessing heroin.
No heroin was found in her possession.
She was approached by two men she didn't recognize, and she tried to leave the parking lot because within the couple of days leading up to this incident, she had been attacked at her home by people who were involved in drug trafficking.
She'd gone to Utah, interestingly, from Washington State, in order to seek treatment for her drug addiction.
She had contacted the police a couple of days before the shooting in November 2012, because her home had been broken into, and she was being threatened.
She was approached by these two men who may or may not have been identified as police officers.
They had their guns drawn.
She tried to leave the parking lot, and as she fled, she was shot from behind and to her left by Detective Cowley.
Over the course of a couple of years, an investigation was made into the West Valley City Police Department that, predictably enough, turned up evidence of abundant corruption within its narcotics investigation unit, which has been shut down.
Daniel conducted that investigation, and in the course of doing so, he threw out dozens of cases that had been made on the basis of unreliable evidence or perjury, or in which there was pretty compelling evidence of misconduct by the police officers.
Earlier this year, he ruled that the shooting—actually, it was July of last year, July of 2013, if memory serves—he ruled that the shooting of Daniel Willett was unjustified.
This year, there was a preliminary hearing on manslaughter charges that were filed against Sean Cowley.
This is one of the few times in the history of Utah that a police officer has actually faced the prospect of prosecution for an on-duty killing that was manifestly unnecessary.
The preliminary hearing resulted in the charge being dismissed because, as is the case in most jurisdictions, there's enormous deference granted to police in the exercise of lethal force in circumstances that normal citizens would not be permitted to.
This is particularly interesting because one of the people who intervened on behalf of Detective Cowley is a former federal judge by the name of Paul Cassell, who is a rampaging jihadist and the cause of capital punishment, and somebody who's tried to get the exclusionary rule overturned.
He wants to do away with Miranda, but he insisted that it was appropriate to grant to Officer Cowley something like an enhanced Miranda status through what's called the Garrity guarantee for police officers, in that his special privilege version of Miranda had been violated, supposedly, by the Salt Lake County District Attorney, Sim Gill, and so he managed to persuade a federal judge, actually, forgive me, a district judge in the state of Utah, to dismiss the charges.
While this was going on, the Fraternal Order of Police in Utah were filing bar complaints against Sim Gill and looking for a candidate they could support to run against him.
They found in his office a deputy DA by the name of Nelson, who's a Republican, unlike Gill, who's a Democrat, and he's running against Sim Gill, his boss, in tomorrow's election for the County District Attorney's office.
All this is a necessary backdrop to what happened on October 22nd, when a 72-year-old man by the name of Robert Warren was shot in the face on the front door of his home in West Valley City.
The chief suspect is an identified gang member by the name of Raymond Marquina, and he was aided by three people who are considered to be accomplices, so they were very quickly arrested because they were very well known to the authorities.
The three accomplices were charged, one of them was sent back to prison on a parole violation, so they're all either in custody of the West Valley Police Department, actually, the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, or they're in custody in the prison system there.
But a week after the shooting, Marquina was inexplicably let go, and the reason that was given initially by Sheriff Winder in Salt Lake County and by the West Valley City Police Department was that there was a mistake in the evidence, that they hadn't provided sufficient evidence in order to hold Marquina and have him indicted for the charge of attempted murder and felonious discharge of a weapon.
So, on October 29th, the Fraternal Order of Police issued a press release accusing Sim Gill of being responsible for this mistake that was made by the police in providing the evidence to the prosecutor's office, and claiming that he was covering up his mistake that he made in allowing this would-be murderer to be set free.
But the problem here, first of all, is that in the DA's office, the head of the Violent Crimes Unit is the person who's running against him as the potential DA.
His political rival, in other words, is the guy upon whose death this case would've landed, first of all, because he's the head of the Violent Felony Unit, and he's also an amply decorated veteran prosecutor of street gangs.
He's got a whole wall full of plaudits and awards and plaques that he's received for his service as a gang investigator.
That's the first problem.
He would've actually been routed through the office of the guy that the Fraternal Order of Police is supporting there to replace Sim Gill.
The second problem here, of course, is that the DA, like any other prosecutor, can't simply hold somebody if the evidence is insufficient because of this nasty little provision in the Constitution, frequently ignored but very important, called the Habeas Corpus Guarantee.
If you can't charge a guy with a crime, you have to let him go within a certain limited time frame.
Typically in Utah, it's 48 hours.
In this case, Marquina was held for a week.
But irrespective of the fact that there's no reason to believe that Sim Gill would do something so consummately stupid as to release a veteran gangbanger or would-be murderer on the streets a few days before an election, and the fact that this is something that would've gone through the office of his subordinate political rival, and the fact that the police screwed up, the Fraternal Order of Police managed to capture the news cycle last Thursday and last Friday by putting into the information bloodstream the idea that Sim Gill, who is an inveterate cop-hater, and he had the lack of wisdom and foresight to arrange to be born in India rather than in Utah, that's a very important part of this equation, Scott.
He's being painted as somebody who is a foreign-born usurper who is an inveterate cop-hater because of the misfortune he had of being brought up as a young child in India.
The former head of the Republican Party in Utah, as a matter of fact, actually said that he's not qualified to be the DA because he grew up in India rather than in America, and that means that he's got a negative perception of police on the basis of the way that cops behave in India.
The cops in India, of course, like anyplace else, are instruments of violence, and they're clothed in privilege.
But the cops in Utah, of course, are the primary concern of the public here, and there's a large and understandably growing movement on the part of people who are the families of police victims to seek accountability, and Sim Gyo has been somewhat sympathetic in defiance of his political connections and all reasonable expectations we have for somebody who's part of that cohort.
He's actually been listening to people who've seen their family members beaten or tased or shot or otherwise mistreated by police who are clothed in impunity.
And so because he has made it clear that he's at least receptive to the idea that police must be held accountable through the criminal justice system for abuse of power and for mistreatment of the public, the Fraternal Order of Police is trying to get rid of him.
Now, does this mean that the Fraternal Order of Police and somebody within the West Valley City Police Department conspired to release this criminal or to botch the case, if you will, in order to create a scandal on the eve of the election?
I pose that question to somebody who knows the players very well from decades working within the criminal justice system in Salt Lake City.
His name is Edward Flint.
He's a very well-respected trial attorney who knows everybody in the DA's office.
And there's your cliffhanger.
We'll be right back.
All right.
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All right, guys.
So I'm talking with Will Gregg.
He wrote the book Liberty in Eclipse.
And he wrote he writes the blog Pro Libertate at freedom in our time dot blog spot.
Dot com.
And we're talking about this very important article here.
Let me rewind up to the top killer on the loose.
Did cops botch a case to punish an independent DA?
So cop kills lady for no good reason.
Prosecutor decides he's going to go ahead and look into this and try to prosecute this, but is ended up thwarted by the court.
Then the the other party, the Fraternal Order of Police, sides with the other political party, in this case, the Republicans.
And they start backing this other guy against the DA in the upcoming election.
And then he's directly in the chain of command for this botched arrest and prosecution of a murderer who, as you say, his accomplices, the murderer's accomplices.
And we're not talking about the cop who murdered the lady.
We're talking about a separate murderer.
Would be murder.
Would be murder.
Oh, the old man survived.
I'm sorry.
He's in the hospital right now.
Oh, OK.
I'm sorry.
I had that attempted murder there.
But OK, so the accomplices are in jail, but they let the perp go free.
And apparently it wasn't the DA that let him go free so much as it seems as though possibly his opponent in the Homicide Department deliberately botched the evidence in order to let him go free and then spin it in the media in the days before the election as all the DA's fault when really his fingerprints are all over the thing.
Will Gregg, is that right?
Do I understand?
That's one possibility.
When I talk with my friend Ed Flynn, he's an attorney there in Salt Lake who knows all the principles.
He's of the opinion that Steve Nelson and Steve Nelson is the head of the violent felonies unit there in the Salt Lake County police, rather Salt Lake County DA's office.
Ed Flynn is of the opinion that Mr.
Rogers is a conscientious attorney.
He doesn't believe that he was the one who botched the case.
He believes that.
And let me quote him here.
Either the FOP, that's the Fraternal Order of Police and the West Valley City Police Department botched this case because they are incompetent or they botched it because they're corrupt.
He says that the cops, the Fraternal Order of Police are slimy, corrupt and out to get Gil.
Gil says he can't charge Markina, that's the would-be murderer, the suspect in the shooting, on made up evidence.
The West Valley PD knew what they needed to do.
They didn't do it.
They brought the evidence for the accomplices, but not the would-be murderer.
It makes a bigger headline and a bigger last minute before the election, slimy smear on the DA they've decided is not their puppet.
So from his perspective, as somebody who knows the principles, knows how the system works in Salt Lake County, and he makes it clear that he's not specifically accusing anybody, he's just reading the evidence from the perspective of a trained observer and somebody familiar with how things operate there, that if this was botched, it was almost certainly botched by the West Valley City Police Department, probably with the active connivance of the Fraternal Order of Police and that Rogers, for whatever reason, is not directly implicated in screwing up this case.
And I think that if you take a look at it from the perspective of who benefits, it would benefit Rogers to see the case screwed up rather than to see the case be successful because he wouldn't take credit.
He couldn't take credit if there were headlines about the arrest and indictment.
When you say Rogers, you mean Nelson?
Forgive me.
You have Nelson.
There are a lot of names here.
I just want to make sure that we're all straight.
I've referred to him as Rogers a couple of times, mistakenly.
Steve Rogers is the, forgive me, Steve Nelson is the assistant DA, the 11 year veteran of the district attorney's office.
And Steve Nelson is the one who heads the violent felonies unit.
And he is the one that Ed Flint, the attorney I interviewed, said is a conscientious trial lawyer.
And he doesn't believe that he was directly responsible, but rather that the West Valley City Police Department, which is a thoroughly corrupt agency, more corrupt than most, their newly appointed chief a few months ago became very defensive when a motion was filed on behalf of Daniel Williams' family, alleging that, or not alleging, but rather recounting the testimony of a former member of that police department that there had been hush money payoffs to people in the narcotics unit who had been sexually exploiting some of their female informants.
The new police chief in West Valley City said in so many words, well, it's not as if we still have criminals running this department, tacitly acknowledging that it had been operated like a street gang until his advent.
Well, I don't think that the institutional momentum has shifted so dramatically in such a short time frame.
But from where he stands, knowing the principles, knowing the lay of the land, Flint says that this was botched either as a result of deliberate incompetence or deliberate, deliberate malfeasance of office or institutional incompetence, perhaps followed by opportunism on the part of the paternal order of police.
But there's no way that you can look at this and say that Sam Gill is responsible because if they don't bring the evidence, they cannot indict the guy simply because he wants to.
And this is the sort of thing that he, perhaps uniquely among prosecutors in the state of Utah, would scruple at is the idea that as long as we're going to be prosecuting somebody, we have to have something that comports with the habeas corpus requirements and due process.
Now, wait a minute.
Is there any argument as to why?
I mean, on the other side as to why?
Well, we were able to bring the evidence against the three accomplices, but we didn't have the evidence on him.
I mean, for arguing the cops defense, that it's not there's no argument that the FOP has made beyond insinuation that this was anything other than a botch, if you will.
What they're trying to say is that on the part of the West Valley City Police Department, it was a mistake.
But on the part of Sam Gill, somehow this is a deliberate act of nonfeasance of office.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
And they filed the Public Information Act request for email correspondence within the DA's office that they say would supposedly reveal that there was evidence there and that Gill, for whatever reason, didn't use the evidence to indict the shooter.
And what Gill has said is, by all means, file the public information request because I've got nothing to hide and I'm too busy to worry about this.
So this is the sort of thing that will be thrashed out sometime after tomorrow.
And the whole point here, as far as I can tell, is that they wanted to create a big splash before we can get everybody in a fine froth of indignation over what happened, knowing that this would do nothing but injure Sam Gill's reelection chances.
So at the very best, as far as I can tell, what you have here is is probably this is the best case scenario from the perspective of the FOP.
What you have here is tremendous institutional incompetence on the part of a police agency that is famous for that type of behavior, as well as corruption, that was capitalized upon by the FOP in order to smear Sam Gill.
That's the very best case scenario from their perspective.
The worst case scenario is that somebody in that police department, probably with the active connivance of the FOP, decided that they'd let this guy go and play catch and release with him because he's one of the usual suspects.
He was well known as an identified member of the Serrano's street gang, and he's the sort of person they can keep on a short tether and then reel in after the election and then probably win another headline for recapturing this guy who was let loose by this this alien usurper, this liberal squish of a Democrat D.A. who's occupying the D.A.'s office there in Salt Lake County.
And the partisan dynamic here is really interesting, Scott, because Salt Lake County is the only county in Utah where a Democrat has a pretty good chance of winning office.
But typically you don't find that the D.A.'s office is occupied by a Democrat.
The FOP endorsed Sam Gill when he ran several years ago, and they became quite disaffected with him because he insisted on holding police accountable to the same laws that they're supposed to enforce.
But what Ed tells me is that some of his lifelong Democrat friends who are trial lawyers, just activists, are starting to become equivocal about their support for Sam Gill.
He needs to come clean about this, they say.
Well, he's come clean about it.
He said, go ahead, get the records out into the public for public inspection.
I've got nothing to hide.
If I don't have evidence, I can't charge the guy.
Boy, it sounds like you're talking about some third world country where the police union is going to run a D.A. out of town for daring to try to prosecute a cop who killed some lady.
Exactly.
Of all the impudence.
Yep.
All right.
That's freedom in our time.
Dot blogspot dot com.
Thanks, Will.
You bet.
Take care.
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