The Justice Department says it is reviewing the Drug Enforcement Administration’s “Special Operations Division”—the subject of an explosive report published by Reuters on Monday. The SOD works to funnel information collected by American intelligence agencies to ordinary narcotics cops—then instructs them to “phony up investigations,” as one former judge quoted in the story put it, in order to conceal the true source of the information. In some instances, this apparently involves not only lying to defense attorneys, but to prosecutors and judges as well.
DEA is taking a predictable “nothing to see here” stance in its public responses to the story, but on its face this seems like a fairly brazen violation of the right to due process. As several legal experts quoted in the Reuters article point out, the accused in our criminal justice system cannot effectively defend themselves unless they know how evidence against them was obtained, and this program is clearly designed to deprive them of that knowledge. Moreover, at least some of the information channeled to police derives from FISA electronic surveillance, and 50 USC §1806 explicitly requires the government to notify persons whenever it intends to use information “derived from” such intercepts against them in any legal proceeding. Flouting that requirement is doubly troubling because, in light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Amnesty v. Clapper, the only way for any court to review the constitutionality of intelligence programs is for a defendant to raise a challenge after being informed that they’ve been subject to surveillance.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/nsa-keeping-us-safe-dope-pedddlers
No comments:
Post a Comment