| Chapter 3
Reporting
on Drug Law Enforcement
and Controlled Substances
By
Bill Wallace
Procedural
Differences
If the prosecution of a drug offense is being handled through the
state or local court system, the prosecuting attorney will most
often file a criminal complaint with the court in
which the precise nature of the alleged offense is described. In
most cases, these complaints become a part of the court record and
are available for review by reporters and other members of the public
by the time of the defendant's initial appearance before a judge
or magistrate.
In addition to the complaint, court files may contain the original
police report that was written in connection with
the arrest and any relevant supplementary reports.
Occasionally, a chronological record of the investigation that
lead to the arrest will also be included, though it is rare to find
them in routine criminal prosecutions.
A local prosecutor or district attorney may proceed by means of
a grand jury investigation rather than a preliminary
examination. If that occurs, the actual grand jury proceedings are
closed to the public, but the transcript of the grand
jury's work may become available shortly after a bill of indictment
is issued. If it is available, a grand jury transcript can be a
particularly rich source of information about alleged criminal activity
because it draws on a wide variety of sources and consists of verbatim
records of the testimony witnesses gave to the panel.
Even if a transcript is not available, a grand jury eventually
will issue a bill of indictment that sets out the
basic elements of the alleged crime. Indictments can be terse documents
only one or two pages long that contain little detail about what
happened other than the names of the suspects, the section of the
law that was violated, and a sketchy description of the violations
of the law that occurred. They can also be lengthy tomes that run
to hundreds of pages and contain a wealth of detail about who did
what, when it happened and what the results were.
Other Crucial Documents
Also in local and state cases, investigators armed with a court-issued
search warrant will often comb through homes, business
offices, automobiles, storage facilities and other locations where
evidence of criminal activity may be found. Shortly after a search
is conducted – often within 10 days – the investigators
must go to court and file a search warrant "return"
that includes an inventory of all items that were seized.
Along with the inventory, the return will contain a copy of the
original search warrant signed by the judge and one or more sworn
affidavits filed in support of the warrant application.
These are usually a detailed description of the investigation written
by one of the law enforcement officers involved in the case. Because
the affidavit must establish that a search is necessary in order
to obtain crucial evidence about the criminal activity under investigation,
it will contain a discussion of the evidence that has already been
collected and the types of evidence that a search is expected to
yield.
Similar affidavits are usually filed with a request for an arrest
warrant, and the court file will often contain a copy of the warrant
request and the affidavit that was filed to obtain it. Sometimes
the court seals documents in search and arrest warrant applications
because the investigation still is under way, but often they are
a matter of public record. The information contained in these papers
often can be used to generate a story about the case, even when
other sources of information are not available.
Of course, the vast majority of drug cases – like most criminal
cases – never go to trial. Some are simply dismissed by the
prosecutors because some problem develops in the evidence that has
been gathered or critical witnesses change their stories –
or disappear entirely. Most are resolved by plea bargains –
negotiated settlements in which the accused agrees to plead guilty
to one of the lesser offenses in return for a shorter sentence than
he or she would receive if found guilty by a jury.
Because the court system at all jurisdictional levels has overcrowded
dockets, overtaxed judges and clerical staffers, and a limited number
of courtrooms to hear cases in, there is often pressure from the
bench to negotiate a plea agreement that resolves the case before
its trial date. When cases are resolved by a negotiated plea agreement,
documents spelling out the nature of the plea become a part of the
court record.
Making a Federal
Case of It
If the drug case in question is being handled by federal agencies
such as the FBI or DEA, the initial charge may be contained in either
a criminal complaint or a criminal indictment issued by a grand
jury. The primary difference between a criminal complaint filed
in federal court and those filed in state and local jurisdictions
is the fact that a federal complaint will also include a detailed
affidavit signed by the investigator assigned to the case establishing
probable cause that the accused committed the crime in question.
Like the affidavits filed in support of a search warrant, a complaint
affidavit will contain a summary of the investigation to date and
a discussion of some of the evidence that has been collected against
the defendant.
Federal grand juries, like their counterparts under state law,
operate in closed session. Unlike state and country grand juries,
however, the transcripts of federal grand jury proceedings are rarely
released to the press or the public.
Fleshing Out The
Story
Reporting on drug busts, raids, indictments, and arrests are an
important part of covering the drug enforcement beat, but they are
not the only part. A drug beat reporter should strive to make stories
about controlled substances as meaningful as possible to the reader,
and that involves putting it into context.
That context can be provided in a number of ways. One is to include
background information on the drug or drugs allegedly involved in
the case you are writing about. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
has fact sheets online that contain information about each of the
50 states, including summaries of each state's major drug abuse
problems, information about its chief illicit drugs, and a breakdown
of the amounts of controlled substances seized in the preceding
year.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy in the White House is
another good source of background information that can be used to
flesh out drug beat stories. ONDCP, a lead agency in the government's
war on drugs, almost invariably presses for more aggressive law
enforcement policies and legislation. As a consequence, its information
has to be regarded as biased. However, ONDCP maintains information
that can be useful to journalists on the drug enforcement beat,
including data on drug suppression efforts in the U.S. and abroad,
reports on specialized topics such as the availability of certain
dangerous drugs, fact sheets on various controlled substances and
detailed information about the budget of U.S. drug programs.
Another way to provide context is to include information in the
story about the number of drug-related arrests that occur in your
geographical area or a community the size of the one you cover.
That information can be found in the FBI's annual Uniform Crime
Reports, although the information can be difficult to integrate
in a story. The FBI's crime index concentrates on only a limited
number of the more serious events – murder, rape, robbery,
aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, auto theft and arson –
and contains detailed analyses of those numbers, including statistics
for specific U.S. cities with populations of more than 100,000.
The UCR is much sketchier when it comes to less serious crimes,
including drug offenses, and breaks down arrests for those crimes
only into regional areas and urban areas within certain population
ranges. In the future, more detailed information may be available
through the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System, which
is designed to refine the statistics collected through the UCR and
make them more reliable. NIBRS will eventually allow the FBI to
publish more accurate reports about drug arrests and seizures, but
at present only 18 states are certified to collect NIBRS data while
another 18 are testing the system.
A problem in using UCR or NIBRS data is that the material usually
is quite dated by the time it appears. Government reports using
this information usually focus on the preceding calendar year's
activity and may not appear until months after the data has been
collected.
Useful background on addiction problems may be found in the National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse, a detailed survey conducted by the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The three-month
long survey is based on responses from more than 100,000 U.S. residents
age 12 or over, and provides a comprehensive picture of National
and regional drug abuse trends broken down by sex, age, race and
other demographic factors.
Another unit of SAMHSA, the Drug Alert Warning Network (DAWN),
compiles data about drug-related deaths and emergency room visits
that show developing drug abuse trends.
Continue to
the next page in "Chapter 4: Racial and Ethnic Issues"
>>>
<<< Return to the previous
page in "Chapter 3: Reporting on Drug Law Enforcement"
|
