In an interview last year, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said a defense attorney first raised concerns that the evidence in these people’s February 2020 cases was falsified, The N&O reported.
The officer in question, Omar Abdullah, was on leave in September 2020 after Freeman dismissed the last of the cases in question. Raleigh police confirmed Tuesday that he is still working as a detective.
On Wednesday, Freeman said that the State Bureau of Investigation was investigating Abdullah and that “there is currently no evidence to support a criminal prosecution.”
However, Freeman noted that the investigation could take another month so new evidence could emerge. She also noted that the rules for criminal cases are different from civil cases like the lawsuit filed on Monday.
Of the 11 people sued for heroin arrests, five were arrested before February 2020, when, according to Freeman and the lawsuit, the crime lab revealed that the alleged heroin was fake. One was arrested on the last day of February and five others were arrested and charged in the following months – despite concerns about the evidence.
The first of the defendants dismissed his charges on June 1, while others had to wait almost two months until July 30 for their charges to be dismissed. Freeman announced an investigation into Abdullah in September.
Lawsuit alleges racial discrimination
Every person wrongly accused was black, and the lawsuit alleges that racial discrimination was a factor.
The lawsuit alleges that the officer and his informant held at least 16 people responsible for drug trafficking: 15 for heroin and one for marijuana. It is unclear what happened to some of them who are not part of the lawsuit.
One of these lawsuits is Curtis Logan, who was falsely arrested despite one of Abdullah’s colleagues having previously reported two concerns. First, even though the informant claimed to have bought heroin from Logan, it did not test positive as heroin. Second, the informant claimed to have bought 20 grams of heroin for $ 400 when its actual street value would be $ 2,000.
Despite those two red flags, Logan was arrested on January 2, 2020 while driving with his two young children. Six weeks later, the crime lab came back in mid-February and confirmed what the field test had also found: the alleged heroin was not heroin.
But Logan was jailed anyway and was not released until June 1, six months after his arrest and a month before his charges were finally dismissed.
Freeman said last September there was no evidence that Abdullah knew the drugs were counterfeit when he made the arrests, The N&O reported. The lawsuit says that is impossible.
Not only did Abdullah know that the drugs were fake and the arrests were fraudulent, the lawsuit said, but also at least five of his colleagues and two of their superiors, a sergeant and a captain.
“The defendants tested the heroin several times on site and found that it tested negative for a controlled substance. Nevertheless, they were arrested and accused of heroin trafficking,” the lawsuit said.
According to WRAL-TV, Adbullah was the 2013 Raleigh Police Department Officer of the Year.
In addition to Abdullah and the City of Raleigh, Capt. Jennings Bunch, Sgt.William Rolfe and the detectives Rishar Pierre Monroe, Julien David Rattelade, Meghan Caroline Gay, David Chadwick Nance and Jason Gwinn.
Freeman said neither her office nor the SBI had investigated any of them except for Abdullah. Harris, the police spokeswoman, would not say whether there had been an internal investigation or leave since September last year, when Abdullah’s investigation began.
How it supposedly worked
The lawsuit claims the program started in 2018 and continued in 2019 and through the first half of 2020. So it went on according to the lawsuit:
In late 2018, police arrested a homeless man they named aspirin on charges of crushing aspirin and selling it as cocaine. The lawsuit does not use his real name as he became a confidential informant after his arrest.
He’d call and say he’d made a deal to buy heroin. Then Abdullah would meet with him privately, after which Aspirin would make the alleged deal. Since the camera is covered, it is unclear what happened at the meeting and whether someone sold something to aspirin, according to the lawsuit.
Each time, however, aspirin returned with a sachet that he said contained heroin. Each time it turned out to be brown sugar.
Sometimes the officers tested it on the spot and found that it wasn’t really heroin. Sometimes they wouldn’t test it. In any case, they would arrest anyone who Aspirin said had met, and Abdullah would meet Aspirin again in private afterward.
According to the lawsuit, this process violates numerous departmental guidelines and the rights of those later arrested. The Raleigh police would not provide their guidelines for field testing drugs or dealing with confidential informants. Harris said it was “not optional”.
The lawsuit does not explain why Abdullah and Aspirin would do so, but it alludes to financial incentives and cites a colleague who claimed that “after Aspirin complained about his pay, Abdullah told him he could make more money if he did bring in larger cases. “
“The secrecy of the use of informants combined with the attraction of making money creates a system that is ripe for abuse,” said Rubert-Schewel, the falsely accused’s lawyer. “It was clearly misused here and the continued use of confidential informants to create cases must be carefully examined.”
Ignore or delay test results
Even after the crime lab confirmed that the drugs were counterfeit, police “continued to use them [Aspirin] as a confidential informant who leads to additional prosecution measures against innocent plaintiffs ”, it says in the lawsuit.
In some cases, the lawsuit said, officials covered up the fact that field tests showed the heroin wasn’t actually heroin by failing to inform prosecutors of the results. In other cases, it is said that they have been slow through the process and delayed submitting evidence for testing.
Freeman said these cases highlighted the fact that her office did not initially see the counterfeit drug sample from a particular informant and official, as there are half a dozen prosecutors handling drug cases.
She said she made changes to ensure a similar falsification of evidence scheme wasn’t in place.
“That’s why we just rolled out a policy in the last few weeks,” said Freeman.
Will Doran covers North Carolina politics with an emphasis on government workers and agencies. In 2016, he launched PolitiFact NC, The News & Observer’s fact-checking partnership, previously covering local governments around the triangle.