[Streck-Fu]

Originally Posted by sinjefe

^^^^^ Did you miss "deputy sheriff's false statements to a judge last year set in motion a chain of events that led to the critical injury of a toddler"?

More information is coming out that the very premise of the raid was a complete fabrication.....LINK

According to federal prosecutors, none of these things were true. There either was no informant or Autry lied about what the informant said. There was no guard. There was no drug buy in the doorway. The GBI also denied at the time that it had approved the raid. The agency began investigating the case in June of last year but doesn’t appear to have issued a report.

In a sane world, Georgia officials would have learned from this case that violent, confrontational, forced-entry police raids are a terrible way to serve search warrants on people suspected of low-level drug crimes. In a sane world, we’d understand that because all parties to a drug transaction are consensual, there’s no direct victim to report the crime. Therefore, police must use informants, surveillance and undercover operations to get information. That makes the information rather unreliable. In a sane world, we’d understand that conducting volatile, nighttime raids based on dirty information is a good way to get people injured or killed, whether they’re drug dealers, drug users, cops or toddlers.

Instead, Terrell initially blamed the baby’s injuries on the suspected drug dealer, whom he called “no better than a domestic terrorist.” That was blame-shifting even if the suspect had been guilty. It was Terrell’s deputies who created the violence here, not the guy who allegedly sold a small amount of meth. Yet an assistant district attorney told CNN last year that he was considering charging the drug suspect for the injuries to the baby. And, of course, federal officials now say the guy never actually made the alleged drug sale in the first place. So Terrell’s deputies didn’t create violence as a disproportionate response to a consensual crime, they created violence for no reason at all.

Terrell then blamed the informant for providing bad information. But this indictment means the bad information never came from an informant. Terrell then told CNN that the baby’s parents “were aware of drug activity in the home.” (They were staying with their Georgia relatives because their house in Wisconsin had recently burned down.) This led some enforcement supporters to blame the baby’s parents for putting their kid in harm’s way, an argument reiterated in a Habersham County brief in response to the parents’ lawsuit. We now know that none of this is true.

But more broadly, the suspect himself was arrested at another residence, without a SWAT team and without incident. He clearly wasn’t the violent threat the officers had claimed him to be. So why deploy the commando tactics in the first place?

Combined, both cases cost the local governments well over $3 million in settlements. Ayers got $2 million. The toddler’s family got $1 million (which might cover the child’s medical expenses). The alleged drug transaction that led to the investigation ending in Ayers’s death was for $50 worth of cocaine. The transaction that nearly led to the death of the toddler was for $50 worth of meth. A dead pastor, a widowed wife, a fatherless baby, a disfigured toddler, $3 million in settlements, who knows how much money spent on investigations and legal fees . . . all over $100 in alleged drug sales.