Post by Shuftin on Aug 28, 2006 0:09:13 GMT -5
BALTIMORE — The Baltimore City Police Department has used a technical legal argument to win a defamation lawsuit against two of its officers.
But the opposing attorney says the argument — that applications for search warrants are immune from libel — gives police carte blanche to make false statements on court documents and search anyone's home based on lies.
"A police officer can lie about a citizen on a search warrant or an arrest warrant," said attorney Clarke Ahlers. "That's the city's position and the judge agrees. It's absurd that's their public policy."
Jordan Watts, assistant city solicitor, said his office had not yet seen the judge's ruling and could not comment. Ahlers said he received the ruling Saturday.
On Aug. 1, Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge M. Brooke Murdock dismissed Ahlers' $1.5 million defamation lawsuit, filed by police officers Sgt. Robert L.D. Smith and Vicki Lynn Mengel.
The suit claimed that the former Southwestern District "Flex Squad" members were subject to "public ridicule, scorn, dishonor and embarrassment," because of false statements made by other officers investigating the squad that were released to the media.
Two police officers stated in a Dec. 29, 2005, document that they believed Smith was violating drug laws, and Mengel was planting drugs on citizens to make false arrests, but did not include evidence or specifics to support those claims.
In dismissing the suit, Murdock agreed with the police department's argument that applications for search warrants "are protected from a claim of defamation by absolute immunity."
But Ahlers said the police department's legal arguments show a disregard for the truth.
City police "do not deny that they made intentionally false and malicious statements in contravention of law in the affidavit in support of a search warrant," Ahlers wrote. "They claim absolute immunity for making these false and malicious statements because they were made in the course of judicial proceedings."
But Baltimore Police Department Chief Legal Counsel Karen Hornig wrote that the officers' suit was a "vain attempt to deflect attention from their own involvement in the possible criminal activities of the Flex Squad."