IAPE Evidence Blog

The Wash­ing­ton Times, washingtontimes.com
BYLINE: Andrea Noble
Link to Article

Prince George County, MD

Defense blames task-force negligence

A Prince George’s County police offi­cer assigned to a state gun seizure task force stole weapons from an evi­dence locker and resold them on the street, pros­e­cu­tors told jurors Mon­day at the start of the officer’s trial.

Cpl. Juan D. Carter faces six counts of mis­con­duct in office and seven theft charges related to 16 weapons that went miss­ing while he served as a prop­erty offi­cer for the Mary­land State Police-led Gun Inter­dic­tion Task Force.

“He knew what he was sup­posed to do and yet the guns that he seized — machine guns, shot­guns, and hand­guns — they wound up back in the com­mu­nity,” Assis­tant State’s Attor­ney Jonathon Church said dur­ing open­ing argu­ments in Mr. Carter’s trial. “At some point those guns wound up being recov­ered on the streets and those guns were traced back to the defendant.”

Mr. Carter’s defense attor­ney ques­tioned what ben­e­fit his client, a mid-career police offi­cer with no debt to speak of, could have gained from putting his job on the line to sell stolen guns for minus­cule amounts of money.

Rather, attor­ney Dou­glas Wood said, the task force on which Mr. Carter served was dis­or­ga­nized and pros­e­cu­tors were out to make him the fall guy for the miss­ing weapons.

“Juan Carter was very active in seiz­ing the guns but not as good at the paper­work,” Mr. Wood said. “At no point did Juan Carter take any guns from the task force and sell them on the street.”

Pros­e­cu­tors said that when Cpl. Carter, 37, learned that inves­ti­ga­tors were look­ing into his activ­i­ties that he took mea­sures to erase his paper trail and, as a result, had no record of mak­ing any gun seizures for approx­i­mately 19 months.

Cpl. Carter, of Bowie, was indicted on the charges in Octo­ber 2010 after a nearly year-long inves­ti­ga­tion. The Prince George’s County Police Department’s inter­nal affairs divi­sion was alerted to the sus­pected thefts in Novem­ber 2009 and Cpl. Carter, a then-13-year vet­eran of the force, was imme­di­ately sus­pended from duty, police offi­cials said.

He has been sus­pended with­out pay since Octo­ber 2010, a police spokesman said.

Accord­ing to trial tes­ti­mony, the gun task force was com­posed of eight offi­cers who came from the county police depart­ment and sheriff’s agency as well as the Mary­land State Police.

The group tar­geted indi­vid­u­als who were pre­vented from own­ing guns because of crim­i­nal his­to­ries but appeared to be still pur­chas­ing ammu­ni­tion from local gun shops, tes­ti­fied Mary­land State Police Capt. Don­ald Har­ri­son. He ini­tially super­vised the task force after it was formed in 2007.

Guns seized by the task force were often stored in a pad­locked locker in the office where the task force was based before the arms were for­warded to the police department’s firearms exam­i­na­tion unit, Capt. Har­ri­son said.

An unde­ter­mined num­ber of peo­ple, ranked as super­vi­sors or senior cor­po­rals like Cpl. Carter, had access to the stor­age rooms at the police department’s nar­cotics enforce­ment divi­sion where all guns seized by the police depart­ment were stored, tes­ti­fied Lt. Eti­enne Jones, a for­mer county police inter­nal affairs investigator.

“I can’t tell you who had access to those rooms,” Lt. Jones said when asked by Mr. Wood for a list of names of peo­ple who could go into the rooms where the guns were sup­pos­edly taken.

Cpl. Carter’s trial is expected to last through Wednesday.

Fam­ily mem­bers who escorted him out of the court­room declined to comment.

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org