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| If Kafka and Dickens collaborated on a character, Ed Corrigan would be the result. |
“These sort [sic] of things are not unusual,” sniffed Ed
Corrigan, District Attorney for Flathead County, Montana, in response to a
complaint against him filed with the state attorney general. “It’s not
uncommon for a disgruntled defendant or disgruntled defense attorney to file
complaints with either the attorney general or with the Office of Disciplinary
Council.”
Not surprisingly, Corrigan’s statement is a
misrepresentation. Such complaints are relatively uncommon – but not because of
a paucity of prosecutorial misconduct. The corruption and criminal behavior
documented in the complaint against Corrigan's office – which include witness tampering,
interference with the attorney-client relationship, and official retaliation --
actually reflect the industry standard for his profession.
What is unusual about this case is that a defense attorney was
not intimidated into silence, and was able to provide irrefutable documentation
of the charges – a fact demonstrated by the haste with which Corrigan’s office
dropped criminal charges against his defendant, rather than deal with these
disclosures in court.
Late last summer, defense attorney Timothy Baldwin filed a Rule 11
motion demanding that Corrigan and Deputy DA Kenneth “Rusty” Park be punished
for official misconduct. At the time, Baldwin represented a defendant named
Cory Franklin who faced decades in prison on drug conspiracy charges.
Franklin’s wife Kristina, a woman who admits to being a
habitual methamphetamine consumer, had been pressured into becoming an
informant for the Northwest Drug Task Force. Although she believed that her
husband could beat the charges in court, she agreed to become a snitch after being
told that her “cooperation” would earn leniency for her husband.
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| Unwelcome: Defense attorney Tim Baldwin. |
Baldwin believed the case against Cory Franklin was weak,
and began to file discovery requests and other motions on his behalf. The
Franklins, who were regrettably familiar with the behavior of public defenders,
found Baldwin’s behavior to be a delightful novelty.
“Tim Baldwin is the only attorney who’s ever done anything
for us,” Mrs. Franklin later pointed out. “The rest of the attorneys didn’t
file any motions, didn’t do nothing [sic] to help Cory.”
Deputy DA Park likewise considered Baldwin’s behavior to be
unusual – and, for his purposes, unacceptable: It simply wouldn’t do for a
defense attorney to mount an actual defense, rather than acting as a broker for
a deal dictated by the prosecutor.
“I’m going to make this simple,” Park wrote in an April 30th
email to Baldwin. “Cory can take 20 years with 10 suspended right now…. [He]
will be required to continue to assist the agent on other federal and state
charges that he has been assisting on, including but not limited to conducting
interviews, testifying in state or federal courts and/or in front of the grand
jury.”
If Mr. Franklin didn’t want to spend the next two decades of
his life as a disposable slave-informant on behalf of the task force, Park continued,
“he will be subject to a minimum sentence of 15 years [in the Montana State
Prison] in addition to whatever time he is facing on the revocation [of his
probation] plus prosecution from the federal government.”
“This offer expires at 5:00 PM on Wednesday, May 7, 2014, or
upon the filing of ANY motions of any sort from your office except a motion for
a change of plea,” gloated Park in a flourish reeking of a kidnapper’s
triumphal arrogance. “This offer is not open to any further negotiation.”
Roughly a week before sending that email, Park
had told Mrs. Franklin that he “cannot stand Tim Baldwin,” and that because
Baldwin was representing Franklin and her husband “he would throw my husband to
the federal government for criminal prosecution … [and] that it would be in my
husband’s best interest to get a new attorney, because if he had a different
attorney, Mr. Park would be willing to work with him….”
To punctuate that ultimatum, the Task Force fired Kristina Franklin
as an informant, acting in the misplaced confidence that this would leave her
without options. However, Kristina had a great deal of practice setting up
others on behalf of the Task Force, so simply turned that skill against her
handler -- which is the first time it had been used for a morally defensible
purpose. She called Deputy McKeag Johns, who – owing to either distraction or
complacency – offered explicit first-hand testimony of Park’s criminal
misconduct during the 26-minute recorded conversation.
“I can only say that he [Park] told me that, yes, he was
going to help you based on the work that you did, so I don’t know if he’s
trying to like – he must be against Tim Baldwin, I assume,” Johns told Mrs.
Franklin. But “it’s not just Rusty” who was unwilling to countenance Tim
Baldwin, Johns continued: “Nobody likes Tim…. You need to look into the
attorney that you have and make sure you’re getting along with him correctly.
Because it comes down to, do you want the entire County Attorney’s Office
against you?”
Baldwin was uniquely unacceptable, Johns said, because he’s “a
constitutionalist kind of guy.” The Deputy also served up a greasy porridge of
insinuation and rumor intended to persuade Mrs. Franklin that the only attorney
willing to defend them in court was using them as “his puppets” in the hope of
racking up billable hours.
However, as Johns candidly admitted, the County Attorney’s
problem with Baldwin was not his supposed greed, but his principled
intransigence.
“Well, honestly, it’s because you’re pushing so hard,” Johns
told Mrs. Franklin. “I’m trying to help you. I will try to help you. But you
guys are pushing it to a point with that frickin’ attorney that it makes it
really hard for all of us. Every other attorney out there typically kind of
works with us or we work with them, we try to find a deal that works good for
you guys.”
Johns was admitting that Park and his boss, DA Corrigan,
were punishing the Franklins because their attorney wasn’t interested in
helping the Task Force expand its stable of confidential informants.
Displaying the ersatz solicitude of a sex trafficker dealing
with a runaway reluctant to enter the trade, Johns affected concern for Mrs.
Franklin and her family – strictly conditioned on her willingness to be
properly submissive and profitable in her boss’s employ.
“You’ve done – you’ve done great work for me,” Johns told
the weeping, desperate woman. “Kristina, I wish that I could find C.I.s like
you every day of the week. Because I think you’re doing a great thing for our
community.” At the same time, Johns warned her, if he caught her using meth, “I’m
the guy that’s going to throw you in jail … because I care about the well-being
of your children.”
Mind you, that tender concern for the Franklins’ children
didn’t prevent Johns from participating in a conspiracy to extort a plea deal
from their father, or exploiting their mother as an undercover informant in
potentially risky narcotics investigations.
After learning about the June 4th conversation
between Johns and Mrs. Franklin, Baldwin
filed a motion to recuse Park as a prosecutor. Park stoutly denied the
allegations – and promptly confirmed them by filing
a motion to dismiss the case against Cory Franklin, an act that would
constitute official nonfeasance
if Mr. Franklin were indeed a dangerous criminal worthy of a twenty-year prison
term.
Armed with the recorded conversation, a notarized
transcription, and an
affidavit from Mrs. Franklin attesting to its accuracy, Baldwin – along with
fellow defense attorneys Phyllis and John Quatman -- filed
a Rule 11 motion demanding sanctions against Corrigan and Parks. After a
brief and not particularly suspense-laden interval, Attorney General Brant
Light denied the motion, insisting that he didn’t believe that the allegations “warrant
a criminal investigation of Ed Corrigan or Kenneth Park.”
Denied redress through official channels, Baldwin and the
Quatmans, acting as the Criminal Defense Attorneys Association, took the matter
before the public on September 15, releasing an on-line archive of
documents and a detailed narrative of Park’s official misconduct.
“When we put together the Rule 11 complaint, we sent a draft
of it to every defense attorney we knew of in Flathead County,” John Quatman
told me. “We were hoping that at least some of them would join in our complaint
as co-signers, or perhaps even add to it. Not a single defense attorney signed
the complaint; in fact, we never even heard from any of them.”
A brief review of the documented allegations in the
complaint offers adequate explanation for such reluctance. Over the course of
nearly two decades in office, Ed Corrigan has refined the science of
intimidation and retaliation.
Roughly 15 years ago, while John’s wife Phyllis was
representing a defendant named Jackie Buck, Corrigan told the client’s parents
that Mrs. Quatman “was a troublemaker and a problem” and promised that if Buck “fought
her drug charges at all, he would file a sexual assault charge against her,
which he did after she insisted on having a preliminary examination,” notes the
complaint.
Corrigan’s vindictiveness and gift for creative sadism were
displayed memorably during his term as a deputy DA in the case of a woman named
Gerri Steffes. In December 1999, Steffes, who faced ten counts of prescription
drug abuse, was suddenly hit with an eleventh charge – and arrested in front of
her children three days before Christmas. This happened after Phyllis Quatman
began to file motions to prepare to defend Steffes in court.
“Phyllis had filed the motions, then left the week of
Christmas to visit family in California,” Mr. Quatman recounted to me. “Just
days before Christmas, Corrigan filed the eleventh count as a separate charge
so that she could be arrested and held in jail away from her family during
Christmas. He waited until Phyllis was out of town to do this, and he filed in
front of a judge who was a friend and former colleague in the prosecutor’s
office. I had to go to the DA’s and personally intervene with Corrigan’s boss to
arrange for bail.”
After Steffes was compelled to offer a guilty plea, the
Quatmans filed a vindictive prosecution complaint against Corrigan.
“We were able to depose Corrigan on the stand, where he
admitted, under oath, that he intended to put this woman in jail over
Christmas, and that it gave him `great pleasure’ to think about who her
attorney was,” Mr. Quatman recalled, his voice flavored with weary disgust.
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| Worst of both worlds: Kenneth "Rusty" Park |
Kenneth Park, a former Oklahoma City Police Officer and federal undercover narcotics operative, has been Corrigan’s faithful disciple.
When a defendant named Byron Nelson was accused of selling $100 worth of marijuana to a particularly
insistent Task Force informant, the Quatmans prepared to present an entrapment
defense.
Park responded by dispatching three Task Force mouth-breathers –
including McKeag Johns – to threaten and intimidate Nelson’s mother, who
operates a legal medical marijuana dispensary.
“Those guys showed up with guns plainly visible, and started
accusing that poor woman of selling marijuana to people without [government-issued
medical] cards,” John Quatman recalled to me. “They knew those accusations were groundless, but they didn't care. One of them mentioned that the
maximum penalty she could face would be up to 100 years in prison. They blackmailed
Byron into accepting a guilty plea when he had a very good entrapment defense.
When he was asked in his change of plea hearing if he had been coerced, Byron
frankly said that he had, because the Task Force had threatened his mother.”
Like any other swaggering bully, Park is as intrepid as Hector
when dealing with defenseless and marginalized people, but he dissolves into a
puddle of petulance when he’s facing the receiving end of the enforcement
apparatus.
In April 2013, Park decided to celebrate the third
anniversary of his job with the Flathead County Prosecutor’s Office by getting
drunk and assaulting his wife. Arrested at 9:30 on a Friday evening, Park faced
the prospect of a weekend behind bars.
Rather than manning up and dealing with
a small sample of what he and his boss had inflicted on helpless people, Park
had his attorney roust
a Justice of the Peace from bed to hold an unprecedented midnight hearing
during which he whimpered about the dangers he would face being locked up with
representatives of the local criminal element.
Leaving aside the fact that Parks
could have been put in a segregation unit, and brushing over the fact that
petty criminals represent a higher grade of humanity than prosecutors of Park’s
ilk, it’s useful to remember that Park
has cultivated an image as a bold and valiant badass who infiltrated biker
gangs during his law enforcement career. The same prosecutor who once
gloated that he had a defendant “by the short and curlys” found that his own
unexceptional dangling anatomy was inadequate for him to endure two days in
jail. The people running Flathead County’s “justice” system were willing to
make special arrangements to protect the poor, cringing little creature.
The domestic violence charge was dropped, the
long-suffering wife quite sensibly obtained a protective order and filed for
divorce, and Parks was permitted to resume his well-compensated career
visiting wreck and ruin on the lives of less violent people. Contacted for
comment about this story Park
offered a dismissive reference to “cowards” who are supposedly spreading “false
statements” about his conduct.
By dismissing the Cory Franklin case rather than defending
his actions in court, Park engaged in behavior that could be characterized as
cowardly. Of greater importance, however, is the fact that the chief witness
against him was not a criminal defendant or a defense attorney, but McKeag
Johns, his comrade in the local counter-narcotics Gestapo.
“Generally speaking,
all narcotics investigations are questionable,” Quatman told me. “This isn’t
limited to Flathead County – it’s nation-wide. Narcotics officers operate at
the fringes of the law, and they develop an `Us-against-the-world’ mentality.
They see themselves as saviors of humankind from the deluge of drugs – they’re shoring
up the dikes trying to prevent a deluge that would destroy us all. This leads
them to cut corners, ignore Due Process, lie to defendants, lie in reports, lie
on the stand – because they think by doing so they’re benefiting humanity.”
Police who specialize in vice enforcement “usually start
believing their own propaganda,” Quatman continues. “Prosecutors tend to be a
little more cynical. They don’t like to work very hard, because they get paid a
flat fee whether they win or lose. There is a lot of prestige at stake,
however. Your win-loss record makes all the difference in the eyes of your
peers, and in defining your career trajectory. There is huge pressure to win,
and the prospect of being ostracized if you lose. This is why they prefer
defense attorneys who don’t fight back.”
A former narcotics officer-turned- prosecutor, Park embodies
the worst of both worlds. In Oklahoma, he was part of a federal multi-jurisdictional
task force that focused on an area in which Interstates 35, 40, and 44
converged. This allowed them to rake in millions of dollars through seizures,
some of which involved actual drug traffickers, and some of which inevitably
targeted entirely innocent people who lost their money to “forfeiture.”
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| Isn't that cute! Parks in Biker drag as a Fed. |
In 2008 Park was awarded a law degree. Rather than seeking
honest work, he found a sinecure with the DEA before moving to Montana to
become a deputy county prosecutor.
Once he arrived in Flathead County, Parks “attached himself
to the drug task force,” Quatman recalls. “He became a `rip-and-run’-type
prosecutor. They’re like drug enforcement officers who don’t pay much attention
to the law or due process. They simply kick in doors and make arrests, figuring
that everything will be sorted out later. Park was the kind of drug prosecutor
who worked very well with officers like that.”
The task force was “carrying out searches without warrants
or consent,” Quatman continues. “They were going through motel rooms, sending
in officers posing a plumbers and that kind of thing. Naturally, we began to
challenge their cases because of due process violations and generally shoddy
police work, so we quickly became personae not grata because we weren’t following
the familiar script. The same was true of Tim Baldwin, who approached us and
wanted to work together because his clients were experiencing the same kind of
treatment.”
Everybody involved in Flathead County’s court system is
aware of the routine abuse and pervasive corruption, and nobody other than
Baldwin and the Quatmans has been willing to confront it.
“Corruption and collusion are endemic here in Flathead
County, but we’re hardly unique in that respect,” insists John Quatman who
spent 25 years as a deputy prosecutor in Alameda County, California. “It is
alarming how law enforcement will bind together to protect their own, what the
system is willing to do to protect itself – and how many lives are needlessly
ruined as a result.”
As Ed Corrigan said, there is nothing unusual about this kind of impenitent corruption and unpunished criminality.
This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast deals with the Flathead County Counter-Narcotics Gestapo; to listen or download that program, click here.
This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast deals with the Flathead County Counter-Narcotics Gestapo; to listen or download that program, click here.
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