Officer In Fatal '06 Raid Guilty Of One Charge

Arthur Bruce Tesler's acquittal on two of three charges Tuesday may have spared him a long prison term for his role in the killing of a 92-year-old woman -- but a spectator at his trial said the Almighty would have the last word.

"I put it all in God's hands," said Esther Woltz as she waited on the Fulton County jury's verdict for the Atlanta police detective.

The jury acquitted Tesler on two charges from the illegal 2006 narcotics raid in which officers shot and killed Kathryn Johnston in her northwest Atlanta home. It found him guilty of lying in an official investigation in the cover-up of police wrongdoing that followed the shooting.

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A Fulton County jury said Monday that it cannot reach a verdict in charges leveled against an Atlanta police detective for his role in the police killing of a 92-year-old woman, but it will continue with a fourth day of deliberations Tuesday.

Jurors asked for a transcript of the officer's testimony at the trial. Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson said he would provide the transcript Tuesday.

Arthur Bruce Tesler is the only Atlanta police officer to face a jury over the events that led to the killing of Kathryn Johnston in a botched and illegal narcotics raid on her house two days before Thanksgiving in 2006. He is charged with violation of oath of office for being party to a lie to get the warrant; lying in an official investigation because of the cover-up afterwards; and false imprisonment for his participation in the raid in which he surrounded the Johnston house but did not fire his weapon.

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Russell Bietsch was just weeks away from his 19th birthday when his parents discovered he used drugs.

It's hard to say whether this was his first time or not, but it was his last. Sometime around 2:30 a.m. June 1, Russell collapsed at a friend's home and was pronounced dead on arrival at Grady Memorial Hospital.

He was a nice kid from a nice suburban neighborhood and responsible, involved parents, one of countless American teenagers who experiment with drugs - except for two things.

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Opening Statements to Begin Today in Officer's Trial

Arthur Tesler doesn't face the most serious charges in the illegal police raid that resulted in the killing of a 92-year-old woman, but his trial could be the only time the high-profile case gets laid bare in the courtroom.

Tesler is the only Atlanta police officer to go to trial for his role in the 2006 raid that left Kathryn Johnston dead. Officers later admitted planting drugs to justify breaking into her home.

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Program Helps Point Kids Down Better Path

The Hall County school system has a program in place, educators hope, that stops student drug use in its tracks.

Since 1999, the district has required students caught in offenses related to drugs or alcohol to attend its Substance Use Prevention and Education Resource, or SUPER 1, program.

"We want to be able to try to decrease any type of incident of drug-related referral," said Stacy Benton, student assistance coordinator for the school system.

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The cause of Georgia Tech baseball player Michael Hutts' death hasn't been determined, but the mention of heroin in the police report on his death was a reminder that abuse of the addictive drug is on the rise.

According to the Georgia Drug Rehab Alliance, local law enforcement agencies around Atlanta are reporting increasing problems in their jurisdictions.

Ryan Tinkoff, Hutts' roommate, told police that an acquaintance of Hutts who was known to use heroin -- "possibly with Mr. Hutts," the report said -- arrived at their apartment about 11 the night before the Tech pitcher was found dead.

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Constant worry: With the easy availability of drugs and alcohol to college students, coaches have to monitor players' behavior for potential problems.

Former Georgia Tech football coach Bill Curry said Saturday that the police report stating Jackets pitcher Michael Hutts consumed alcohol the night before he died took him back to the days when he dealt with issues of drug and alcohol abuse on a daily basis.

"There is a world out there that most of us have no idea that it even exists," said Curry, who also coached at Alabama and Kentucky. "And if you're a coach today, you better be willing to get down and deal with it on the street level.

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Program Could Begin This Fall

The Hall County Board of Education is looking at expanding mandatory, random drug testing to include student drivers as early as the fall.

Superintendent Will Schofield recommended the measure Monday night.

"We don't have a greater safety issue than people under the influence driving vehicles," he said in an interview earlier in the day.

The program now involves only student athletes, with costs covered by gate receipts as part of athletic budgets. The expanded move could be covered by student parking fees now in place.

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When the Office of National Drug Control Policy announced in late February that 26 additional counties across the nation would be designated as High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA), astute observers might have noticed that almost a third were located in Georgia.

Eight counties--Barrow, Bartow, Cherokee, Clayton, Douglas, Fayette and Forsyth counties, all part of suburban Atlanta--were added to Georgia's existing HIDTAs: DeKalb and Fulton counties, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and the city of Atlanta itself, which have been designated HIDTA since 1995.

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DEA Agent Makes Plea Deal Tax Charge Means Jail For Defendant Based In Atlanta

A former Drug Enforcement Administration special agent on Wednesday agreed to spend at least 15 months in prison for failing to report more than $200,000 in cash he obtained while working as an Atlanta agent in 2004.

Gregory Campion, 46, of Orlando was a longtime DEA agent, serving from 2003 to 2005 as backup supervisor at an Atlanta task force office where he had access to millions of dollars in cash seized from drug traffickers. In 2006, Campion was indicted for embezzling seized drug money, but prosecutors agreed to drop those charges in exchange for the guilty plea to the tax charge.

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In a woefully shortsighted opinion by Craig Morford, he stated as acting deputy U.S. attorney general that "we believe communities are safer when violent, convicted criminals are imprisoned for the full duration of their sentences" ("Crack crooks are behind bars for a reason," @issue, Feb. 29).

My question is, "And then what?" As he acknowledged, "re-entry programs are not equipped to deal with this many offenders." The more intelligent and responsible action would be to devise, fund and equip re-entry programs so they are able to effectively deal with a large number of people who need substance-abuse counseling, not imprisonment. To say that we can't handle it, so we'll just lock them up and unleash them in 20 years is an abdication of responsibility. Morford advocates dumping today's untreated addicts on tomorrow's innocent citizens. What a tragedy.

Lisa Bashir,

Loganville

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Metro Atlanta may get a little bloodier. Call it a sign of success.

Jack Killorin, who heads a federal narcotics task force, said his agents are rolling up drug-trafficking organizations to the point that they have decreased the quality and raised the price of drugs on the street.

He credits last year's spike in area burglaries, robberies and car thefts in part to criminals forced to pay more for their illicit drugs.

If law enforcement someday succeeds in breaking up established drug territories - the real sign of success from a metropolitan perspective - it could mean a similar spike in murders, as drug organizations vie for a larger market share.

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Three U.S. Army Rangers and another soldier were charged Friday with drug conspiracy after agreeing to an undercover scheme that involved the armed robbery of purported cocaine traffickers.

When three of the men --- Carlos Lopez, 30, Stefan Andre Champagne, 28, and David Ray White, 28, all staff sergeants --- were arrested Thursday, they had an assault rifle, semi-automatic pistols, 15 magazines of ammunition, a TASER, a ski mask and a medic kit. The soldiers, two of whom were armed, were taken by surprise and arrested by agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' SWAT team and Sandy Springs police officers.

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Businesses Paid Officers Directly for Extra Patrols. Crime Pushed to Owners Who Didn't Pay, U.S. Attorney Says.

A former Atlanta police officer pleaded guilty Thursday to extortion charges that were uncovered in the ongoing federal investigation of the fatal shooting of an elderly woman during a botched drug raid in 2006.

Daniel Betts, who resigned from the force shortly before his plea, admitted accepting payoffs in exchange for extra patrols. Betts and other officers would give business owners their phone numbers so if there was trouble, the owners could call the officers directly, not 911.

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Mandatory minimum prison sentences have done little other than give the land of the free the highest incarceration rate in the world. (Editorial, "Cracked Sentencing," Dec. 24)

The deterrent value of tough drug laws is grossly overrated. During the crack epidemic of the 1980s, New York City chose the zero tolerance approach, opting to arrest and prosecute as many offenders as possible.

Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry was smoking crack and America's capital had the highest per-capita murder rate in the country.

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You don't hear much about the nation's "war on drugs" these days. It's a has-been, a glamorless geezer, a holdover from bygone days. Its glitz has been stolen by the "war on terror," which gets the news media hype and campaign trail rhetoric. Railing against recreational drug use and demanding that offenders be locked away is so '90s.

But the drug war proceeds, mostly away from news cameras and photo ops, still chewing up federal and state resources and casting criminal sanctions over entire neighborhoods. Some four or so decades into an intensive effort to stamp out recreational drug use, billions of dollars have been spent; thousands of criminals, many of them foreigners, have been enriched; and hundreds of thousands of Americans have been imprisoned. And the use of illegal substances continues unabated.

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THERE IS only one illicit drug in America for which one is sentenced differently, depending on how it's ingested: Cocaine.

Until recently, the federal sentencing guidelines for powder and crack cocaine were vastly different. For instance, the penalty a person would face for possessing only five grams of crack equaled the penalty a person would face for possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Now, federal authorities have rightly taken steps to make the sentences more equitable.

Crack might be more addictive than powder cocaine, but on a scale of relative evils, a coke dealer is a coke dealer.

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Clark County officials could seek an injunction against the Southern Indiana Treatment Center, a methadone clinic, as early as Thursday, county attorney Dan Moore said during a telephone interview Tuesday evening.

"I think there are a lot of issues with the safety," said Moore. "I have my thoughts in my mind, and I've done my legal research."

Last Thursday, the Clark County Commissioners voted 3-0 to seek an injunction against the methadone clinic, on the basis of public safety issues that became apparent when the clinic opened at its Charlestown Pike location a week ago today.

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Cops Say Gangs Are Driving The City's Crime Surge

The "International Robbing Crew" was the gang that shot straight -- or, at least, often.

Prosecutors on Nov. 2 charged nine young desperados from the gang, at least three of them from New Orleans, with seven murders. But cops say they may have killed as many as 30 people over the last two years in a brutal gambit to dominate the Atlanta crime scene.

Some of the murder victims apparently were random, among them an Iraq war vet who was gunned down on Spring Street in what prosecutors speculate was target practice by the gangsters.

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If Isaac Saleumsy was a drug dealer, he wasn't a very good one.

Either that or he just didn't pay his bills.

The Marietta police officer rarely paid the monthly dues for his east Cobb County condominium - which resulted in a lien on his condo, and got his pickup truck towed this summer.

He also apparently struggled to pay his mortgage, as a foreclosure announcement for his condo ran in a local newspaper around the same time.

Saleumsy's money problems rankled his neighbors, but those who knew the 30-year-old cop say they never could have predicted he would be charged as an Ecstasy dealer in an international drug ring.

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