Keeping young people off drugs: by putting them in the morgue.

Shot in head
by Dana Larsen (11 Nov, 2002) New York cop kills youth in pot raid

A New York grand jury has decided not to indict a police officer who shot and killed a man during a botched marijuana raid.

Jose Colon, a 20-year-old art student, was shot in the head on April 19, 2002, as he emerged from a house upon which several police officers were advancing for a pot raid. Police claimed that Officer Tony Gonzalez's drawn 9-millimeter submachine gun accidentally fired when he was bumped from behind by another officer.

Police seized a few ounces of bud at the house, and arrested four people on charges of possession.

While awaiting the results of the grand jury, Officer Gonzalez was temporarily assigned to administrative duty, ironically as a "firearms instructor."

A lawyer for Colon's family said they would pursue a wrongful death lawsuit.

Killer cops

In incidents involving DEA agents and other police officers, drug warriors have inflicted severe injury and death on innocent people.

In St. Louis in 2000, DEA agents shot 21 times into a car they claimed was racing towards them, killing the car's driver and passenger. Witnesses said that the car had not been moving at all. The DEA exonerated the agents.

In a Brooklyn incident two years ago, a DEA agent shot and killed an unarmed father of two in the back. The DEA said the shooting was "self-defense."

In 1992, DEA agents and Los Angeles sheriffs killed millionaire Donald Scott during a marijuana cultivation raid. Police documents showed the raid was fueled by agents' desire to seize Scott's land, and that there was absolutely no marijuana anywhere on Scott's property. No police officer was ever arrested for Scott's death.

In 2000, a 62-year-old African-American was shot dead by five white police officers in his home in Lebanon, Tennessee. Officers had a faulty search warrant with the wrong address on it.

Also in 2000, an 11-year-old Hispanic boy was shot in the back and killed by officers during a botched drug raid in Modesto, California.

In Tulia, Texas in 1999, a large percentage of the town's African-American residents were arrested during a drug sweep based solely on the testimony of a now-discredited racist undercover cop named Thomas Coleman. Many of those arrested were jailed or otherwise had their lives ruined. Earlier this year, prosecutors moved to overturn their convictions while the county tried to pay them off for wrongfully imprisoning them.

The Tulia case mirrors a drug war battle gone wrong in Dallas in 2001, during which undercover cops set up dozens of impoverished Hispanics on bogus drug charges, using powdered sheetrock that the cops alleged was cocaine.

The list of drug war killings and frauds is long and getting longer, but the unifying feature of these tragedies is that police officers who commit drug war crimes are rarely if ever brought to justice.

Extracted from The Murder Of Ashley