Reality doesn’t always jibe with first impressions, so maybe the Jefferson County district attorney’s office will end up giving Denver Detective Paul Baca a clean bill of health. Maybe its ongoing review of the officer’s alleged role in fabricating an injury by an assault victim will stop short of accusing Baca of engaging in witness tampering, or even perjury.
But if so, let’s hope the Jeffco DA has a mighty persuasive argument for why Baca gets a pass. A detective who would help to invent evidence qualifying defendants for harsher sentences is a rogue who ought to find another line of work. And the facts as we know them, unfortunately, look anything but good.
Baca was an investigator in last year’s race-based downtown muggings — black males jumping solitary white and Hispanic men. But the victim of one such assault, Allen Andes, admitted early this year that he lied about the extent of his injuries, and claimed Baca was partly responsible for his deceit.
As a February report from the Denver DA’s office explained, “Andes stated that he had felt pressured by . . . Baca to state that the tooth was broken in the assault” even though he’d told the detective “the tooth had been previously broken in another incident in Philadelphia.”
Although Andes did suffer a lacerated lip, black eye and bumps and bruises on his head from the beating, none of that met the legal definition of “serious bodily injury” needed for felony assault.
In other words, the tooth was a big deal — big enough that after Andes recanted, Denver prosecutors reduced a felony assault charge for seven suspects to misdemeanor assault and police began a probe of Baca’s conduct that they eventually turned over to the Jeffco DA.
“Our office is reviewing the material,” Jeffco DA spokeswoman Pam Russell told me, but couldn’t say when it might conclude.
After Andes recanted, a Denver police spokesman reminded The Post’s Kirk Mitchell that “people make allegations all the time” against officers. True enough, and many no doubt are invented. But in this case we have more to go on than one individual’s word. Baca’s initial interview with Andes, taped at police headquarters, included a damning exchange that CBS4’s Brian Maass recounted last month.
Baca: “Did they chip your teeth?” Andes: “No . . . that was already (there).”
Maass also aired audiotape of two hearings in January in which Baca was asked about Andes’ injuries. “Possibly some chipped teeth,” Baca responded in one. At the next hearing the “possibly” is gone. The detective can be heard flatly declaring, “. . . and the front tooth which had not been damaged previously was damaged during this. Broken, yes.”
Denver, we’ve got a problem. Unless Andes told Baca after the August interview that his tooth, come to think of it, was chipped in the assault, what would explain the detective’s testimony?
Not long after those hearings, America marked a disturbing milestone when a New York judge vacated a rape conviction from the 1970s, the 250th time a person has been exonerated by a DNA test. According to the Innocence Project, “The cases of wrongful convictions uncovered by DNA testing are replete with evidence of fraud or misconduct by prosecutors or police departments.”
The men who assaulted Andes are obviously not innocent, but they too deserve punishment in line with the law — as opposed to the fancies of a free-wheeling detective.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
