Justice Perverted?
In its efforts to convict a man, Fort Wayne Police Officials are accused of withholding information about its confidential informant
By Fredrick McKissack
Of Fort Wayne Ink Spot
John A. Bridges, a man sentenced in 2015 to 20 years for drug dealing, hopes that an Allen County magistrate will seriously consider that even in criminal court cases, the laws of judicial conduct apply to both the accused and his accusers.
Bridges admits he’s made mistakes in his life. However, he and his Merrillville-based attorney, Russell Brown, contend that when Judge Wendy Davis sentenced him the scales of justice were tilted against him to the point of being unconstitutional.
Among the grounds for setting aside Bridges’ conviction—including ineffective assistance by both trial and appellate counsel—the most damning at first glance is Fort Wayne Police narcotics detectives failed to divulge that its confidential informant had been paid “to testify at the deposition and subsequently at trial,” Bridges and Brown wrote in a petition filed last year.
Bridges’ evidentiary hearing on Monday, April 19 at the Allen County Courthouse in front of Magistrate Steven O. Godfrey, will be the first step toward casting doubt on his conviction. Most likely, the magistrate will take the case under advisement and then do his own research before rendering his ruling. The best-case scenario, Brown said, is that a new trial would be held.
“It’s pretty disturbing,” Brown said in a telephone interview, who added that he’s “never seen anything like this” in his 11 years as a lawyer.
Calls for comment by the Allen County Prosecutor’s Office were not returned.
Bridges, 41, has spent the last six years at Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Ind.
“I’ve been dealing with this for six years,” he said by phone. “When you go to trial, if they have evidence, they need to show it to your lawyer. The law says it’s supposed to be done this way, right?”
The case against Bridges, which was upheld by the Indiana appellate court in 2016, hinges on two drug buys—Jan. 20 and Jan. 30, 2015—made by a confidential informant under the direction of Fort Wayne Police Department Det. Shane Heath. In both cases, the informant bought heroin from Bridges. Based on those buys, police raided an apartment on Lake Avenue. Bridges and his girlfriend at the time were not on the lease, but, according to the police, he and another woman were exchanging drugs for rent payment.
On Feb. 9, 2015, the state charged Bridges on six counts, four of which were for dealing a narcotic drug; one was a lower-level drug offense; and one for possessing a handgun as a felon, which was later dropped.
Bridges, originally from Muskegon, MI, served six years in federal prison for felony possession of a handgun. He moved to Fort Wayne in late 2012 to “get away from the life I was leading.” His father lived here. He died last October.
Bridges said he tried to stay on the “righteous tip” for a year and a half, but he couldn’t find work. Futility and fatalism pushed him back toward a life of crime.
Bridges’ past weapons conviction has an unusual role in his current case. According to Bridges and his lawyer, police pulled Bridges over days before his arrest. Bridges said he wasn’t given a reason for the stop.
Two things are striking here. First, Bridges was driving with his girlfriend at the time on a suspended license from Michigan. His only form of identification was an Indiana ID. According to Bridges, the detective who pulled him over told Bridges to get his license straightened out.
In checking the National Crime Information Center records, Kirby would’ve been aware that he had an outstanding federal warrant dating from 2014 for failing to check in with his probation officer. Instead of arresting him, the detective let him drive away.
Brown said that while extraordinary, it isn’t unprecedented for police to let a “minor offense” go if they’re after something bigger.
“The only reason for that stop was to identify who [Bridges] was,” said Brown, “which we contend they had no basis to pull him over at all.
“So,” he added, “what you have here is that you have a confidential informant who is being paid to essentially set up a drug dealer.”
The informant is deceased. And she had been a drug user, according to the deposition taken in 2015, where Bridges trial attorney, Bart Arnold, questioned both the informant and Det. Heath.
Q: ...How did you become involved in the case?
A: I went to the police knowing that John sold heroin.
Q: Now, sometimes people become confidential informants for a lot of different reasons. What was the reason you became a confidential informant?
A: I had done some work for a different county, and I met one of the officers here, and I really like working with him. So—
The person she was referring to was Det. Heath. The informant said she had met Heath while, as Arnold put it, “working off charges on another case somewhere else.”
Q: So, for this particular case were you working off any charges this time?”
A: No, I was not.
Q: So, you weren’t in any trouble?
A: Nope.
Later, Arnold asked the CI why she chose to be an informant in this case?
A: I knew that he had a lot of guns, and there were kids around. And I knew that he was dangerous.
Q: What was in it for you? Was there anything in it for you?
A: I mean, the police department paid me, but that is not why I did it.
According to the informant, she was paid $100 for each buy—$200 total. Later in the deposition, she told Arnold that she had stopped using drugs a week before she bought heroin from Bridges with police money. However, she also testified that she had worked with police on two other investigations in late 2014, while she was using.
She said she quit before the Jan. 20 heroin buy because she’d lost custody of her son. It was “a sobering moment,” she told Arnold.
What wasn’t asked, because it wasn’t known at the time, is why the informant was being paid for her deposition? Later, she would be paid for testimony in court. According to Brown, payment like this is unprecedented.
In a letter dated Nov. 5, 2015, Bart Arnold wrote to Bridges explaining that he’d just learned that the police “had not divulged to the prosecutor that they were paying her to testify at trial and deposition.”
Furthermore, Arnold wrote, another attorney learned that the confidential informant had been “paid thousands of dollars for various services she’s provided the police department and again, you and I did not know that for our trial.”
This and other information did not appear in the 2016 appellate petition. It would be speculative to say that Judge Davis would’ve ruled differently had she known. The question posed by Bridges and Brown is that all parties involved in the first trial should’ve been made aware of the CI’s level of involvement with police in order for justice to be weighed fairly.