Strange things happen here in February, especially in government. But few have been as strange or as damning as the attempt by townsite police chief Heath Scott to criminally prosecute his political opponents, three years ago this month.
Arresting or locking up your political opponents is associated with tin-horn dictators in lawless, Third World nations, but Scott took action akin to just that in February 2017 when he forwarded to the district attorney for criminal prosecution a complaint against four assembly members for their votes on a political appointment.
We’ve seen outrageous behavior by previous police chiefs in Haines. One police chief stole money from a police account (Cliff Christensen), another bilked the City of Haines for overtime pay that as a salaried employee, he wasn’t entitled to (Bob Smart) and one even bullied his own employees (Gary Lowe), but by all appearances Scott used the law to try to punish political opponents, an unprecedented, brazen and particularly egregious abuse of police power.
In January 2017, four assembly members – Margaret Friedenauer, Heather Lende, Ron Jackson and Tresham Gregg – rejected a recommendation by Mayor Jan Hill to appoint former assembly member Diana Lapham to the Ports and Harbors Advisory Committee.
Among their reasons for rejecting Hill’s recommendation, assembly members cited Lapham’s support of a lawsuit against the assembly for firing manager Bill Seward, Heath Scott’s former supervisor, friend and roommate. (Scott’s wife, Candace Mustard-Scott, also was on record contributing to the lawsuit.)
Don Turner Jr. and Terry Pardee, friends of Lapham’s who about a month later led a recall effort against assembly members, wrote up a complaint against the four assembly members, alleging, with specious logic, that not appointing Lapham amounted to a violation of Lapham’s First Amendment rights.
It was a crazy claim, but even if it had merit, it wasn’t a criminal matter, it was a civil one. Anyone who ever watched a cop shows knows that when a person calls the police to complain that their landlord violated their rights by evicting them, or that their car mechanic ripped them off, the cop says, “I’m sorry. I can’t do anything about that. That’s a civil matter.”
Police operate only in the area of criminal law. Civil law is for teams of lawyers. This is not a complicated question.
As explained by the website, LawHelp.org: “Criminal laws are the rules that apply when someone commits a crime, such as assault, robbery, arson, rape and other kinds of crimes. Civil law refers to almost all other disputes – these are the rules that apply when one person sues another person, a business or agency.” The website goes on to say that civil court cases can also be about “discrimination and civil rights violations.”
Here’s another big difference: When you’re guilty in a civil court, you’re fined. When you’re guilty of a crime, you’re often arrested and put in jail.
Lapham and friends were alleging that her rights had been violated, not that she suffered any crime. So when their complaint landed on Chief Scott’s desk, Scott should have done what every beat cop in history has done when someone claims their rights were violated. He should have said to Turner and Pardee: “Sorry. This isn’t a criminal matter. You have to take this to civil court.”
This is Police Protocol 101. You needn’t go to law school to learn it. It’s something they teach on the first day at the police academy.
Why then did Heath Scott send the complaint to the state district attorney whose sole responsibility is prosecuting criminal matters? Was Scott so ignorant of his own job that he didn’t understand the difference between criminal and civil law? Or was he so supportive of attacking the assembly that fired his friend that he didn’t care about the limits of his authority? Or did he take the town of Haines for a bunch of rubes who didn’t know any better?
The district attorney, James Scott, effectively laughed Pardee and Turner’s complaint off his desk, and the language that he used in dismissing it showed that he tried explaining basic police law to Heath Scott before Scott put the complaint in the mail.
“As we discussed before you forwarded the material related to this claim, it is difficult to imagine a set of circumstances where law enforcement and prosecutors should proceed with more caution,” James Scott wrote. “It should not come as a surprise that convicting elected officials of a crime for actions taken in their official capacity, while on the record at a public meeting, would be unprecedented.”
Assembly member Friedenauer, who had worked as a paralegal, called Scott’s action forwarding the complaint “insulting,” but Friedenauer and other assembly members were too forgiving. Heath Scott’s action was much worse than an insult. It was an attack on their integrity and on their ability to function in the seats to which the public elected them.
It had a chilling effect. Not long after, Friedenauer resigned from the assembly. “I’m very upset by (the criminal charge), which means they won,” she said of the matter. A few weeks later Scott ginned up a complaint against assembly members as part of Turner’s attempt to recall several of the same assembly members targeted in his Lapham complaint. The recall failed.
But by sending the Lapham complaint to the district attorney, Scott either knew he was using his position to rough up his political opponents, or he was so woefully ignorant of his job that he didn’t understand the difference between civil and criminal law.
Either of the above were grounds for firing Scott, which should have happened, but by then Scott had also made friends of his new supervisor, Brad Ryan, who gave Scott a pass.
A few months later, I raised this incident with manager Debra Schnabel, Scott’s current supervisor. Schnabel defended Scott, saying he forwarded the complaint to the district attorney “to remove himself” from the politics of the situation.
Not even on its face does that explanation stand up. You don’t break the rules of your profession “to avoid politics.” You don’t run up a criminal complaint against four politicians — causing them public ridicule and embarrassment — “to avoid politics.”
What Scott did was all about politics. He knew it and should have been fired for it. On the infinitesimal possibility that he didn’t know it, Scott then demonstrated in a way that damaged the reputations of others that he also didn’t know the first thing about law enforcement, in which case he should have been fired for incompetence.
Remarkably, three years later, Scott is still on the job.