Maryland State Police "over-reached" and disregarded civil rights when they spied on anti-death penalty and peace activists in 2005 and 2006, according to a report commissioned by Gov. Martin O'Malley and released yesterday.
Undercover troopers and their bosses were not justified in their surveillance of peaceful protesters and ignored the free-speech implications of their actions, concluded former Maryland Attorney General Stephen H. Sachs in a 93-page report. Police may have violated federal law when they labeled activists as possible terrorists in a multistate database, the report said.
While Sachs found that the police's public-safety rationale for their spying was "sincere," he also called it "misguided" and said that the agency under the administration of former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. operated under "systemic obliviousness" to the potential harm caused by spying.
"I believe that the surveillance undertaken here is inconsistent with an overarching value in our democratic society - the free and unfettered debate of important public questions," Sachs states in his report. "Such police conduct ought to be prohibited as a matter of public policy."
Details of the secret police operation were first made public by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland this summer, which sued to get the information. ACLU staff attorney David Rocah yesterday called the Sachs report "explosive" and said it "depicts a police force that completely lost its moorings."
But Rocah said a more comprehensive review was needed and that the General Assembly should act to prevent recurrences.
"We want binding legal controls" over state surveillance of activists, said Rocah, who this week filed public-records requests on behalf of more than 30 political groups that fear they may have also been covertly monitored.
Col. Terrence B. Sheridan, the current police superintendent, said his agency would adopt all of Sachs' recommendations. Among them are that spying on political groups be conducted as a last resort and only when there is clear indication of illegal activity. Sachs also recommends that those subjected to unjustified spying should be notified and allowed to view the information gathered about them before it is purged.
Nevertheless, Rocah said "the level of impropriety here is sufficiently serious ... that we should not leave it to mere regulations that can be changed at whim."
