Gov. Martin O'Malley, who was mayor of Baltimore when police agents spied on activists in the city, said the report should offer "assurances" that his administration takes the matter seriously.
The Sachs report concludes that O'Malley was unaware of the spying at the time, and that neither Baltimore City, Baltimore County nor Anne Arundel police departments "participated in any way" in the state police operation.
Ehrlich and former police superintendent Col. Tim Hutchins declined to be interviewed by Sachs or state lawyers assisting his review. Hutchins is expected to testify before a state Senate hearing on the matter next week.
Though the Sachs report offers the first independent account of a 14-month surveillance operation that has sparked outrage among Maryland activists across the political spectrum, it does not answer key questions, including when the state police began monitoring political groups, and who ordered the undercover tactics.
"I don't think we know the answer to that," Sachs said in an interview yesterday. "The search for culprits, frankly, may be futile," he said, because the problem was "systemic."
That answer doesn't satisfy Max Obuszewski, a Baltimore peace and anti-death penalty activist whom the report describes as having the most contact with the lead undercover trooper, who went by aliases "Lucy Shoup" and "Lucy McDonald."
"We have to find out who ordered this," Obuszewski said. "How far up the ladder does it go?"
Sachs reports that by late 2004, the state police "may have decided to cast a relatively broad net in the 'protest group' area seeking to learn more about the activist community in general."
But the investigation, which included 32 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, focused on the 14-month surveillance of anti-death penalty groups, starting in March 2005.
The report concludes that the surveillance project was instigated by Maj. Jack Simpson, then in charge of special operations at the state police. Simpson asked subordinates in the police's Homeland Security and Intelligence Division to prepare a "threat assessment" around the upcoming executions of death-row inmates Vernon Lee Evans Jr. and Wesley Eugene Baker.
"It is ... our impression that Simpson's forceful presence, and his rank, influenced" the Homeland Security unit, established just two years earlier, "to launch the covert operation," the report says.
