Despite a police analyst's report that "contained nothing to indicate that protests surrounding the planned executions posed a significant threat to public safety," a trooper identified as Trooper No. 1 was dispatched on a 14-month infiltration of anti-death penalty groups, the report found.
Greg Shipley, a police spokesman, declined to say who Trooper No. 1 is, because she may still be "working undercover." Shipley said Simpson now heads up the police department's records division.
In April 2005, after learning that Obuszewski was also an active anti-war advocate, Trooper No. 1's spying expanded to include peace groups, the report said, making the surveillance operation's "connection to crime prevention and public safety ... even more tenuous."
At no point did any of the four troopers who engaged in spying on political groups discover any real threat to public safety, said Sachs, who said he was given unfettered access by state police to their records.
Some Maryland activists have said they are worried that police targeted individuals or groups for political reasons. But Sachs says in the report that he did not find any evidence of that.
"I am convinced that [police] did not attempt to compile political "dossiers" on the participants, or otherwise suppress any particular viewpoint as subversive and threatening by virtue of its ideology," he states. "There is not evidence ... that [police were] motivated by anything other than a desire to protect the public safety.
Though he is sharply critical of the police for failing to take into consideration the civil rights of activists who were spied upon, Sachs does not recommend disciplinary action. Nor does he believe, he said in an interview, that there are grounds for criminal charges, though the reports states that one aspect of the operation may have been technically illegal.
By transmitting some of its surveillance findings to a federally funded regional database designed to target drug trafficking, the state police "violated federal regulations," Sachs reported, because there was no "reasonable suspicion" that the Maryland activists were "involved in criminal conduct."
The report also found that state police in its own database "indiscriminately" and inappropriately designated anti-death penalty activists as under surveillance for "terrorism."
