AN INNOCENT MAN

They stood in line for Scott Sanders — friends, relatives and the cops who once worked by his side in the Special Intelligence Division and other branches of the force. They hugged him tenderly, crying. They clasped him roughly and thumped his back. Some laid their heads on his shoulder.

Minutes before, a jury had declared him not guilty on a charge of “causing to be accessed a government computer, willfully and without consent” after a deliberation that began on Thursday at 3:45 p.m. and wended its way through Friday afternoon.

The verdict brought gasps and barely audible sighs, caused cascades of tears and loosened knitted brows among the dozens who had supported him all week in courtroom 4C, the ones who, with Sanders, had lived with the charge — a Class H felony — since he was indicted by a grand jury in September 2007 along with fellow officer William “Tom” Fox, who was named as a co-conspirator along with Sanders in another related charge.

After the verdict was read, the other charges against Sanders and Fox, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice, were summarily dropped by Special Prosecutor Jim Coman, the senior deputy attorney general who came in from Raleigh to try the case. It was a cathartic moment for Sanders, his family and friends. And for a city that has been living with turmoil in its police department since City Manager Mitch Johnson locked former Greensboro Police Chief David Wray out of his office in January 2006, the verdict spelled an end — at least in the criminal courts — to the controversy.

These were the only criminal charges to arise from allegations of racial profiling in the GPD, a saga that

featured high-volume cocaine dealers, secretly taped conversations, lascivious prostitutes, numerous civil suits, tracking devices, a “black book,” leaked documents and state and federal law-enforcement agencies, most of which the jury knew absolutely nothing about. For their purposes, the entire fiasco boiled down to the state’s Exhibit 1, officer Julius “Jay” Fulmore’s laptop.

The laptop

It’s a Toshiba, ca. 1995, made of obsolete circuitry and creaky gray plastic, big as a phone book, bereft of USB. And when the jury passed it around the box on Day 3 of the trial, they turned it over in their hands, ran their fingers across it, looked at the orange Housing and Urban Development sticker on top. This is the computer that Sanders handed over to a special agent from the State Bureau of Investigation, Gary R. Cullop, on Dec. 20, 2003. Then, at Sanders’ behest, Cullop removed the hard drive, brought it to his Greensboro office and searched it for anything that would incriminate Fulmore.

This fact was not under dispute. Sanders never denied that he searched Fulmore’s computer. He had, in fact, already searched Fulmore’s office desktop computer, and found what he considered evidence of association with prostitutes.

At issue here was whether the computer was the property of HUD, where it originally came from, or the GPD, where the man who used it worked. Or was it Fulmore’s personal computer? He retained possession of it until 2006 even through a nine-month suspension that ended in March 2005. Another matter for the jury to decide was if Sanders had received proper special agent who loaned Fulmore the computer in early 2000 while working together on a multi-agency task force called “Operation Hole Shot,” or if Sanders needed permission at all to search the machine during the course of a criminal investigation. Sorting out these issues would take five full days.

The crew

Coman, the special prosecutor, and Seth Cohen, counsel for the defense, insisted from the beginning that jurors would only see this tiny slice of the larger police controversy, and that anyone sitting on the jury hadn’t read the thousands upon thousands of words that have been published locally about the overarching storyline.

“News accounts, with all due respect to news outlets, are sometimes inaccurate,” Superior Court Judge Forrest Donald Bridges said to the jury pool on Day 1 of the trial. “News coverage is not testimony.”

Both lawyers agreed on an inaccuracy that had appeared in the Greensboro News & Record that very day. On Day 2, Cohen fumed about a segment by Frank Mickens on WFMY the night before, about which he claimed bias and inaccuracy.

The outburst prompted Coman to relay a synopsis of the entire story to Judge Bridges, who, like Coman, had been brought in from his bench in Shelby specifically to adjudicate this case. When he got to the part about the report compiled by Risk Management Associates, a lengthy document chronicling a thirdparty investigation into the various interdepartmental machinations and their effects, he paused.

“This report, your honor, has actually ended up on the internet,” he said. “The bloggers had a field day with it — I only know that because I’ve been told that.” “How many people read it?” the judge wanted to know. Coman could not quantify, but he could elaborate.

“My concern is if we go into this, we’re really gonna open Pandora’s Box.” One potential juror during voir dire uttered the words “black book,” which caused Judge Bridges to clear the rest of the jury pool from the courtroom. She was not chosen to sit on the jury. Another issue raised during jury selection on Day 2 concerned race, after Cohen attempted to use a peremptory challenge to strike his fifth African- American juror in a row. Coman objected, but Cohen maintained that he wanted to eliminate the potential juror because, he said, “I don’t like her attitude.”

Judge Bridges considered the situation. “What if it were being done in the reverse order, with a black defendant, and the state had established a pattern?” he asked.

“I daresay that in that situation a judge would be hard-pressed not to have some grave concerns about the challenge. “I have some grave concerns about this matter,” he continued, “so much so that I am going to sustain the objection.”

The black juror was selected as the first alternate juror. The other alternate juror was also African American. But of the sitting jury, only two were black, both women, along with six white males and four white females. One thing they had in common was near-total ignorance about the case and the greater circumstances surrounding it. Judge Bridges declared that there would be no cameras of any kind in the courtroom, and that witnesses, excluding the SBI agents seated at the prosecution table, would be barred from hearing any other testimony. At one point during the discovery process, Judge Bridges removed Special Agent Mark Heinbach from the courtroom after Cohen saw him walk in.

The beginning

In his opening statements on Day 2 of the trial, Coman gave a history of the computer and the people connected to it, then succinctly outlined his case in a calm, deep voice.

“The state position is that the defendant knew he had to have the permission of HUD to look at that computer,” he said, alleging that Sanders had misled Cullop into pulling and searching the hard drive.

He would use testimony from key witnesses to support his burden of proof. Cohen, in his opening statements, came with more brio. “There were serious, serious allegations about Officer Fulmore coming out of Guilford County Jail,” he said. “Someone told [Guilford County Sheriff] BJ Barnes he was protecting Terry Bracken. [Bracken is] a major drug dealer. He’s in federal prison.”

He asserted that Sanders was investigating Fulmore under the auspices of the SBI, and in that context, Sanders had “all the authority in the world” to inspect the computer. “Detectives detect,” he said. Irregardless of that, he maintained that Special Agent Heinbach had, in fact, given Sanders permission to search the computer over the phone in 2003. And that Sanders also had permission from then-Deputy Chief Randall Brady, who was on the defense’s witness list. “That’s the evidence in this case,” he said. “It’s not a complicated case.”

The fed

HUD agent Mark Heinbach, a large man shaped like an exclamation point with a wavy mane of hair, took the stand as the state’s first witness. Under questioning by Coman, Heinbach, who has been with HUD for 17 years and works out of the North Piedmont Office in Greensboro, spoke about Operation Hole Shot. It was a special task force created in 2000, he said, to tackle problems like violent crime, guns, gangs and narcotics in area public housing projects. The force gathered five law enforcement officers from the FBI, the Secret Service, the SBI, the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office and the GPD. Fulmore was the lone Greensboro police officer assigned to the task force; SBI Special Agent James Bowman, who sat behind the prosecution table and would later be called upon to testify himself, supervised.

Heinbach admitted giving the computer to Fulmore in 2000 to aid in his police work. Of Fulmore, Heinbach testified: “We worked a lot of long hours. I’d trust him with my life.” When Sanders and Bowman met with him on December 2003 to request permission to search the computer, then in Fulmore’s possession, Heinbach said he told them he would “look into it.” “I wanted to get approval from my supervisor before I did something.” He said. He testified that Sanders and Bowman paid him another visit with the same request “a couple months later,” and that he told them to ask his supervisors in Atlanta.

Both parties agree on the request, but Heinbach’s testimony contradicted the SBI investigation’s timeline, which placed the second request only a couple weeks after the first, on Dec. 17, something which Cohen would seize upon during cross-examination.

Sanders asked him about the computer a third time, he said, in the summer of 2007, just before his indictment. Sanders, he testified, said something along the lines of “How can we make this go away?” Heinbach had heard that Sanders was in the habit of tape-recording phone conversations without the other parties’ knowledge, he testified, and that “I felt he was trying to make me say that I gave him access to the computer.”

“And would that be true?” Coman asked. “That would be false,” the federal agent said. In his cross-examination, Cohen pointed out the timeline discrepancy, and accused Heinbach of changing his story to comply with Bowman’s testimony in the SBI investigation. He also had questions about Fulmore’s use of the computer.

Operation Hole Shot had ended in 2002, he said, yet “Julius Fulmore kept the computer for the whole year 2002, 2003, 2004 — are you aware that in 2004 he was suspended from the GPD?” By the time Heinbach got the computer back in 2006, Cohen said, “Operation Hole Shot had been over for five years.”

Cohen also pointed out that while Heinbach had filled out a HUD chain-of-custody form when he got the computer back from Fulmore in 2006, there was no documentation of the initial transfer of the computer from Heinbach to Fulmore.

“You couldn’t spend 30 seconds to fill out a form before you gave it to Jay Fulmore? … [The form] existed,” Cohen charged, “you just decided not to use it.” “Yes,” Heinbach eventually admitted.

The techies

On Day 3 of the trial, Special Agent Cullop, a mustachioed man who has been with the SBI for more than 20 years, took the stand. He is the agent Sanders was alleged to have deceived in order to get at the contents of Fulmore’s computer.

Cullop has worked in the computer crimes division of the bureau’s North Piedmont office since January 2003 in the forensic unit. He testified that Sanders asked him to come to the Special Intelligence Division’s office on Yanceyville Street, where Sanders shared a workspace with Fulmore, on a Saturday morning to procure the laptop. It was in the middle drawer of Fulmore’s desk, he said, and he tried to swipe the hard drive right there, but then removed the hard drive and brought it to his Greensboro office, made several copies of it and returned it within a couple hours.

“I tried to put it back in the drawer so it looked like it hadn’t been moved,” he said. “He wanted it done surreptitiously so Fulmore wouldn’t be aware.” Sanders informed him that Fulmore was under investigation, Cullop said, but that Sanders did not show him a search warrant for the machine.

“We can only examine a computer with the owner’s consent,” he said, “or with a search warrant or a court order. “I’m sure I asked. ‘Do you have consent to do this?’ he continued, “and I was told that he did.” Cullop said he pulled some e-mails from the computer, but that “there was very little information I thought would be useful” in an investigation.

He said that he did not notice that orange HUD sticker on the computer, that he thought it was a city of Greensboro computer and that he was assisting in an internal criminal investigation. When Cohen tried to exploit this in cross- examination, Cullop elaborated.

“Over the years I have seen equipment in these police departments that come from a variety of places: surplus military, property seizures… HUD did not even enter my mind until 2006.” The day also saw testimony by Darryl Jones, the city’s information technology director. Though he admitted he had never been asked to participate in a criminal investigation, he was able to clarify the city’s internet use policy, which states that those using city equipment should have no expectation of privacy while online.

Anita McCoy, who is the network services manager for the GPD, concurred with that policy on the witness stand and proffered that the department had its own internet use policy.

“A request to access someone’s e-mail account and access to a computer are two different things,” she said. “There is a process for obtaining e-mails or files; that comes through me.” Someone wishing to look at a police officer’s e-mails, she said, should first call her to make the request, get the request in writing and then e-mail a network engineer CC’d to Jones, the IT director.

On cross-examination, Cohen wanted to know if the GPD policy affected officers using their home machines to access the GPD server. “All policies apply while they are in the mainframe,” she said, but that “once they are off the mainframe, their home computer is not subject to city policy.”

“You did not write this directive?” Cohen asked. “This directive?” she said. “Yes I did.” Cohen pointed out that the wording of the policy did not specify this nuance. “Those words are not there, no, but that was the intent of the policy,” she said. “I have been asked that question by officers.”

The street cop

Detective Julius Fulmore has been on the Greensboro police force for 25 years. He has been named to numerous multiagency task forces in that time, and is purported to have made the very first crack cocaine bust in North Carolina.

He has had known associations with prostitutes and addicts, stood accused of providing protection for large-scale drug dealers operating in the area and been investigated by local, state and federal agencies. He also was suspended from the GPD for nine months in 2004-’05 for an inappropriate and undocumented relationship with Brenda Weidman, a prostitute and police informant who he met during a routine traffic stop in 2002. This was the result of an investigation opened in 2003 by Special Agent Bowman of the SBI after a corrections officer at Guilford County Jail relayed an accusation by inmate Pamela Williams: that Fulmore was protecting Bracken, the drug lord. Williams, who Fulmore describes as “a con artist who was investigated by the Secret Service,” had given reliable information before, about a prostitution ring operating in the prison. So Bowman thought it prudent to check the situation out. He enlisted Sanders to aid in the investigation.

When Sanders searched the computer on Fulmore’s desk in the office space they shared in December of that year, he found an e-mail from Weidman in which she referred to Fulmore as “Sexy” and gave a link to her personal website. On this site, where Weidman describes herself as an “escort,” she had also posted pictures of herself in suggestive poses, clad in a small black bra and black boy shorts. Sanders would testify later it was the impetus for his desire to search Fulmore’s laptop.

No criminal charges have ever been filed against Fulmore, and he maintains that he has been unfairly persecuted by area journalists and officers in his own department in attempts to ruin his career and damage his reputation.

Fulmore has filed two lawsuits to that effect. One names as defendants the city of Greensboro, Wray, Brady, police hire-back Randy Gerringer, former Asst. Chief Craig Hartley, Sgt. Craig McMinn and private investigator Art League.

That suit, seeking damages of $30,000 from each defendant, was dismissed last year. Another lawsuit, naming as defendants true-crime writer Jerry Bledsoe, the Rhinoceros Times and its editor and publisher, brothers John and Willie Hammer and seeking $40,000 from each defendant, has yet to be resolved. Somewhat ironically, the lawyer representing Bledsoe and the Hammers is the same one Sanders procured for his criminal trial: Seth Cohen.

Cohen brought out these lawsuits during cross-examination, and Fulmore insisted that financial gain was not his motivation for any of them. “I wasn’t looking for that,” he said. “I’m looking for justice.”

Fulmore, a bull of a man with bunches of muscle straining against his sportcoat, took the stand on Day 3 of the trial. It was a day in which he described the demise of Operation Hole Shot as “sabotage” and offered a glimpse into the world of a vice/narcotics detective, one in which drug-addicted informants and women of ill repute are necessary elements.

Fulmore said that after working as a teenager for the Guilford County Sheriff’s Department, he joined the military. Upon his return to Greensboro, he said, “I saw a great need for law enforcement. I have a passion for it. It’s all I wanted to do was stop drugs.”

Under Coman’s direct examination, he recounted the tale of his laptop. “We borrowed this computer from Special Agent Heinbach to do operational sheets, surveillance assignments,” he said. “I basically signed for it for my own personal use along with these.”

He also testified he was in sole possession of the laptop until he returned it to Heinbach in 2006, but under Cohen’s cross-exam he admitted he kept the machine at a cousin’s house for a period opf more than one year. “It’s an interpretation,” he said. Fulmore said he and Sanders both worked in the Special Intelligence Division’s office on Yanceyville Street. He said he was “constantly on the defense” with Sanders, and the two had “not really established a working relationship.”

Though Fulmore said he changed his passwords regularly, Sanders had used a key catcher to obtain access — legitimately, according to GPD policy — to Fulmore’s office desktop computer, where he discovered the e-mails from Brenda Weidman, which linked to the photos and resulted in Fulmore’s suspension.

“I get a lot of e-mails,” Fulmore testified. “My e-mail is on my business card.” He said he was “stunned” that someone had seen his e-mails and shrugged his shoulders when asked about the internet use policies of the city and police department.

Fulmore said he didn’t blame Bowman for conducting the investigation. “I never blame any law enforcement agent for conducting an investigation,” he said. “An investigation is an investigation, as long as it’s handled properly. Mine was sabotaged “I can respect an investigation,” he continued. “I can’t respect a witch hunt.”

The suit

Special Agent James Bowman of the SBI, with avian features and natty clothes, has acted as both boss and accuser of Julius Fulmore. Testifying in flawless copspeak on Day 3, he described his opinion of the man as “favorable” when he took the stand for the prosecution.

Bowman came to prominence as the lead investigator in the 1988 murder of Julian Pierce, a Lumbee Indian who was blasted with a shotgun during a successful run for a federal court judgeship. But he got his start in law enforcement with the Greensboro Police Department in 1982. And he was in charge of Operation Hole Shot, the task force that brought down Terry Bracken.

In his 2003 investigation of Fulmore, Bowman testified he was informed that the con artist Williams might have security tapes in her South Carolina clothing store capturing Fulmore and Bracken “meeting for drug business.” Williams refused a polygraph, but Bowman took measures anyway.

He sent some SBI agents down to the South Carolina clothing store, where Williams’ teenage daughter lived. The agents enlisted the daughter in the sting: She called Fulmore and told him some Secret Service agent had been coming around asking about the tapes.

“[Fulmore] basically told the daughter he did not know the Secret Service agent, that she could have the agent contact him.” Then Bowman took another measure, having Williams’ daughter call Fulmore and tell him her grandfather, tired of Secret Service agents crawling around, was threatening to destroy the tapes.

“Fulmore instructed her not to do that,” Bowman said. “In my mind it was completely exculpatory to Fulmore.” There was one instance, Bowman said, when both he and Heinbach thought Operation Hole Shot might be compromised. It involved a court order for placing a tracking device on Bracken’s car. The day the court order came through, Bowman said, the car disappeared. Their fears were assuaged when the car was found nearby with a flat tire. Bowman said that when he and Sanders compared Bracken and Fulmore’s phone records, they found “no significant information.” And when Williams made another allegation against Fulmore — that he had come to the jail to threaten her — Bowman found that her story didn’t jibe with prison records.

Then, Bowman testified, “I developed a concern… that Detective Sanders had what I would call ‘tunnel vision’ as to this particular person we were investigating…. He felt that Fulmore was guilty of something, and despite contrary evidence he continued to see it in only one way.” On cross, Cohen reminded Bowman that he, himself had initiated the investigation of Fulmore and enlisted Sanders’ aid. And he accused Bowman of forcing Williams’ teenage daughter to lie in hopes it would entrap Fulmore.

“That’s where we differ,” Bowman said. “I wanted the truth. I wasn’t hoping.” Bowman said he met with then-Chief Wray in the summer of 2004 and informed him of Sanders’ “tunnel vision.”

He also admitted that, while he didn’t order the search of Fulmore’s computer, “At the time I didn’t have a problem with it.” Then, during testimony by Sgt. Kevin Moore of the GPD, the jury asked to see the computer.

The defense mounts

Seth Cohen introduced the defense’s case on Day 3 with a swift succession of sworn police officers who triangulated the defense attorney’s key point: that Scott Sanders had done nothing wrong.

Testimony by Jeff Flincham, a computer forensic examiner for the GPD, indicated he was never asked to examine the laptop in question, but that he had performed searches on other GPD computers without reprimand. The other remarkable turn of events during his cross-examination was that it afforded Cohen the opportunity to introduce printed pictures of the lingerieclad Weidman as defense Exhibits 6 and 7. On cross, Coman established that Flincham’s computer investigations had been ordered during the departmentwide internal investigation amid the departure of Chief Wray, not a targeted criminal investigation years earlier.

Next came Detective Mark Steed, another forensic examiner who swiped the hard drive from the laptop of officer Bobby Edwards during that general internal investigation in 2005 without repercussion. Edwards’ computer was a loaner from the SBI — no small irony — and Cohen drew parallels between this instance and the one being argued that day. Then Assistant Chief Gary Hastings took the stand for the defense. Under Cohen’s questioning, he shakily acknowledged ordering the forensic examination of Edwards’ laptop and said he neither asked for nor thought he needed permission from the SBI to examine it. Cohen pointed out another of the case’s many ironies: While Gary Hastings had been promoted to his current rank in the years following his action, Sanders had been suspended and indicted for his. After Hastings had chuffed from the room, Cohen asked the judge to clear the jury from courtroom 4C. “With all due respect,” Cohen said with a touch of indignation, “I ask the prosecution to do the right thing and drop these charges right now.” Because Hastings and Steed had done essentially the same thing, Cohen argued, “[Coman] needs to indict these two men or drop the charges against this one. “There should be no double standard to the law.” Coman, unmoved by the argument, declined.

The switch

Day 4 of the Scott Sanders trial saw an increase in spectators, many of them reading copies of that day’s issue of the Rhinoceros Times in the courtroom, one which bore a front-page headline: “Police Fiasco Results In Wrong Man On Trial.”

The day began with something of a surprise. Though former Deputy Chief Randall Brady was named on the defense witness list, the morning began with testimony from GPD Officer Bobby Edwards, who had spent the first three days of the trial seated among Sanders’ support team in the courtroom galley before being tapped by Cohen at 5:10, according to Edwards, the night before.

Bobby Edwards was in the Special Intelligence Division when it was disbanded in 2005 following Wray’s resignation and the ensuing investigation, the reason behind the seizure and search of Edwards’ SBI laptop, which he said occurred three days later. He had not given permission for his laptop to be searched, he said Edwards was also able to pinpoint the length of the internal investigation: “Two years, four months and 11 days.” These feats of precision set the stage for testimony by the defendant.

The accused

At 9:51 a.m., Scott Sanders took the stand in a courtroom filled to two-thirds capacity with reporters, cops, lawyers, courthouse employees and trial buffs. Sanders’ family and friends formed a strong contingent. Sanders graduated from rookie academy in 1988 and was appointed to the Street Tactical coincided with Fulmore’s, and then found himself a member of the Special Intelligence Division.

He had been suspended from the GPD on Oct. 10, 2006; he stopped collecting pay on Sept. 17, 2007. Sanders said the division tackled “many sensitive areas” including organized crime, gangs and the protection of visiting dignitaries.

Much of Sanders’ work with the unit, though, dealt in what he called “internally sensitive matters that the chief directed us to look at. “Most of the matters were serious in nature, criminal in nature,” he said. “Things that would not be resolved in an investigation or two or just be handed off.” The SBI-initiated investigation of Fulmore, he said, had become one of those projects, and secrecy was required.

“The police department is just like any other big business,” he said. “You got the gossip and rumor mill at the drop of a hat.” That was why the only people aware of his investigations during his time in Special Intelligence were Sgt. Craig McMinn, also in the unit, then-Deputy Chief Brady and former Chief Wray. And when Cohen tried to delve into the investigation of Fulmore, the line of questioning brought a flurry of objections from the state. Cohen took another tack. The defense posited that Sanders did not need Hainbach’s permission to search the laptop, that the machine fell under both city and police department internet use policy, and as such its user should have no “expectation of privacy.”

Sanders said he asked Heinbach permission only as a formality, and also to make the HUD agent aware that a computer that originated from his agency was now part of an investigation . “[It was] more so as a courtesy than anything,” he said. “When you’re working with other agencies you don’t want to step on any toes.” Sanders agreed that the first meeting took place on Dec. 3, 2003, and held that the second encounter with Heinbach was over the phone two weeks later, not the two months Heinbach remembered.

He also remembered the content of the conversation differently. When Sanders asked if Heinbach had procured his supervisor’s permission to search the machine, Sanders testified, “[Heinbach said] he had and to go ahead and do what we need to do.” Had Heinbach denied the request, Sanders said he would have “gone to his [GPD]supervisor, made him aware of the situation and asked him what to do next.” Instead, he had Agent Cullop pull the hard drive on a Saturday to maintain secrecy, search for incriminating evidence and report his findings.

Sanders said he never saw a report. “He told me verbally there was nothing relevant to the case on the computer and that was it.” Then Cohen introduced relevant facts through his witness’ testimony: that Sanders could have done a basic e-mail search of the computer himself, without Cullop’s participation, had he so wished; that as an experienced detective Sanders knew that illegally obtained evidence could not be used in court.

He closed his direct questioning with another fact: For his actions, Sanders was suspended from the GPD in Oct. 10, 2006 and stopped collecting pay on Sept. 17, 2007. During cross-examination, Coman wanted to know why Sanders never got Heinbach’s permission to search the HUD laptop in writing.

“I can’t tell you how many cases I’ve taken to court based on verbal consent,” Sanders said, and, “It’s hard to get him to sign [a form] over the phone.”

“You chose not to get one so you could ask this jury to believe you when you say Heinbach gave you consent,” Coman charged. “If you had used that form, we wouldn’t be here…. You chose not to get that form.” “That is correct,” Sanders said. Sanders also offered a different version of Fulmore’s suspected compromise of Operation Hole Shot. According to Agent Bowman’s testimony, the drug dealer Terry Bracken’s car disappeared before a tracker could be placed on it and was later discovered nearby with a flat tire. “Heinbach was ready to put the tracer on the car,” Sanders said. “He got the court order and within two days the car never moved again…. It got a flat tire because it sat there so long.” Under questioning Sanders admitted this version was not evident in Heinbach’s report.

Coman began to parse the chain of command within Special Intelligence. “You were fond of telling people you reported directly to the deputy chief,” Coman had observed earlier. Sanders now intimated that Sgt. McMinn was also part of command “to a point.” Under questioning, it came out that Brady was the officer who generally supervised Sanders’ internal investigations, and that there were 10 of them. Cohen then objected to the line of questioning. Coman explained to the judge, “I want to ask him, ‘Isn’t it a fact that every one of them is African American?’” “What he’s trying to say is [Sanders is] only investigating African Americans,” Cohen said. “We would have to look at each one. James Hinson could take a long, long time.” “The ones that got handed off to him seemed to be African American officers,” Coman said. “There’s a pattern.”

“The clear implication is that [Sanders is] a racist,” Cohen said. “He didn’t decide who he investigated. He’s assigned that. “This is not whether Fulmore should or should not be investigated,” the fiery defense lawyer continued. “The SBI started the investigation.”

After a recess, Coman utilized property of Sanders that could potentially cast the defendant and his former superior Randall Brady in unflattering light: a CD case containing 67 discs of conversations Sanders had recorded during his time in Special Intelligence, one of which that captured a troubling conversation between the two. It concerned Pamela Barker, a mentally ill senior citizen who lived in the same apartment complex as Chief Wray and had been making complaints about the former chief. Cohen objected at the mention of her name, but was overruled.

Sanders acknowledged that Barker was making “spurious allegations” against Wray. “She had become a potential nuisance?” Coman asked. Sanders agreed. Coman began reading from the transcript of a tape Sanders had made of a conversation between him and the former deputy chief.

“I need a file kept on her if she ever shows up in the management office.” “I’m not sure what he was afraid she’d do,” Sanders said, “but they were concerned, yes.” Again Coman read from the transcript: “I mean she’s freakin’ nuts, but she’s articulate… yeah, just enough to start with where it will cause problems.”

Then the prosecutor asked, “When he’s implying to you he wants you to cause problems for this woman to get her evicted, you picked up on that, didn’t you?” Sanders said, “Yes.” Coman read from the file again: “Even if we have to do something to make it look like she’s done something…. She just needs to move on… It’s amazing what I get paid for, isn’t it?” Then he asked if Brady directed him to “manufacture” evidence about Barker.

Sanders said, “No. You have to know Chief Brady and how he talks…. I knew he wasn’t serious. I know Brady.” “So we should just take this as some kind of joke?” Coman asked.

“Those particular lines that he stated, yes sir,” was Sanders’ reply. Cohen addressed the Barker tape on redirect, and Sanders said he handled her as a “DP,” or displaced person. “A lot of them are schizophrenic or bipolar,” he said. “The full moon’s out, they’re off their meds, a lot of times the police get called.

“We’d build a rapport with these people,” he continued, “get them back on their meds and with their families.” Of the recordings in general, Sanders said he started making them amid the departure of Wray to protect himself.

“Why didn’t you tape the phone call with Heinbach when he gave you permission?” Cohen wanted to know. “I totally believed and trusted Mark Heinbach as a federal agent that he would not lie,” Sanders said. “Is that why you didn’t ask him to sign the [consent] form?” “Yes.” Before closing arguments, Cohen again made an attempt to have his clients’ charges dropped with a motion to Judge Bridges on the basis of Hastings’ earlier testimony.

“He’s not receiving due process,” Cohen said, his voice rising. “The man, ironically, who is investigating him did the exact same thing.” The motion was denied.

The close

Deputy AG Coman waived his right to begin the closing arguments, allowing Cohen to summarize his defense in earnest. “The irony in this case is so thick you could cut it with a knife,” he began. “If you saw it on television you wouldn’t believe it. “Scott Sanders has been suspended for more than two years; he hasn’t been paid in more than a year and a half. Now he sits here awaiting your judgment.”

He recounted the many stories of Special Agent Heinbach, three by his count, and the curious absence of paperwork relating to the computer Heinbach had given Fulmore.

“Have you ever in your life dealt with the federal government without filling out a form?” he asked. “Heinbach gave his buddy a federal computer,” Cohen asserted. “He didn’t fill out a form because he didn’t have permission to give him the computer. He couldn’t ask his superiors [for consent to access it] because he’d get in trouble.”

Cohen considered Heinbach a key witness for the prosecution, and he said, “I would submit to you that in order to convict Scott Sanders of this crime, the state has to prove to you that Heinbach is credible, honest and is telling the truth.”

He reiterated that under GPD policy, Fulmore had no expectation of privacy on that laptop, and that as such, “The truth of the matter is Scott Sanders didn’t need permission.”

And then he alleged that Sanders’ accusers were in league against him. “So what do they do?” he asks. “The say, ‘Let’s destroy Scott Sanders. Let’s throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.’” That, he said, was why the Pamela Barker tape transcript came into evidence.

“What does the taping have to do with anything, except to destroy him?” Cohen asked. “Desperate people do desperate things.”

He again hammered on the parallels between Sanders’ actions and those of Hastings in the case of Edwards’ SBI computer, and then drove it home. “Send a message to this city and this community,” he said. “In Greensboro, North Carolina, it doesn’t matter if you’re chief of police or a lowly detective: You’re going to get treated the same.” And with that the defense did rest. Coman, who had orated in an even timbre throughout the trial, came alive during his close with a roar. “I must say I was offended this afternoon to hear it argued that for some reason the state of North Carolina has set out on some course to destroy this individual,” he said. “The reason we’re here today is not for some nefarious reason…. All of us in the community have a right to expect that when [Sanders] engages in an investigation that he does it in a lawful manner.

“That didn’t happen.” About the Barker tapes, Coman claimed Sanders used a “Nuremberg Defense,” and then then made an inquiry of the jury, “Who has a reason or motive in this case to not be truthful?” He characterized the defense’s case as the “shotgun approach,” an “absolute smokescreen” and accused Cohen of “light[ing] the confusion bomb, hoping to at least befuddle one juror.” He called them “spin doctors.”

“The state of North Carolina Attorney General’s Office doesn’t engage in selective prosecutions…. The way [Sanders] went about it underscores that he knew what he was doing. Julius Fulmore had every reason to be concerned with this individual investigating him…. “What would you think of me if I called you on the phone and set you up?” That, he averred, was the motive behind Sanders’ December 2007 phone call to Agent Heinbach.

“You think [Sanders] stopped recording? Heinbach doesn’t take the bait.” If Heinbach had given consent to search the laptop during that phone call, Coman said, “they’d have had a tape in court and played it for you.” He noted the conspicuous absence of former Deputy Chief Brady’s testimony on the record, even though he was on the defense witness list. “I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation,” Coman said. “We were going to ask Brady about this.” He held the transcript of the Pamela Barker conversation in his hand, which he said exemplified “that this defendant is disposed to go out and violate the rights of citizens.

“It speaks volumes,” he said. He called Sanders a “rogue cop,” and said, “What do you think he was prepared to do with Officer Fulmore, who we know he didn’t like?” He said that Assistant Chief Hastings “didn’t get some Get Out Of Jail Free card,” that there was a difference between the inventory Hastings conducted in the department and Sanders’ criminal investigation of Fulmore.

Then he addressed the defense’s theory of conspiracy. In order to believe Sanders, he said, you would have to believe that law enforcement officers Heinbach, Cullop and Bowman were perjuring themselves in order to frame the defendant, and that HUD, the SBI and the NC Attorney General’s Office “had some reason to get together and go after this particular officer.”

The charge

Judge Bridges told the 12 members of the jury that the state must prove two things: that Sanders had “caused to be accessed a government computer,” and that he had done so. “willfully and without authorization.” These conditions must be met, he told the jury, without any reasonable doubt in order for them to convict Scott Sanders of a Class H felony, with a possible sentence of 16 months and the certainty that he’d never work in law enforcement in North Carolina again.

The jury then began a deliberation that would last until the next afternoon. At 5:45 p.m., 45 minutes after the courthouse was locked for the night, they requested to see the transcript of the SBI interview with Heinbach, the validity of which Cohen questioned under cross-examination, and the computer use policies for both the city of Greensboro and the GPD, which described the rules for city and police department employees while accessing the city server.

They also asked for transcripts of the week’s testimony by Heinbach, Cullop and Sanders. Judge Bridges allowed the SBI interview and the computer use policies, but not the transcripts of testimony from this trial, which is allowed under NC law at the discretion of the judge in Superior Court.

At 6:25 p.m. the jury passed another note to the judge. They wanted to se a copy of Bridges’ instructions to the jury and the wording of the law Sanders had been accused of violating. They also wanted to know, “Is a verbal agreement binding?” The judge responded by repeating his instructions to the jury, which he said satisfied all three inquiries.

The night wore on as courtroom spectators roamed the halls of the fourth floor of the Guilford County Courthouse, canceling plans on cell phones and eating dinner from the vending machines. Sanders spent his time circulating among his support group, which by now included various family members and personal friends, officers of the court, journalists John Hammer and Jerry Bledsoe, Councilwoman Mary Rakestraw, bloggers Sam Spagnola and Ben Holder, and various former and current officers in area law enforcement organizations, a group which included Randall Brady, with parted hair the color of cigar ash and a neatly clipped mustache.

And at 8:05 p.m., with a jury still in deadlock, Bridges sent everybody home.

The release

Day 5 of the Scott Sanders trial began at 9 a.m., with the jury back in deliberation, and again the interested parties milled around the courtroom. Someone had draped a lei of delicate white and violet flowers across the courtroom rail, a nod to the defendant’s South Pacific heritage.

By noon it became apparent that the vote had stalled at 11-1, had in fact been 11-1 in every tally since they went into the jury room the day before.

Judge Bridges took action by addressing the jury one more time. The task before them, he said, was “difficult, but not impossible.”

“Any time the majority seeks to impose its will on the minority, that minority can become a tyranny,” he said. “At the same time, a minority given absolute right of veto power… that minority can likewise become a tyranny.”

Juror No. 7, a female, African-American registered nurse, held out for two more hours. Jury Foreman John Irvin pronounced a verdict of not guilty at 2:49 p.m., but before Sanders could rise from his chair, Judge Bridges addressed the jury one more time. “You have been handed a task which is not easy,” he said from the bench. “You have done something which in many ways this community has been unable to these past few years.”

After the cathartic courtroom release, the dismissal of the other pending charges against him and Fox, Scott Sanders left Courtroom 4C with his lawyer Seth Cohen and they shared an elevator down to the plaza level of the Melvin Municipal Building with Councilwoman Rakestraw, where they disembarked. Sanders accepted a warm hug from a supporter while he waited for the television crew to set up. Rakestraw went to place a call to City Attorney Terry Wood, after which she immediately offered Sanders and Fox their jobs back. They should be in uniform again by the time this issue hits the streets.