S.F. police scandal widens - 26 more cases dropped

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Source: San Francisco Chronicle

A San Francisco judge dismissed 26 more felony cases Friday involving plainclothes police officers who allegedly lied about the circumstances of drug searches and arrests or stole from suspects, bringing the number of prosecutions lost in the widening scandal to nearly 120.

Superior Court Judge Lillian Sing granted the dismissals at prosecutors' request. Outside court, prosecutors said the cases - nearly all of them involving drug charges - had been dropped largely because of potential credibility problems with an undercover officer at the Mission Station, Ricardo Guerrero, whose testimony in a preliminary hearing this year was called into question by videotape evidence that defense attorneys secured.

Prosecutors had already dropped eight cases in which Guerrero was involved since the video surfaced this month.

The video was of an arrest that Guerrero and other undercover officers from the Mission Station made at a Tenderloin residential hotel Dec. 30. It shows Guerrero carrying a gym bag from the suspect's room that he did not account for and was not booked as evidence.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/27/MNQQ1JMF76.DTL