Vigilante justice?
Federal judge lambastes Pasadena cop for breaking rules in uncovering weapons cache
By Jake Armstrong 01/07/2010
Did a Pasadena detective contort the truth to help arrest a seasoned criminal who might have been plotting a terrorist attack?
A judge on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals seems to think so, even if his colleagues refused to dismiss evidence — pipe bombs, assault weapons and ominous plans to blow up unspecified buildings — that Detective Dennis Beene’s questionably justified police work helped uncover in the 2002 arrest and conviction of John Leon Noster.
In a five-page dissent attached to an opinion delivered Dec. 28, Senior District Judge Milton Shadur railed against Beene for using delinquent finance payments on a truck Noster bought from a Pasadena dealership as the basis for a stolen vehicle report, which paved the way for police searches that ultimately turned up the weapons cache at a Lancaster storage facility.
“Vigilantism — whether manifested by group action such as that of a lynch mob or by individual rogue activity — is the enemy of orderly law enforcement,” wrote Shadur, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1980. “It is infinitely worse when practiced by a law enforcement officer such as Detective Beene, for such officers are cloaked with authority that can too readily turn the wheels of justice into wheels of constitutional injustice.”
Beene could not immediately be reached for comment.
In 2001, Noster, of Canoga Park, was wanted on a warrant for stealing ATVs from a Glendale dealership, and Beene, a member of a regional auto theft task force, followed leads to the Pasadena dealership where Noster bought the truck, according to court documents. That dealership’s owner signed a stolen vehicle report, according to a statement Beene gave. Days later, LAPD officers found the truck, and the stolen vehicle report gave them legal basis for a search that uncovered a pipe bomb and information that led to the weapons cache.
But, Shadur noted, the dealership owner later filed a declaration with the court saying he had no authority to report a financed vehicle as stolen because the finance company, not the dealership, is the vehicle’s actual owner. The finance company had taken no steps to report the truck as stolen and had been trying to repossess it, since Noster made only seven payments in the roughly two years he had the truck, according to court documents.
The majority on the court performed judicial alchemy in finding that the delinquent truck payments constituted a theft by false pretenses, Shadur also wrote. “Essentially the majority seeks to transmute base metal into gold by transforming Detective Beene’s unequivocal statement that the vehicle was stolen into some notion of ‘criminal fraud’ or the like. With all due respect, I believe that such revisionist history regrettably whitewashes Beene’s own unlawful conduct, effectively creating a kind of asserted ‘probable cause’ when in fact Beene was totally lacking in probable cause to label the vehicle as ‘stolen,’” the judge opined.
Noster was convicted of the ATV thefts. While in state prison, he was indicted in federal court and pled guilty to two counts of possessing unregistered firearms in relation to the weapons cache. He was sentenced to 61 months in February 2005.
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