Nevada ranks low in prosecution of drug cases

Monday, Oct. 20, 1997 | 9:30 a.m.

Out of 90 districts surveyed nationwide, only 24 had a higher percentage of cases rejected by federal prosecutors.

Thomas Green, former chief of the U.S. Attorney's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force here, blames the low figure on a lack of resources.

Green, who left the agency in July for a job with the Las Vegas city attorney's office, said there are not enough prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office.

Still, Nevada ranks 19th among the country's 90 districts for number of criminal investigators per capita. Data shows Nevada had 22 criminal investigators in 1996 and 21 in 1995.

Keith Baudoin, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA's Nevada district, said the agency now has 27 criminal investigators in the state, excluding supervisors. Fifteen of those investigators work in Las Vegas, he said.

Baudoin said he believes the prosecutors approve a higher percentage of his agents' cases than the statistics show, but he agreed the U.S. attorney's office needs more resources.

The federal data comes from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization associated with Syracuse University in New York.

Green, who had worked as chief of the drug task force since 1986, said he once had as many as seven prosecutors working under him in Nevada, but that number dwindled to three by the time he left the U.S. attorney's office.

At the same time, he said, the drug agency and the FBI were getting more agents.