A Knocking in the Night

With a candor rare in government, federal officials in San Diego have admitted they made a terrible blunder when customs and drug agents broke into Donald Carlson’s home in 1992 and shot him three times--twice as he lay wounded. But we remain puzzled why so little has been done to punish the agents who recklessly relied on the dubious informant who fingered Carlson as being part of a drug ring.

The case is chilling in its detail. Asleep in his suburban Poway home, Carlson, 41, an executive with no criminal record, is awakened by pounding on his front door. When the intruders do not identify themselves, he fires two shots from a pistol. The agents break down his door, throw an explosive device at him and shoot him, leaving him permanently injured.

The agents, from the Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration, found no drugs. It turned out that they had been conned by an informer who is now under criminal indictment for making false statements to federal agents.

Both of the agencies and the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility have completed internal investigations. The results have not been released because of the pending criminal case. But, astonishingly, nobody has been disciplined.

The Carlson case is not unique. Only two months after the San Diego shooting, federal, state and local officials acting on an informant’s tip killed Donald P. Scott, a reclusive millionaire, at his ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains. The facts are murkier than in the Carlson matter, but there too no drugs were found.

The new U.S. attorney in San Diego, Alan D. Bersin, deserves praise for accepting responsibility and agreeing to pay damages to Carlson, the amount to be worked out later. He says the DEA and Customs have tightened their procedures as a result of the Carlson fiasco. He argues that most drug raids are conducted properly and that because of the “convoluted” facts of the Carlson case, failure to punish the agents was “not an unjust” result. “The more important lesson is to understand how the system failed,” he says.

We disagree on that. No law-abiding American citizen asleep in his home should be subjected to such abuse, more appropriate to a police state. Somebody should pay a penalty, possibly criminal, for ruining Donald Carlson’s life.