One Very Bad Cop

More than any other policeman in Vermont, Paul D. Lawrence, 30, had a reputation in drug circles as one tough cop. In his six years on the drug beat, first as a state trooper and then on various local forces, Lawrence racked up some 600 drug convictions. He never failed to turn up incriminating evidence. Police and counterculturists agreed that his record was almost too good--or too bad--to be true. As it turned out, bad was the right word.

Big Drug Buster. Last week Governor Thomas Salmon was contemplating an extraordinary letter from Francis Murray, the Chittenden County (Burlington) prosecutor, asking him to pardon all 600 of those convicted on Lawrence's testimony. Lawrence, the prosecutor pointed out, faced up to 16 years in prison after being found guilty of turning in false arrest affidavits and giving false information to a police officer. The big drug buster apparently arrested anyone he was suspicious of, often supplying the narcotics evidence himself and claiming he had made a buy from the alleged pusher. Judges, and in a few cases even juries, simply took Lawrence's word.

As his story unraveled in court, it became clear that Lawrence had rarely been more than one quick step ahead of discovery. Somehow, he became a cop in 1966, despite a youthful arrest for illegal possession of liquor and an Army discharge for "behavioral disorders" after three AWOL incidents in seven months of service. He was with the state police from 1968 to 1972 and quit shortly after his squad-car windshield was apparently shot out from the inside when he was alone on patrol. His record also included the beating of a man he had arrested. After that, a brief stint as a tobacco salesman came and went amidst claims by his employers that a cache of cigarettes had mysteriously disappeared. Lawrence then managed to get a job as chief of the four-man police force in the small town of Vergennes; he left a year later, this time just before being fired for questionable drug arrests and hyperactive enforcement of speed limits.

He next became an officer assigned . to the drug beat in St. Albans. There, defense attorneys soon noted that an unusually high percentage of their clients claimed that Lawrence had framed them. The lawyers persuaded the state defender general to hire a private detective, who filed a 30-page report a year ago that was highly critical of Lawrence's activities. The state attorney general, who was busy running for reelection, shelved the charges as unsubstantiated. By then, the St. Albans police had lent Lawrence to Burlington to work on undercover drug enforcement there. That was the end of the line.

At about the same time that a fellow policeman became suspicious of Lawrence's too-easy arrests, a reporter approached the local prosecutor's office with stories of Lawrence's past. A special undercover policeman brought in from Brooklyn (for his expertise and to assure that he would not be recognized) was pointed out to Lawrence as a suspected drug dealer. Then, while police watched from hiding, Lawrence approached the planted "pusher," but exchanged neither words nor money with him. Nonetheless. Lawrence later filled out an arrest affidavit and claimed he had bought a nickel ($5) bag of heroin. At Lawrence's trial, one girl he had arrested testified to another Lawrence technique. She was hitchhiking, she said, and he picked her up, offered her dinner and a few sniffs of cocaine, then asked her to spend the night with him. She refused; two weeks later he busted her for selling him drugs.

Case-by-Case. Officials are still trying to find out exactly how and where Lawrence got the drugs that he turned in as evidence. Further charges are pending over his use of the money he was given to make his supposed buys. Meanwhile, Prosecutor Murray has requested the mass pardons from Governor Salmon. Though state officials contend that some of the convictions were valid. Attorney General M. Jerome Diamond concedes that it will now be necessary to begin a case-by-case review of every Lawrence arrest. It might also be advisable to review the hiring practices of Vermont towns that may be more anxious to ferret out drugs than bad cops.

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