Rush To Judgment: New Documents Reveal Who Was Really To Blame For John Geer Fiasco

It seems like every day now, the Washington Post is publishing yet another article on the slow motion disaster surrounding the police shooting death of John Geer by a Fairfax County Police Officer in 2013. Despite the fact that the shooting occurred almost two years ago, absolutely nothing has happened at all.  The officer has not been cleared, but neither has he been charged either.  Now I’ve heard of the wheels of justice turning slowly, but this is ridiculous!

Earlier in the current year, the Post published a series of articles that were often quick to blame the Fairfax County Police Department for allegedly mishandling the investigation of the Officer.  Based on those articles, I offered by own insight into who was to blame, suggesting that, at least on the surface, the head prosecutor of Fairfax and the Department of Justice were more to blame than the police department.  Now however, it looks like the Post has found the true culprit behind the madness, a member of the county attorney’s office.

According to a Washington Post article dated March 5^th,documents released by the Fairfax County Police Department show that Cynthia Tianti, a twenty five year senior member of  the county attorney’s office,  told the Fairfax police to withhold internal affairs files from the head prosecutor Ray Morrogh, thereby preventing him from concluding his investigation.  At the time Morrogh thought it was the police who were obstructing him, and in a sense it was, but the real culprit, at least according to the Post, appears to be the attorney that suggested the course of action to the police. 

To make matters worse, County Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova (D) said that the county attorney’s office failed to inform them that Morrogh had requested a meeting with Bulova and the rest of the board to discuss the case.

According to the Post article, Tianti is now on leave, and her boss, the head county attorney David Bobzien, has announced that he plans to retire in June.  It looks like a major shake up of the county attorney’s office is underway. 

My Insight:  I can only guess that the county attorney’s office was trying to mitigate the county’s civil liability in a potential wrongful death case, a course of action that Geer’s family inevitably pursued.  However, how civil liability concerns can trump a criminal investigation by the head prosecutor seems astounding to me.  

Furthermore, why is the county attorney’s office a separate entity from the prosecutor’s office?

I had a conversation with my attorney spouse about this recently.  In the jurisdiction where my wife is from, a county attorney’s office operates under the head prosecutor.  This ensures that a situation like what happened in the Geer case could never happen.  While I’m not sure that this is necessarily the right way to re-organize the county attorney’s office, it is definitely a course of action that the Board of Supervisors should consider.