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North Country Gazette - Cheste
04 February 2007

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Warren County Sheriff's Office

EDITORIAL: Unequal Treatment

QUEENSBURY---The arrest of a Queensbury woman this past week by Sheriff Larry Cleveland and the Warren County Sheriff's Department gives a troubled view of the unequal, disparate treatment of people in the county's criminal justice system.

It served as prima facie evidence of how Cleveland uses his lackey, Post-Star reporter Don Lehman, to deny people their right to a fair trial in Warren County, to convict people in the pages of The Post-Star and deny them any presumption of innocence as constitutionally guaranteed.

There would also seem to be prima facie evidence for a long overdue federal investigation of Cleveland and the sheriff's department or minimally, an investigation by the Public Integrity Unit of the Attorney General's office as the woman says that police officers forced her to recant her claim.

After all, Gov. Eliot Spitzer and AG Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats, have both committed to governmental reform, to rout out corruption in government. In his inaugural address, Spitzer said that "all citizens will win when we finally get a government that puts the people's interests, openness and integrity first".

Warren County has been a cesspool of corruption for a long time and is ripe for change-----and investigation.

Angela Genier, 30, of Windsong Drive in Queensbury, has been arrested for allegedly making a false report to police, accusing a man with a hefty criminal record of putting a gun to her head and threatening to kill her and her three bi-racial children.

Genier also alleged that Tony Brock, 31, made racial epithets and threatened to kill Warren County officials and their family members over the prosecution of a friend of his. Brock has a 2002 conviction for making terroristic threats but yet it appears despite his record, police are siding with him in the incident of domestic violence, rather than the woman.

If any of the alleged threats were made towards anyone in the district attorney's office, that would seem by itself to immediately disqualify Warren County District Attorney Kate Hogan and the district attorney's office.

With the alleged display of a gun and death threats, Brock was charged with second degree menacing and jailed for four days.

And then along came The Post-Star asking questions about the alleged threats to county officials. Cleveland says that when Genier was reinterviewed, she recanted her story. He charged her with third degree filing of a false report, a misdemeanor.

Cleveland claims that Genier now says that there was no confrontation between her and Brock. But Genier says that she wasn't lying, that she was threatened and changed her story only because police questioned her for hours and threatened to put her children in foster care if she didn't sign a statement recanting her earlier story. She says the police coerced her into saying that the incident hadn't happened and that she lied. If that's true, why would the police do so?

What's strangely missing in The Post-Star story is the names of the investigating officers.

Some questions arise----was Genier advised of her rights to have an attorney present for questioning and if she couldn't afford one, advised that one would be appointed? Was she advised that she had the right not to answer questions? What kind of relationship, if any, does Brock have with the sheriff's department? Is he a drug informant? Is this a troubling revelation of how investigations are conducted in Warren County, that The Post-Star and Don Lehman is controlling how matters are investigated in the county?

Genier's mother says that she has witnessed threats allegedly made by Brock towards her daughter and that there are multiple witnesses too but Cleveland says police don't believe that's the case. What happened to the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt in Warren County instead of Cleveland doesn't think so and the Post-Star's trial by newsprint. Is The Post-Star making the news instead of reporting it?

She says she's terrified of the man and perhaps rightfully so. Has any order of protection been issued to keep him away from her and her children? After all, the case is in Queensbury Town Court where Cleveland's former personal attorney, Robert McNally is a town justice and then there's Michael Muller who's been found to have violated the constitutional rights of defendants. Virtually every time there's a controversial case involving Cleveland and the sheriff's department, it's in Queensbury Town Court. There's something wrong with that picture.

What's abhorrent is that The Post-Star, district attorney Kate Hogan and Larry Cleveland have convicted this woman in the pages of the newspaper, already announcing that they're going to seek restitution from her for the hours spent by the sheriff's department and state police investigating the case, already deemed her a liar.

Hogan is quoted by The Post-Star as saying "there was a lot of time invested to investigate these threats". She wants Genier to pay restitution.

There's something mighty suspicious about this whole incident and deserves a review by an independent outside investigatory agency. In that alleged threats to county officials are at issue, it would seem that the FBI or AG's Public Integrity should be involved because there's no perception of impartiality when Warren County officials investigate each other.

And it also appears that it's the integrity of Larry Cleveland that's again at issue, as usual.

The whole incident brought to mind Cleveland's handling of a harassment case in the Town of Chester in 1998, later transferred to the non-jurisdictional court of Queensbury when he used the powers of his office, resources and money of county taxpayers to retaliate against the publisher of The North Country Gazette with whom he and his predecessor, Fred Lamy, had a long standing dispute because of the newspaper's coverage and editorial policy regarding the sheriff's department.

Cleveland repeatedly refused to allow the publisher to file a harassment complaint against Eleanor and Donald Lambert of Chestertown who were engaged in harassment of the publisher and her family. It was later learned that the harassment was ongoing at the behest and encouragement of Cleveland.

When Cleveland denied the publisher her constitutional right to file a complaint, denied her due process and violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in denying her equal protection under the law, an attorney advised her to file her complaint directly with the court.

She did, under what is known as a PL 210.45 warning which says that the complainant will be charged with a misdemeanor if the statement is found to be untrue.

Immediately, before the matter was ever allowed to be heard or the publisher interviewed and in total absence of due process, Cleveland deemed the complaints against the Lamberts and Jay Becker false, pointing to typographical, ministerial errors and errors in format.

But he didn't charge the publisher with misdemeanors pursuant to PL 210.45, he eagerly and vindictively charged her with felony counts, basing his charges on previous arrests he had engineered against her in 1998 when he had directed an unprecedented 10-day surveillance of the publisher, using two-men, surveillance equipment, a vehicle, gasoline and multiple other departmental resources, causing a seven-year legal battle which necessitated the expenditure of even more tax dollars before the court finally ruled that the county and in particular, Queensbury justice Michael Muller, had violated the publisher's constitutional rights by criminally charging her for constitutionally protected acts.

In the Genier case, Brock was charged with second degree menacing for allegedly pointing a gun to her head and threatening to kill her and Warren County authorities.

The publisher was charged with second degree menacing for allegedly shaking her fist at Eleanor Lambert, using a camera to take or simulate the taking of photographs of Eleanor Lambert while the publisher was on her own property, that of her parents or in a public place, of blowing her horn at Eleanor Lambert when Lambert stood in front of the publisher's driveway blocking the publisher's entrance to her own property and for calling Lambert Cobass and liar.

Hardly the same situation.

After seven long years, the charges and ultimately convictions against the publisher were reversed, sentence vacated and finally dismissed but at a cost to the county of well over $100,000 and excessive costs, financially, physically and emotionally, to the publisher for the false arrests and abuse of process.

Our question to Kate Hogan and the district attorney's office, now that it's been proven in a court of law that the original charges brought against the publisher in 1998 at the direction of Larry Cleveland have been ruled in a court of law to have been legally insufficient, that the conduct complained of was protected by the First Amendment even if it had occurred as alleged and that the publisher's constitutional rights had been violated, is the county seeking restitution from the Lamberts, Becker and Cleveland for the malicious prosecution they caused by the false arrests?

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Article sourced from

North Country Gazette - Cheste04 February 2007

EDITORIAL: Unequal Treatment

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North Country Gazette - Cheste
04 February 2007