Buck.
Ed Buck.
DIGG
Snyder’s ruling undercut the finding of Jackie Lacey, when she was L.A. County district attorney, that the drug evidence could not be used to file charges against Buck in Moore’s death. Lacey argued that sheriff’s deputies had no legal right to pick up the meth and paraphernalia that they saw in Buck’s apartment as emergency workers were trying to resuscitate Moore.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-26/ed-buck-court-evidence-drugs-district-attorney#:~:text=Democratic%20donor%20Ed%20Buck%2C%20shown,in%20his%20West%20Hollywood%20apartment.
By MICHAEL FINNEGAN, JAMES QUEALLY
MARCH 26, 2021 6 AM PT
A federal judge has ruled that Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies acted properly when they seized drugs and other evidence from the West Hollywood home of Democratic donor Ed Buck after a man was found dead there in 2017.
The ruling raises new questions about why L.A. County prosecutors initially declined to charge Buck with a crime and then belatedly did so two years later after federal prosecutors built a case against him.
Buck, who is awaiting trial on federal drug charges stemming in part from the man’s drug overdose, asked U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder to bar prosecutors from using as evidence syringes, drug paraphernalia and nearly two grams of methamphetamine deputies discovered in what Buck called an illegal search of his apartment.
Snyder denied the request. In a ruling Wednesday, she wrote that Buck effectively invited law enforcement into his home when he called 911 to report the overdose of 26-year-old Gemmel Moore during a “party and play” sexual encounter. The deputies’ presence was lawful and the drug evidence was “in plain view,” she found, so prosecutors are free to use it in their case against Buck.
“The evidence they ultimately saw and seized was mere feet from Moore’s body,” Snyder wrote.
The judge’s decision was a victory for federal prosecutors, who allege that Buck, 66, provided the meth that resulted in Moore’s death. They say Buck systematically targeted often destitute Black men, luring them to his home for sex and drugs, in some cases injecting them with meth when they were unconscious. Seventeen months after Moore’s death, another man died of a meth overdose in Buck’s apartment.
Snyder’s ruling undercut the finding of Jackie Lacey, when she was L.A. County district attorney, that the drug evidence could not be used to file charges against Buck in Moore’s death. Lacey argued that sheriff’s deputies had no legal right to pick up the meth and paraphernalia that they saw in Buck’s apartment as emergency workers were trying to resuscitate Moore.
In a brief 2018 memo declining to prosecute Buck for Moore’s overdose, county prosecutors noted an “inadmissible search and seizure” had taken place but did not elaborate.
In 2019, Lacey told Spectrum News that sheriff’s deputies in Buck’s apartment “saw that Mr. Moore was dead, but they investigated it sort of like an overdose.”
“They found some things, but we contend that it’s illegal how they searched for it,” she said. “They needed a warrant in order to get that stuff.”
Lacey also defended her rationale at a gathering of the Stonewall Democratic Club, telling the LGBTQ group that deputies and a coroner’s office investigator improperly searched a red tool chest containing drugs inside Buck’s home.
By then, federal prosecutors had filed drug charges against Buck. He faces a nine-count indictment that includes charges of distributing drugs leading to death and enticement to travel across state lines to engage in prostitution.
In a March 2 hearing held over Zoom, Snyder heard testimony on the tool chest from Buck, who was in jail, and Sheriff’s Deputy Grehtel Barraza.
Barraza said she noticed a bulbous pipe and a plastic bag with white crystalline residue in drawers of the tool chest that were open, along with drugs on the kitchen table. Buck testified that he was “ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths” percent sure the drawers were closed, because the tool chest could tip over if they were left open.
But prosecutors showed the judge a video from Buck’s computer that appeared to show Moore smoking something with the tool chest just behind him and its drawers open. Snyder said she found the deputy’s testimony more credible than Buck’s.