ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Maryland State Police are trying to contact 53 people who were wrongly described as terrorists in a state police database, a majority of them during a 14-month period when officers spied on anti-war and anti-death penalty groups, the state police superintendent said on Oct. 7.
State police have sent letters to 27 of them and are working to find the rest, Col. Terrence Sheridan told a state Senate committee. Sheridan said the wrongly classified people are being notified by letter and invited to see files state police kept on them before they are purged from the database.
"The letter explains that we've made a big mistake here, and we need to straighten it out," Sheridan said.
The state police Case Explorer database was designed to share information with authorities in the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which is funded by a federal initiative.
Sheridan also told lawmakers that no sanctions were planned for anyone on the state police force for the covert surveillance. However, he said, new guidelines to prevent future abuses would carry sanctions, including written reprimands up to termination.
Sheridan said the 53 people were not actually considered to be terrorists by investigators, who were "merely filling in a database."
"These folks were never thought of as being terrorists," he said. "It was just a way of capturing the name and the information."
Lawmakers on the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee also heard from Sheridan's predecessor, Tim Hutchins, who was superintendent of the state police in 2005 and 2006 when the surveillance was conducted. Hutchins was aware of the practice.
Hutchins, who stepped into the job in December 2003 to replace Edward Norris after he was indicted by federal investigators in a public corruption case, described the agency as one "over its mission capacity, that was very understaffed and that was extremely technology-challenged."
Hutchins also apologized for any errors made for wrong classifications, although he said he only knew personally of one of the examples cited in a state review released last week.
"Again, we were technology challenged, trying to do the best we could to fashion and cobble together whatever we could to make it better for investigations and tracking leads and those types of things," Hutchins said.
The former superintendent also said the monitoring was done "to try and do the best we could to obtain situational awareness" and properly deploy and coordinate with other law enforcement due to concerns about possible disturbances at an execution.
Last week, a report conducted by former Maryland Attorney General Stephen Sachs found that state police violated federal regulations and intruded on law-abiding residents' rights to express themselves freely by spying on the groups.
Sachs found the surveillance violated federal regulations by entering findings into HIDTA, a federally funded initiative. Federal regulations require sharing intelligence through the system "only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity."
Officers were not found to have reasonable suspicion to conduct the surveillance.
Sachs made four recommendations to prevent improper spying in the future, and Sheridan said the state police agency was implementing them.
The surveillance was revealed in documents released by state police after the agency was sued by the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The documents show undercover officers infiltrated meetings of peace and anti-capital punishment groups for more than a year, spending nearly 300 hours on surveillance.
The ACLU is calling for legislation to address the spying and prevent it from happening again.