Crangle: Sheriff’s deputies need due-process rights

It is all too easy for an elected public official such as a sheriff to throw a lion to the Christians to appease them when everybody is looking for a scapegoat. Legend holds that Nero did the reverse when he wanted to avoid blame for the burning of Rome.

A sheriff in South Carolina is the closest thing to a Roman emperor tolerated by state law. He can hire and fire at will all of the employees who work in the sheriff’s department. Those fired have no due process rights. By way of contrast, Columbia police officers are civil servants and have a right to a hearing before a Police Department board and can be terminated only for good cause shown.

The rampant corruption and abuse of office by S.C. sheriffs is related to the despotic power they hold. It is no accident that sheriffs have been criminally investigated and/or prosecuted in recent years in Lexington, Abbeville, Saluda, Lee, Orangeburg, Chesterfield and Berkeley counties, and perhaps others as well.

One of the major reasons corruption and abuse flourish in sheriff’s departments is that the employees who know of wrong-doing are afraid to say anything for fear of being fired. I have discussed this theory with Columbia attorney Jack Swerling, who represented convicted Lee County Sheriff E.J. Melvin, and he is of the opinion that personnel under Melvin probably knew what was going on but were intimidated. Herb Louthian, a former Richland County councilman and attorney for half a century, also thinks that department personnel are afraid of retaliation as at-will employees. George Glassmeyer, a former deputy sheriff in Richland and Lexington counties and a prosecutor in Orangeburg, believes that the code of silence is a result of the fact that department employees can be fired at will.

This problem of silence produced by fear of job loss is compounded by the fact that South Carolina has a fake whistle blower law, which is really designed to prevent the exposure of crime and corruption by state and local government officials and employees, not to encourage employees who know about crime to report to law enforcement.

I know from personal experience how frightened government employees and officials can be of retaliation. When I first went to the State House as a lobbyist and advocate of government reform for Common Cause in 1987, I found more and more evidence of abuse of office and corruption, but nobody wanted to talk about it — not legislators, not lobbyists, not law enforcement, nobody. It took the FBI to come in from the outside to expose the bribery and drug abuses of 17 state legislators, two officials in the executive branch, one Circuit judge and a half dozen lobbyists.

More recently, representatives, senators and governors sat silent as the dead while Speaker Bobby Harrell ran out of control in the same building, until citizen activists finally persuaded Attorney General Alan Wilson to launch an investigation, which ended with Harrell pleading guilty to multiple crimes in state court.

It is long past the time for all employees of the sheriff’s departments to be given civil service status after a reasonable probationary period and appropriate training. This would entitle them to a fair hearing and due process in disciplinary and employment matters to protect them from arbitrary and abusive treatment if they stand up to corruption or if they take politically unpopular but justified action pursuant to their employment.

The time has come to end the dictatorship of the sheriffs and assure that sheriff’s department employees are not afraid to report wrongdoing and not afraid to do their job.

Enforcing the law and not political survivalism should be the job of deputies and staff. That is what taxpayers have a right to expect.

This story was originally published November 9, 2015 at 12:47 AM with the headline "Crangle: Sheriff’s deputies need due-process rights."