Ethics Corner: Undercover Angel Grounded in Texas

By: Allan Wolper Venessa Santos-Garza rehearsed her role as an undercover police prostitute for a day, learning how to lure a man into paying for sexual favors. Her police colleagues told her to make sure her sex-for-money agreements were completed, so the recording device beneath her clothes could capture every tawdry word.

Santos-Garza worked her press-and-sting operation last Dec. 13 like a professional, aided by two real female undercover police officers. Two of her targeted johns were arrested and charged with prostitution. Several days later, she recreated those street scenes for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the Scripps Howard Texas newspaper where she works. It was going to be a great story: a detailed, inside peek into undercover police work.

But Santos-Garza, Managing Editor Shane Fitzgerald, and Metro Editor Kim Vetter didn't realize they had committed a journalism crime far more heinous than the ones they were prepared to describe in their newspaper. They were so sure they were in the right that they didn't even ask the paper's attorney, Jorge C. Rangel, for legal advice.

They should have known their editor, Libby Averyt, would never let her reporters become part of a police sting. Averyt spent a weekend in jail 14 years ago for not sharing with Texas prosecutors her notes from a death row interview.

When word of the press-prostitution project reached Averyt, she killed the story and then issued a statement about it on the top of Page B2 in the Local section.

"We made a mistake in judgment, and that's why we have not and will not run with the information gathered that day," Averyt said in the paper's mea culpa. "For us to maintain our watchdog role, we should not get involved in law enforcement activities and will not in the future."

Soon afterward, Averyt called a meeting of her staff and told them that journalists should never take part in any kind of police investigation. She said it was the job of a newspaper to guard against the public perception that it was an arm of the law.

"It was not the kind of journalism I wanted us to practice here," Averyt recently told me. "We knew we had made a mistake. I told them that we have to be so careful to keep our credibility, with what is going on in journalism these days."

But being sorry won't undo the damage of the ill-conceived press-and-police sting partnership that Corpus Christi's defense lawyers see as an assault on an individual's right to fair trial.

"I don't understand why the police didn't charge the reporter, too," raged Michael O'Brien, president of the Coastal Bend Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, based in Corpus Christi. "They would arrest anyone else posing as a prostitute. She wasn't reporting on a crime. She was creating one."

But Santos-Garza was working with the police. That may have been a journalism crime, but it wasn't a violation of any known criminal statute.

What's worse, the great majority of Corpus Christi citizens might even be applauding Santos-Garza's undercover adventure. After all, police are crediting her for the arrest of four men allegedly involved in street crime ? two through her sting operation, and two others she witnessed as a reporter and phony policewoman.

The officials didn't want Santos-Garza along as a neutral observer, but rather as a volunteer police woman who would later write about her experience for the paper. The only place her name won't appear is on the police Web site used to identify people charged with prostitution. But her testimony is part of the court record, a condition to which Caller-Times editors had to agree for a seat in the sting squad, according to Corpus Christi Police Chief Peter Alvarez Jr.