§ The significance of this story is that this problem
was widespread in 2000.

Friday, April 05, 2002

By Jeffrey Cohan, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

A task force investigating the improper release of an Allegheny County Jail inmate who went on to shoot two police officers may never be able to determine who was to blame for letting the criminal go.

Task force chairman Thomas W. Corbett Jr., the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, offered that assessment yesterday to the county's Jail Oversight Board.

The task force is looking into the June 2000 release of Cecil Brookins, who is charged with shooting two Pittsburgh police officers in a February confrontation in Homewood.

Brookins was in jail for a previous brush with the law when Common Pleas Judge Lawrence O'Toole sentenced him on June 5, 2000, for a firearms violation and possession of body armor.

That sentence should have put Brookins in state prison for as long as four years and 10 months. Instead, he was improperly released on June 19, 2000, from the county lockup.

"There is no trail of accountability," Corbett said yesterday. "You can't tell when [Brookins' paperwork] moved through the system."

The problem, Corbett said, is that judges' sentencing decisions are communicated to the jail in hand-delivered paper documents, rather than through a computer network.

"In this day and age, we need to get away ... from the paper system," he said.

Corbett said he has seen no evidence, one way or the other, to evaluate District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr.'s suggestion that a jail guard may have been bribed to release Brookins.

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