Zimmerman Prosecutors Sued by Fired IT Worker Who Revealed State Didn’t Turn over Evidence Report to Defense

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Maybe this is a first small step in sending [Angela] Corey to join Mike Nifong in disgraced-former-prosecutor obscurity.

Ben Kruidbos, Corey’s former director of information technology, was fired after testifying at a pre-trial hearing on June 6 that prosecutors failed to turn over potentially embarrassing evidence extracted from Martin’s cell phone to the defense, as required by evidence-sharing laws.

“We will be filing a whistleblower action in (Florida’s Fourth Judicial District) Circuit Court,” said Kruidbos’ attorney Wesley White, himself a former prosecutor who was hired by Corey but resigned in December because he disagreed with her prosecutorial priorities. He said the suit will be filed within the next 30 days…

The six-page letter, dated July 11, charges Kruidbos with “deliberate, willful and unscrupulous actions” that make him untrustworthy and calls his questioning of de la Rionda’s actions regarding the cell phone evidence “a shallow, but obvious, attempt to cloak yourself in the protection of the whistleblower law.”

A straightforward whistleblower action or a smokescreen? Take five minutes to read this Florida Times-Union piece published on the day Kruidbos was canned. If I have the timeline straight, in March the office investigated a security breach of its computer system due to suspicions that someone had improperly accessed employees’ health information and disciplinary records. Two employees were suspected, one of whom was Kruidbos. On April 3, eight other employees were removed from his supervision and his access to the computer system was limited, but he was never formally accused as a result of the investigation. Sometime that same month, he contacted White about his suspicions that Corey hadn’t given his report on Trayvon Martin’s cell-phone data to the defense — although, apparently, the defense did receive the source file from Martin’s phone, from which they extracted data. On May 16, Kruidbos got a raise for meritorious performance; twelve days later, Corey finally found out that Kruidbos had gone to Zimmerman’s defense lawyers to let them know about his cell-phone report. He was immediately placed on leave and ultimately fired on July 12th, supposedly because he had “wiped” a computer in the prosecutor’s office in violation of state law on May 24th. (Kruidbos denies this.) {snip}

I tucked this clip of Alan Dershowitz destroying Corey into a “Quotes of the Day” post a few days ago but it deserves more attention, especially what he says about her being the true civil-rights violator in this case. {snip|