[Mb-civic] Subject: police take woman's identity and use it for sting operation

Wed Apr 13 07:17:07 PDT 2005

-------- Original Message --------

Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 12:44:16 -0800

From: James Moyer <james at moyer.com>

To: declan at well.com

Declan,

This article is so weird I'm not sure where to begin. However, for Politech
readers, it definitely starts at the point when state liquor officials
handed a woman they hired to be a strip dancer someone else's driver's
license, based on some misreading of Ohio law.

http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2005/04/10/20050410-A1
-02.html

____________________________

Woman's identity taken by state agents

Strip-club sting was legal, Miami County official says Sunday, April 10,
2005 Bill Bush THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH Authorities gave Michelle Szuhay
another woman's identity to use while undercover.

Haley Dawson has never been a stripper.

But Ohio liquor-control agents took her identity and gave it to a
22-year-old college student who they had recruited to work undercover as a
nude dancer.

As part of an investigation that resulted in nothing more than misdemeanor
charges, police paid University of Dayton criminal-justice student Michelle
Szuhay $100 a night to take it all off in early 2003 - as liquor-control
officers drank beer and watched in the audience for three months, court
papers show.

Other officers watched her strip on the Internet, using an account created
under the identity of a dead man.

The officers did all this by using Dawson's driver's license and Social
Security number to hide Szuhay's identity while she worked at the targeted
strip club, the now-closed Total Xposure in Troy.

To Dawson's father, David Dawson, "It certainly looks like identity theft."

But it's not, said Miami County Prosecutor Gary Nasal.

Pointing to a 2002 change in Ohio's law aimed at fighting identity theft,
Nasal said police are allowed to assume anyone's identity as long as it's
part of an investigation.

"I don't know much about law, but I would say that's just baloney," said
David Dawson, who lives part of the year in Columbus. He is the brother of
Mike Dawson, the chief policy adviser to U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine.

Ohio Rep. Jim Hughes, the Columbus Republican who sponsored the change, also
disagrees with Nasal, as do the American Civil Liberties Union and a
lobbyist who pushed for the legal change.

"It was not intended for that, I can tell you that," Hughes said.

[...remainder snipped...]

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