Federal prosecutors admit mistakes in trial of 5 former EPISD administrators

Federal prosecutors are admitting they made mistakes in the trial of five former El Paso Independent School District Administrators accused in a cheating scheme.

The case ended in a mistrial in June 2017 after two-and-a-half weeks of testimony. The judge threw out the case because the prosecution failed to turn over documents defense attorneys said they needed to prepare.

The former administrators accused in the cheating scheme are former Austin High School Principal John Tanner; former Austin High School Assistant Principals Diane Thomas, Nancy Love and Mark Tegmeyer and former EPISD Associate Superintendent James Anderson. They are charged with participating in a district-wide cheating scheme that denied an untold number of students the right to a proper education by fraudulently boosted the district’s test scores, attendance and graduation rates to meet federal accountability standards.

In a document filed Monday, the top prosecutor in the Western District of Texas, John Bash, admits “some of the factual statements in prior government filings are now known to have been inadvertently inaccurate.”

Mainly, there were some files from 2015 found in lead prosecutor Debra Kanof’s computer that had not been shared, and other documents she believed the FBI had given to defendants. Kanof, who’s been in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for 31 years, asserts the error was not intentional. She was removed from the case in May.

“In light of the of the discovery of the personnel files, the United States cannot now state with reasonable certainty that, after the mistrial was declared, the Assistant United States Attorney reviewed every document collected during the course of the investigation … should this court permit retrial, this Office intends to conduct a top-to-bottom review of all files and documents stored physically or digitally in the Office before proceeding with retrial,” the document states.

Bash, who oversees the district that stretches from San antonio and Austin to El Paso, has added himself to the case.