Jailed over Duff Beer Lemons car. (Page 1 of 2)

That is completely ridiculous.  If they inspected and it passed doesn't it mean that the car is legal?

I've been mouthed off to coutless times. I've never pursued a felony warrant on a trumped-up charge as a result. Those cops need thicker skin. You need to be reimbursed for your legal fees. Are you pursuing that?

+1 on what Speedy said.

I think you and your team has earned a couple of 'Get Out of Penalty Box Free" cards!

Phil, Jonny, Nick?

Even better, come to SC.  No inspections AT ALL!  I work right beside the DMV, and you should see some of the deathtraps that roll in to get tags.  Lemons race cars, they are eligible for Barrett Jackson compared to them sometimes.

That stinks, man.  Go get a signed statement from the second inspector, and I would fight it.  (Though you must have really ticked them off!)

What kind of Communist state is this NC? Damn.

You have 24HOL markings on the car. Dollars to donuts that they did some "internet research" that ended when they found the words "bribe" and "inspection" close to each other.

BRILLIANT.

I believe that the charge was frivolous and an attempt to get me to testify against the second inspector. The police did state that they had been observing the second inspector as part of an investigation, and that they could only charge him with an improper procedure infraction unless I testified that I bribed him. According to the police he conducted the inspection (OBD1 cars only get an external visual inspection) without pulling the car into the service bay, which they said is technically incorrect. I was in the customer lounge taking advantage of the free coffee during the inspection, so I couldn't say if that was correct or not. I observed that the police officer that inspected my car did so with the car sitting on the pavement outside, so apparently it is possible to do an inspection on a car without the benefit of a garage bay, but nobody appreciated my observation.

The timing and nature of the arrest were also strange. It's a Class I felony (the lowest class of felony) and I have no prior convictions. I also have had a job and a known address in NC for over ten years. Based on the sentencing guidelines, the most that I can be sentenced to if I was found guilty would be 3-8 months of unsupervised probation, suspended for a first offence. So I basically can't go to jail for this crime. Typical police procedure would be to call me and arrange a time for me to meet with police and my lawyer at the court to sign papers and get a court date. This isn't something that they typically roll out to make an arrest for. The Magistrate at the jail confirmed that the police were not following normal procedure by taking me to jail, and he promptly kicked me out. The bailiff (think it was a bailiff, the officer that staffs the magistrates room at the jail) was also confused about why they brought me to jail, since I couldn't get any jail time even if I was guilty. They also came for me on the day before Thanksgiving in the afternoon, when basically everyone was off work, and attempted to get me to ask for a deal when they were checking me in to the jail. The whole thing was a little off-kilter.

I used to be a LEO (graduated from NCIS academy) in the Navy; I worked for the commander of Norfolk Naval Base and did local civilian police liason work, patrols on and off base, shore patrol duty overseas, POW camp guard duty and crowd control for Iraqi detainees at an overseas detention facility, prisoner escorts for courts martial, and deserter apprehensions for the Naval Absentee Collection Unit in Great Lakes. In my professional opinion, the officer that interviewed me was not very professional. He tried to do a Miranda warning without letting me know what it was, and botched it in the process, then wrote out an incriminating statement and tried to get me to sign it by threatening to invalidate my Driver's license and vehicle registrations if I did not cooperate with his investigation. Then he called the "DA" on his cell phone and had an obviously fake conversation about what he wanted done with me after I made it clear that I had cooperated as much as I was going to.

So while this is not an indictment of police in general, because I was a professional when it was my job, and others are as well, but just like any other profession, there are people who are not professionals out there. I think that I just encountered one who wasn't. I've seen them before; there were guys that we had to assign permanently to the dispatch desk because we couldn't let them out in public any more. If we let them go on patrol then we'd end up with an incident.

I hadn't thought about recovering legal fees; I figured it was just the price of doing business with the court system, but I need to visit my lawyer again anyway to verify that the expungement of the arrest record went through, so I'll ask him about it then. I was so relieved to have the charge dropped that I just wanted to put the whole business behind me. My job includes working in secure government facilities, and I fail a National Agency Check and can't get a facility pass if I have an unadjudicated felony charge, so I basically couldn't work until this was resolved. Thankfully it occurred at a time when most secure government facilities have limited operations due to holiday vacation scheduling.

I know it may cause you are little more pain man, but you cannot let that shit go.  This is one reason why so many people distrust LEOs in general.  I have met exactly three cops in my life that didn't act like one 24/7, and Speedy is one of them.  Unless he told you you'd never know his was a cop.  He gives cops a good name, which is rare IME.  I know they have a tough job, but that doesn't give them a license to do any f*cking thing they want to do.

With all the crime going on in Wake County they shouldn't have time to even go to your house for this bullshit, especially since they could even make it stick.

I think you need to get some press involved here man.  This type of shit needs to stop.

LOL. That's a howler. Don't even waste your time (and lawyer's fees) trying.

I've done a little criminal defense work over the years. Mostly when it was an existing client who got a BS municipal court domestic violence charge because an ex-girlfriend called the cops, total crap. That kind of stuff. But my very first jury trial was a DWI case where the newbie cop flat out lied on the stand. He wasn't just wrong, he didn't just misremember -- he lied. Not that the DA is going to pursue a perjury charge against a rookie cop on a misdemeanor DWI case, but the evidence was there to prove it. And it was on the videotape that we later showed to the jury, through which we won the acquittal of the accused in 28 minutes. Including time for a smoke break. In other words, this wasn't brilliant lawyering from yours truly, it was patently obvious to anybody who saw the in-car camera footage and/or the interrogation room footage that my guy not only wasn't intoxicated, he wasn't even buzzed.

I know from personal experience that there are a ton of good, fair, righteous LEO's out there. I'd even go so far to say that the vast majority of cops are good guys. But the exceedingly slim percentage of cops who game the system or use the badge to settle up their grudge with the universe for getting cut from the JV football team stain the rest. Same thing is true with lawyers, for what it's worth.

As to the OP, count yourself lucky, even a great lawyer sometimes can't prevent his client from getting ground into mincemeat by the system. Maybe this was a $2700 lesson in learning when to keep your smart mouth shut (ahem, smart BS judging jailhouse lawyers, this also applies to you.) It could have been a much more expensive (and painful if you got put into one of those analraping jails) lesson.

Holy shit! Yeah, we'll give you a Get Out Of Jail Free card for that.

Or we might make your team wear the Joe Arpaio Penalty pink underwear and chains all weekend.

That's what I'm taking from it. I shouldn't have said anything at all to the police. Even exculpatory statements can be used to bone me. My brother sent me a video that explains it better than I could, and I'd love to hear what a lawyer thinks of it (not enough love to pay a billable rate, but the free kind of love):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc