Two of three Durham cops
arrested in January on charges of illegally restraining and assaulting a man
have resigned, city officials confirmed Wednesday.
Lt. Ryan A. Freeman and Cop
Stacy L. Armstrong left the police force March 21.
The third cop, Erin V.
Espinola, remains on administrative leave with pay.
Last week, charges against
Freeman and Armstrong were thrown out in Durham County District Court because
prosecutors weren’t ready to proceed with the case.
Espinola’s case, which was
separated from the others’, was postponed this week until August.
All three were charged with
false imprisonment, simple assault and breaking and entering after they
allegedly broke into a man’s house on Landis Drive, restrained him and grabbed
his arm.
The cops were off duty at a
Ninth Street club in January when someone reportedly stole a coat, wallet,
police identification and iPhone at the club. They apparently went to the house
to retrieve the property.
According to investigators,
several people pushed their way into a residence to retrieve the stolen items.
During the disturbance, a man was chased to another location, where he was
allegedly assaulted.
Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez
said in January that all charges were misdemeanors.
“There was no felonious intent
that we could see in any of it,” he said.
Lopez said he placed the cops
on administrative leave with pay after his investigators made the arrests.
“They were immediately stripped
of their police powers,” Lopez said.
Criminal charges were filed
after an investigation by the Durham Police Department’s Criminal
Investigations Division. The department’s Professional Standards Division
(internal affairs) also investigated the cops’ actions.
In an interview Wednesday,
Deputy Chief Larry Smith of the Durham Police Department said Armstrong and
Freeman “chose to resign.”
“We never ask anybody to
resign,” he said. “People often make that choice based on what they know the
allegations against them are.”
The D.A.'s Office is reviewing
a report that cast doubts on Andre Boyer's many arrests.
Andre Boyer stands out in the
Philadelphia Police Department, posting one of the highest arrest rates among
the city's 6,600 cops year after year.
Cop Boyer, assigned to North Philadelphia's
22d District, also holds the distinction of racking up the most civilian
complaints - 21 - of anyone on the force, the city's Police Advisory Board
says.
Judges have questioned his
tactics and his understanding of the law.
There also was a 2008
confidential police investigation that found Boyer falsified dozens of arrest
reports. It is now at the center of an internal probe by the District
Attorney's Office, which acknowledged last week that it failed to properly
review that report before continuing to prosecute Boyer's cases.
"That's something that
fell through the cracks," Deputy District Attorney Edward McCann said in
an interview Thursday.
McCann said his office did not
evaluate the report to determine whether it should be disclosed to defense
attorneys.
As result, the Public
Defender's Office said last week that it would seek new trials for many people
Boyer arrested.
The defender's office has
represented suspects in hundreds of Boyer's cases since the investigation was
completed, court records show. Boyer has been involved in more than 500
criminal cases since 2009.
"That this was kept a
secret from defense attorneys is outrageous and raises significant concerns
about the legitimacy of any conviction in which Cop Boyer was involved,"
public defender Bradley Bridge said.
Boyer, 46, did not respond to
phone, text, and e-mail messages or to a letter left for him at work.
But he is fighting in a federal
lawsuit to defend his reputation.
In a handwritten complaint last
year, he charged that police officials damaged his credibility when they
suspended him for six days because of the 2008 investigation. He seeks $200,000
in damages and pay for the six days. A civil trial is set for September.
Acting as his own lawyer in a
hearing before U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois in December, Boyer said city
judges had been dismissing his arrests because of the 2008 allegations that he
"willfully falsified documents and stuff like that," according to
court transcripts.
"The [defense] attorneys
tried to impeach me because it just goes to my credibility," Boyer told
DuBois.
He did not state whether
lawyers had obtained the full investigative report.
The findings of the report were
contained in a 2011 labor arbitration case Boyer filed. The police Internal
Affairs Division previously had ruled that Boyer was guilty of conduct
unbecoming an cop because he "continuously and repeatedly placed
inaccurate information on official documents" in drug arrests.
Internal Affairs said that in
63 of his drug arrests, Boyer indicated he performed field tests showing
suspects were in possession of narcotics - although the field tests were
conducted by other cops or not done at all. It also said he disobeyed rules on
the handling of seized narcotics.
Although Boyer did not comment for
this article, lawyers for the Fraternal Order of Police argued in the
arbitration that he was an extremely aggressive cop, and that many of the
errors were a result of a flawed computer system that was later fixed.
Arbitrator Ernest Weiss found
that Boyer deliberately broke rules of conduct, but he showed some sympathy for
the cop in a July 2011 opinion.
"It appears that Cop Boyer
. . . was a victim of his own professional enthusiasm," Weiss wrote.
"In the interest of productivity (900 arrests in less than two years) he
cut some clerical corners. However, there was no showing that any of his
erroneous clerical entries were created for personal gain."
Weiss reduced Boyer's
suspension from 20 days to six.
Boyer won praise in 2008 when
he gave up his badge number, 1410, in honor of Cop Walter Barclay. Barclay, who
had worn that number, was crippled after being shot in 1966. He died 41 years
later from complications of his condition.
After his death, Barclay's
family was given a plaque with badge 1410. Boyer now wears number 4815.
For years, judges have been raising concerns
about Boyer's cases.
Last year, Common Pleas Court
Judge Paula Patrick said Boyer apparently did not know the rules for making
legal arrests, although he had served 16 years on the force at the time. Boyer
had testified that he routinely frisked everyone in every car he stopped.
"Isn't that amazingly
illegal?" said Patrick, according to court transcripts. "I mean,
really."
In that case, Boyer was
explaining his 2011 arrest of Tyrone Hargrove in North Philadelphia. After
stopping him and checking his driver's license, Boyer testified, he asked
Hargrove to step out of the vehicle.
"He was frisked,"
Boyer told Patrick. "I do that on every car stop."
Boyer testified that after the
frisk, he found a loaded .40-caliber Beretta in Hargrove's car. He booked
Hargrove on charges of illegally carrying a firearm because he was a felon,
previously convicted for drug dealing.
The gun case never went to
trial. All evidence was suppressed because an cop must demonstrate a legal
justification for frisking people.
"The case law is clear
that they have to have a reasonable suspicion that they are armed and
dangerous. . . . He does this all the time, routinely, was his testimony,"
said the judge.
The District Attorney's Office
dropped all charges.
In 2009, Judge Karen Simmons
ruled Boyer wasn't credible in his testimony about the arrest of Lewis Butcher,
a convicted drug dealer.
Boyer testified that almost
immediately after he stopped Butcher in November 2007, Butcher confessed to
recently having smoked crack cocaine, a contention Butcher denied.
After hearing Boyer and Butcher
testify and reviewing Boyer's arrest paperwork, Simmons suppressed all evidence
based on the cop's credibility.
The District Attorney's Office,
which withdrew charges against Butcher, has said judges rarely rule that cops
are not credible.
Common Pleas Court President
Judge Pamela Pryor Dembe said courts do not notify police when an cop is deemed
not credible. That, she said, is not the role of judges.
"Detection and prosecution
belong to the executive department, not the judicial branch," she said in
an e-mail.
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled prosecutors must disclose evidence that would enable defense attorneys to
show their clients' innocence or impeach the credibility of government
witnesses.
University of Pennsylvania law
school professor David Rudovsky reviewed the findings of the 2008 police
investigation of Boyer and said the report "contains material that could
be used to impeach the testimony of the cop in other prosecutions and therefore
must be provided to defense attorneys."
The district attorney, however,
did not turn over the report to lawyers defending people Boyer arrested, the
Public Defender's Office said.
Deputy District Attorney McCann
said he opened a review of what went wrong after questions from The Inquirer
about Boyer.
McCann said the police Internal
Affairs Division in 2008 sent his office a copy of its investigation of Boyer's
alleged falsification of reports.
McCann said prosecutors should
have reviewed the investigation to determine whether there was material that
should be provided to attorneys defending suspects Boyer arrested. If an cop's
credibility is brought into question, the District Attorney's Office is
supposed to make a determination of whether the cop can be reliably used as a
witness in court, McCann said.
None of that happened.
"We did not have an
internal discussion," McCann said.
He said he was still trying to
determine what went wrong.