First jury trial since Covid shut down
Aug 10, 2021OUTCOME: Not Gulity
First jury trial in 19 months mid August. Dallas jury trials have been basically shut down since March of 2020 out of Covid concerns. It was in Dallas County Criminal Court No. 4, Dallas, Texas, Ret ... ired Judge Jeffrey Rosenfield sitting in for Judge Nancy Mulder. We picked the jury in the huge Central Jury room and everyone wore masks the entire trial. In the two day trial, the not guilty verdict came in at 3:20 pm on August 17th, 2021 after 36 minutes of jury deliberations. Any win is of course a good win, but this was a fairly easy case for the defense. Judge Rosenfield gave us a 38.23 “Reasonable Suspicion” jury instruction, and the jury concluded the officer didn’t even have reasonable suspicion to stop him, much less arrest him. Duh. Don’t know why that verdict took 36 whole minutes, but I was told there was one juror holding out. The facts: A Farmers Branch police officer was monitoring a huge apartment complex parking lot. The complex has over 250 apartments. My client opened the controlled access gate at 1:00 am and drove into the complex with his girlfriend and her cousin Katie, who lived there. He dropped off Katie and exited the apartment complex. He was in the complex for “maybe 3 or 4 minutes” tops. The officer followed my client for 0.9 of a mile after he left the complex. The officer’s dash cam video showed exemplary driving on the part of my client. No traffic violations whatsoever - not even aggressive driving. The police officer activated his emergency lights and pulled him over. So what reason did the officer give? The officer said he was stopped for suspicion of burglary. “He entered the complex, saw me, and immediately exited. I suspected that he might have been there to burglarize vehicles.” Did you see him drop off a resident? “No.” Was he in in the complex long enough to actually burglarize a vehicle? “No. He was in and out way too quick. His vehicle wasn’t at a stop for more than 10 or 15 seconds.” So you saw his vehicle stop? “Yes. For 10 to 15 seconds.” But you didn’t see anyone get out of the car? “No.” We had his passenger / girlfriend testify that he had dropped off her cousin Katy at her apartment there. It was raining, so Katy got out of the car and walked quickly to her apartment. (Katy now lives in Boston, so she wasn’t there to testify.) So…the officer’s sole basis of the stop was suspicion of burglary, but the officer also knew - for a fact - the Defendant didn’t have time to burglarize a vehicle…right. Oh yeah. There were no sobriety tests (the defendant politely refused them) no slurred speech, and no unsteady balance. And my client had no difficulty driving, stopping for the Emergency lights, parking the vehicle, producing his DL, exiting the vehicle, or understanding any of the officer’s instructions. After getting a warrant to take my client’s blood, my client spent the night in jail before bonding out the next day. The blood test came back (eventually) at 0.081 BAC, which is 0.001 over the legal limit in Texas. And on video he stated his last beer was 10-15 minutes before the stop. So the science would indicate his alcohol level would still be increasing at that point (meaning he could have been UNDER the limit while he was driving.) That poor client waited nearly three years before his September, 2018 arrest was finally resolved with a not guilty verdict in August of 2021. We are now getting his arrest expunged from his record. John Gioffredi August, 2021
