NC Sheriff's Lying Invalidates 100+ DWIs, Makes Roads Less Safe!
Who watches the watchers? In this case, the court did. And what it saw was appalling.
Meet Deputy Robert Davis of the Wake County, North Carolina's Sheriffs Department. Because he is a liar, a judge recently dismissed over 100 cases involving people charged with driving while intoxicated (DWI) and another 75 cases involving other traffic offenses.
Last week, District Court Judge Jacqueline Brewer disqualified Deputy Robert Davis as a witness after determining that he had lied in at least three cases. Freeman then dismissed other cases in which he was a witness.
"He violated the defendants' rights," Freeman said. "He was untruthful on the stand."
Wake Sheriff Donnie Harrison said Davis, who had served more than a decade with the sheriff's office, was fired after the information came to light.
The good news is that a lying cop is being held accountable for "testilying." The bad news, as Popehat's Ken White put it on Twitter, is that "legitimately drunk drivers he arrested now have a clean record. Because he lied. Thanks asshole."
Back in 2005, I interviewed Fox News Senior Legal Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano for Reason. He talked about how his encounters with obviously lying police pushed him in a libertarian direction.
Reason: Let's talk about the evolution of your views. During your college years in the late '60s, you wore a "Bomb Hanoi" T-shirt and supported Richard Nixon's law and order campaign. You write that eight years on the bench as a superior court judge in New Jersey turned you into a "born-again individualist," and Fox News Channel viewers can see you regularly argue in favor of restrictions on cops and law enforcement more generally. How did serving on the bench change you?
Napolitano: I had a realization that many [law enforcement agents] were lying. Some of them would acknowledge, not to the extent that I would have them charged with perjury, but in the wink and the nod in a conversation with them afterwards, "Well, we almost don't care if you found out that we kicked in the taillight." "We knew," they'd suggest, "from the profile–Mercedes Benz, New York plates, African-American driver, coming off the George Washington Bridge–it was more likely than not that drugs were in there, and we don't even care." They took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and they're violating that oath when they violate the rights of the driver of that car.