New Jersey Lawyer News
A 30-year-old Bloomfield man is free, but the two Bloomfield police officers who arrested him are fighting charges themselves after footage from a police cruiser’s dashboard camera showed that allegations against the man of eluding police, resisting arrest, and assault were false.
The case began to unravel when the suspect’s defense attorney requested that police hand over all recorded evidence of the incident. According to The Raw Story, the Bloomfield Police didn’t hand over a tape from a second police vehicle until evidence revealed there had been a second vehicle at the scene of the traffic stop.
Allegedly, that second tape told a different story than what the arresting officers had reported. It showed that the suspect had complied with police during the traffic stop and that one of the officers was repeatedly punching him in the head while he was complying. An officer repeatedly and loudly accused the suspect of trying to take his weapon, even while his hands were clearly raised in the air
Until the tape surfaced, prosecutors had demanded that the suspect serve a five-year prison sentence. Prosecutors have since dropped all of the charges against the driver. Both the arresting officers have been indicted for falsifying reports and one of them for assault. A third officer was implicated in the cover up and pleaded guilty to tampering and retired from the force.
Bloomfield Police Internal Investigators who had seen and evaluated the tape claimed there was no wrongdoing by the officers.
If you have been falsely implicated and charged of a crime, it is essential that you get experienced legal help from a law firm that is not afraid to dig deeper to uncover the facts in your case. There is no excuse for an innocent suspect doing jail time for a crime he or she did not commit, just as there is no excuse for those who have sworn to uphold the law to break it. When you seek a law firm committed to seeing that justice is done in your case, call the defense attorneys at Lubiner, Schmidt & Palumbo in New Jersey at (844) 288-7978 or contact us online to set up a consultation to today.