Taxpayers Shell Out $900k To Cover For Cops Who Charged 64 People With Possessing 1 Oz. Of Weed
from the law-enforcement-efficiency dept
You’ve presumably read the headline. Let’s take a look at how we got there.
On Dec. 31, 2017, Nija Guider finished her waitressing shift and headed to a friend’s 21st birthday party in Cartersville, Georgia. She had been at the party for less than an hour when, suddenly, the police arrived. Without a warrant or permission, they entered the house and detained everyone inside. Guider and more than 60 other guests’ wrists were zip-tied.
“Boom, we were all going to jail,” Guider, then 21, recalled.
Each guest was charged with possessing less than an ounce of marijuana that had been found in the home. Some spent days in jail, held under harsh conditions, Guider and other party guests allege. The district attorney’s office would eventually drop charges against everyone.
Dropping charges was the right thing to do but the right thing to do came long after the damage had been done. Most of those arrested were held over the weekend, denied access to legal representation, strip-searched, prevented from using the restroom or using their cell phones, and held in a 30-degree cell. Jail staff placed signs designating the overfilled holding cell as “THE PARTY CREW.” Some of those arrested were placed in solitary confinement after complaining about their treatment. No other drugs were recovered beyond the single ounce officers arrested 70 people over and charged 64 with possessing.
Here’s the law enforcement depiction of the incident:
At about 2 a.m. on Dec. 31, 2017, Cartersville Police Officer Joshua Coker was responding to a report of gunfire in the area when he drove down Cain Drive. Even with his car windows rolled up, he smelled marijuana, according to his testimony at a subsequent hearing.
He then saw four men in front of the home where Guider and others had gathered. Coker requested two other officers in the area join him.
The officers asked the men what was occurring inside; they explained it was a party. The officers then entered the home and announced everyone was being detained, according to police testimony. The majority of the guests were in their late teens or early 20s, according to booking reports.
“I had exigent circumstances to go inside and clear the residence … and make sure of no destruction of evidence prior to the Drug Task Force arriving,” testified Coker.
The “exigent circumstances” claimed by the officer was nothing more than the odor of marijuana, something he apparently detected while in a moving vehicle with its windows up. A warrant wasn’t obtained until two hours after officers had arrived, entered the residence, and detained the partygoers. The search — which produced a single ounce of marijuana and 64 criminal charges — was later deemed unconstitutional.
The party guests who sued police officers for their actions have been vindicated, as Liz Dye reports for Above the Law.
Forty-four of those arrested filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the various law enforcement agencies responsible for this debacle. And this week the parties came to a settlement, with the plaintiffs splitting a $900,000 payout.
Of course, it won’t be the cops paying for this. It’s the city of Cartersville (GA) paying for it. And the city won’t really be paying for this either. It will be the residents of Cartersville footing the bill and being asked to fund police misconduct with no assurance they won’t be asked to do this again. As is standard with far too many settled lawsuits against government employees, the money is tied to exonerative boilerplate.
Police admit no liability, with the Cartersville City Manager telling Fox 5 News that the defendants were simply seeking to avoid the cost of litigation and acknowledge no wrongdoing.
If no entity involved in the wrongdoing is made to feel any financial pain, the perpetrators are likely to re-offend. Say what you will about the evils of the carceral state, but at least that side of the justice system forces perps to pay for their crimes out of their own pockets. The other side of the justice system often expects nothing from offenders — something that should raise far more concerns about law enforcement recidivism, and result in government efforts to reduce it. Somehow, it never does.
Filed Under: 4th amendment, cartersville, civil rights, drug possession, georgia, joshua coker, probable cause
Comments on “Taxpayers Shell Out $900k To Cover For Cops Who Charged 64 People With Possessing 1 Oz. Of Weed”
Your headline misses the point
The described circumstances would still be inappropriate if 1 person was charged for possession of 64oz of weed.
To repeat:
That’s not how suspects are to be treated. Heck, it’s not even how convicts are to be treated.
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I would like a demonstration of this supernatural scent detecting prowess, then find the genes that create it, then create a gene therapy so we can give all cops super smell powers…
Then make them patrol an industrial pork farm.
Re:
I really want to see some defense lawyer actually have an officer’s sense of smell tested some time. Make them prove they can perform these superhuman feats that make for such preposterous pretext.
“Taxpayers Shell Out $900k To Cover For Cops ”
Someone has been smoking something, if this is true.
smell the bacon
Back at it again with the great idea to #abolishthepolice Holla at ya boi!
By the police logic…
If someone were to find – or even plant – a little half-ounce baggie of weed in the flower bed outside a police station, ALL the officers inside would be subject to arrest for drug possession. Remember, the baggie wasn’t found in the house, it was out in the yard.
A demand for the owner to confess under penalty of them ALL being charged would be a-okay despite the self-incrimination clause of the 5th amendment or the fact nobody was actually in possession of the baggie when it was found.
And odds are, if you walked in and announced the entire department was under arrest, even with the law on your side, many of them would resist.
Such a waste of money
Given that police officers have a stronger sense of smell than drug ‘detecting’ dogs, why do they waste so much money on the dogs to train them to ‘detect’ drugs.
Your headline misses the point
The described circumstances would still be inappropriate if 1 person was charged for possession of 64oz of weed.
To repeat:
That’s not how suspects are to be treated. Heck, it’s not even how convicts are to be treated.
Re:
Yeah it wouldn’t have mattered if every single last person there was involved in a drug-fueled orgy, that would still have been a horrible and unacceptable way to treat them.
Eric beat me to it, what do you need drug dogs for if officers have better noses? Could such a claim even be allowed in a prosecution? It doesn’t pass a laugh test. I can see it in court where the defense would have to hire an expert, so cops counting on non-well off defendants? It’s beyond ludicrous.
"With windows up"
Without wanting to defend all the rest of this bullshit, car ventilation rather favors pulling in outside smell, and particularly if the inside of the car is kept cooler than the outside, this aids detecting smoke particles. Of course the kind of filtering systems built into a particular car may make a tremendous difference here, so “windows up” should be the start rather than the end of a plausibility check.
Re:
Unless one or more joints were being smoked as the car drove past, there is little chance of anything being smelt while outside. The charges do not mention any evidence of anything being smoked at the time. so the smell was imagination, or an excuse to bust a party.
Oh noes, someone else has been fined a bunch...
Ah the ‘we did nothing wrong, we’re just settling because the other side doesn’t want to take this to court’ lie, that really should never have been allowed to be a thing. Any settlement by police should have a mandatory ‘We screwed up, here’s who and how’ statement attached so they can’t just pretend that the whole thing was a ‘misunderstanding’ that they’re saddling the public tens if not hundreds of thousands to make go away.
So long as police never pay personally for their actions they have no reason to change, it doesn’t matter if the fine is nine-hundred thousand or nine-hundred million, any amount is inconsequential when you don’t have to pay it.
They were right to sue
The claim of smelling weed… dubious at best. Of course none of the badged cock suckers will be fired as they should.
Re:
Weed has a very pungent and distinctive smell. Yes his windows were closed, but did he have the AC/Heat on Fresh air instead of re-circ? If so, I can state with certainty that you’d be able to smell it.
Everything else about that night? Fire and arrest them all.
Re: Re:
Where were the people actively smoking weed to cause the stink? The strong odor come from it burning, and the cops did not mention anything about it being smoked as they drove past.
The story also leaves unanswered one very important fact. What was the color of their skin? Update my priors.
Re:
That detail is in the complaint. 50 African-Americans, 3 Hispanic, 1 Native-American, the rest were white.
This happened in Georgia.
I am sure no racism was a motive whatsoever. /s
Quick and easy fix
Any settlement needs to come out of the police retirement fund.
They want the power to live above the law, let them have the consequences and repercussions to go along with it.
The real story:
Egregious violation
I’d argue that is one of the most egregious examples of police abuse of power and rights violations reported on Techdirt.
Most examples involve a small number of officers acting within a short period of time without time for reflection.
This obviously involved numerous officers who over the course of booking and holding 60 people never bothered to consider what they were doing. Holding 60 people for nothing more than being in the same building as a pretty trivial amount of pot. Then sitting around and letting them sit in jail for days for it. Nobody in a leadership position looked at this and thought it was crazy?
Whole thing falsified?
I have to say that this sounds like a pretty clean party. An ounce of MJ amounts to 0.44 grams per partier.
Also, there was evidently no alcohol, which I imagine would have generated other charges.
And no gun found.
Sixty-four people and no one apparently resisted arrest.
Veritable saints.
Which seriously raises the question in my mind: Did the weed come with the cops?
In fact, the original shot — assuming there was one — or the call reporting it, to me raise a question:
Was the whole incident manufactered by the cops, just to create an excuse to arrest these people?