Taimoor Rana is seasoned criminal defense attorney specializing in DUI related cases. He shares his expert legal opinion here « “Xeroxed” DUI Symptoms
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- As it is known by any experienced DUI attorney that many police officers in their written DUI reports and in their testimony are considerably less than honest. One of the practices where this is most readily apparent is the use of what I have referred to as "Xeroxed Symptoms". This is the tendency to "observe" exactly the same "symptoms" in every person that are arrested by the officer for driving under the influence of alcohol.
For instance, with Officer Jones, the suspect when getting his driver’s license fumbles with his wallet, leans against the car for getting support, and word "R" is missed by him in the alphabet recitation, in every case. On the other hand, officer Smith,it looks like that he has to only encounter those citizens who are weaving on the highway, admit to having three martinis, and lose their balance on the third step back, in the walk-and-turn test. If this has been done by the criminal defendant, we would call it "signature" evidence. But when it is done by a DUI officer, we call it "coincidence".
It has been written by a DUI attorney in his book that in order to determine whether xeroxed symptoms exist counsel should also include a request for all reports made out by the officer in other DUI cases during a given period of time — for example, for 15 of the officer’s working days before and after the arrest in his discovery motion ". In later editions of his book that DUI attorney has also commented on the increasing use of computers by DUI officers for creating reports and on the tendency to copy text from one report and paste it into into another.
Of course, prosecutors and law enforcement have and indignantly denied these claims. Well, another news article that has been forwarded by another DUI attorney, having the headlines "Suspicious Reports Ensnare Officers". In the sub-headlines it has been further declared that false and repetitive statements have been filed by the officers in dozens of cases: In the past three years Seven times, veteran Pittsburg (California) police officer James Hartley has reported remarkably similar behavior shown by drunk driving suspects as they tried to walk a straight line. It had been written by Hartley in his reports that each suspect "stumbled after the second step" but kept walking, then "flung" his arm or leg out for balance before that he turned around, then stared at the officer and asked him, "Now what?".
This was not a coincidence. Hartley and Officer Javier Slagado, who was the officer in the Year 2001 has admitted filing dozens of falsified reports. While authorities said that it’s not clear whether the two men discussed the practice, they usually have used old arrest reports as templates by making few changes in them rather than writing the reports from scratch on drug and alcohol cases. Prosecutors have said that in some cases, entire paragraphs appeared verbatim from one report to the next. Much of the information that is provided involved field sobriety tests that are used to establish cause for an arrest and a blood or urine test…."
So for filing false reports what does an officer get, felonious perjury, and sending dozens of possibly innocent citizens to jail? For each, six months of watching TV at home.
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