Thursday, May 26, 2011

Ticket-Fixing Case Tests Officers on the Stand

Ticket-Fixing Case Tests Officers on the Stand

By N. R. KLEINFIELD

In a thinly populated Bronx courtroom, a plain vanilla drunken driving case was in progress. More than four years ago, a red 1988 Oldsmobile driven by a beer-imbibing man collided with a 2002 Chevrolet Suburban on the Grand Concourse. The arresting officer was on the stand on Wednesday in State Supreme Court for defense cross-examination. But she was being asked about something quite different.

She was being asked about fixing tickets.

Did she feel it was all right that her union delegate told her that a ticket for her boyfriend's cousin would be destroyed, or another officer perhaps persuaded to falsify testimony, Adam D. Perlmutter, the defense lawyer, asked the police officer, Julissa Goris.

"Yes sir," she said.

And did she feel it was her right as an officer to get tickets fixed?

"It's a courtesy that's given from an officer to another," she replied.

So it goes as the broad shadow of a police ticket-fixing scandal begins to darken the judicial system in the Bronx.

Via Police Ticket-Fixing Scandal Infects Unrelated N.Y. Trials - NYTimes.com.

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