It took a jury an hour to determine that the Allen Crispin case was complete malarkey, so it’s confounding that the Richmond County sheriff’s office didn’t use common sense to come to same conclusion after a year.
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Opinion
The case is important because it highlights how the local justice system can be abused by elected officials for a vendetta or due to personal feelings.
It is no secret that outgoing and soon-to-be unemployed Sheriff Richard Roundtree has no love for Burke County Sheriff Alphonzo Williams. When the opportunity came for Roundtree to embarrass the Burke County sheriff via one of his deputies being arrested, Roundtree pounced.
The victim in this entire fiasco is Sgt. Allen Crispin and maybe the child he was trying to protect.
Crispin was a pawn in Roundtree’s little game. He has been damaged financially and should sue the department.
The jury quickly reached a verdict after it became clear the charges were not appropriate in the first place. Crispin was trying to help resolve a situation that the Richmond County deputy had no interest in dealing with. The sheriff’s office’s inability to produce the body cam footage didn’t help their case.
Soon after the incident, The Augusta Press, requested a copy of the body cam footage. As per custom, Roundtree refused to provide it. The body cam footage could have resolved the entire matter a year ago. Instead, The Augusta Press sued the sheriff’s office to compel them to produce the footage. It was revealed in the trial that no body cam footage even existed.
If the footage didn’t exist, why spend legal fees fighting over it? Why didn’t Randy Frails, legal counsel for the sheriff, disclose there was no footage and thus kill the case against the sheriff. Instead, Frail’s office kept the fight going, racking up thousands in legal fees paid by the taxpayers of Richmond County.
Either Roundtree had the footage destroyed or Frails should refund the city the legal fees he collected for defending the sheriff against producing a video that didn’t exist.
Roundtree fought vehemently to not have to produce body cam footage, which now has magically disappeared. The excuse is that the officer put the wrong size SD card into the camera.
Nobody is buying that. If you believe that a deputy has a bunch of different size SD cards and accidently put the wrong size in, then you’re probably one of these nuts who believes Trump was behind his own assassination attempt. SD cards fit snuggly into their slots. First, the officer would have to have multiple sizes on his person and second, he would have had to squeeze the wrong size in like a child crushing a puzzle piece into the wrong place.
Either the sheriff’s office is grossly incompetent and its employees shouldn’t be allowed to carry a weapon or the body cam footage was conveniently disposed of by the department. Why else would Roundtree fight in court to not have to produce the footage? He could have simply stated that it didn’t exist.
The other reason Crispin should sue the department is because his wife’s personal property was taken and destroyed. Crispin’s wife had video footage on her phone of the encounter.
Richmond County deputies seized Crispin’s wife’s phone without probable cause and deleted videos that could have exonerated him sooner.
Crispin should sue the department for wrongly arrest, theft and destruction of property, illegal search and seizure and general douche-baggery. Hopefully our new incoming sheriff is making note of the dumpster fire of a department he is inheriting.
