Lawsuit: Police planted evidence in body-cam case
TRENTON >> A Trentonian story about cops being caught dead to rights on body camera making up a story about how they found a gun has resulted in another lawsuit against the litigation-heavy Trenton Police.
The lawsuit accuses officers of “fabricating, planting and tampering with evidence” in a criminal case.
Tyrawn Carter, who was charged with aggravated assault stemming from the suspicious gun find, alleged in the lawsuit Trenton police officers who arrested and charged him with aggravated assault and weapons offenses concocted a “false report” about how they found a rustedout handgun that state police later determined didn’t work.
“Defendants …carried out and perpetuated the conspiracy to deprive plaintiff of his rights by participating in a corrupt effort to illegally seize, book and fraudulently convict plaintiff on false charges manufactured and supported by defendants,” according to the lawsuit, brought by attorneys Robin Lord and Cliff Bidlingmaier III.
The civil complaint includes counts of malicious prosecution, false arrest and imprisonment, and civil rights violations.
Although he refused to go along with other officers blue-silence demands that violate a department order by powering down his body camera, the Trenton Police officer Chris Hutton is a named defendant, along with K-9 cop Drew Astbury and former police director Ernest Parrey Jr.
Carter’s lawsuit was filed last month after The Trentonian earlier this year exposed the whole allegedly staged episode from September 2016.
The newspaper had to sue the city to obtain Hutton’s body camera footage after the city and police department initially refused to turn over the damaging footage because the officers in the video were under internal affairs investigation.
Police refused to say if anything happened to the officers caught on tape conspiring to make up a story about how they found the gun, which Carter allegedly wielded at a passing motorist Sept. 9, 2016, on the 200 block of Walnut Avenue.
Astbury claimed in a sworn probable cause affidavit that he found a gun – a .32-caliber Colt – after seeing Carter drop it over a chain link fence outside 241 Walnut Avenue.
The tape showed police fanned out across the neighborhood in a frantic search for the weapon.
It took several minutes until Hutton actually found a rustedout gun in the same spot described in Astbury’s AOC, undercutting his claim he found the gun immediately after he saw Carter drop it there.
Another cop, William Mulryne, had searched that exact spot but didn’t find it, suggesting to police accountability experts the gun was planted.
Those same experts took issue with Astbury’s blatant lies in the sworn AOC, in which he claimed he had a good vantage point of the action from 100 feet away, calling it an example of “noble cause corruption.”
The AOC underpinned the charges against Carter, who ultimately pleaded guilty to terroristic threats, and had other charges dropped, in exchange for probation.
He wanted to take his deal back once The Trentonian exposed the glaring holes in the cops’ story.
At one point, Hutton received a tip from a man on a porch that Carter was a gunrunner and may
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