Jury acquits deputy accused of lying about drug bust
A jury here found a former Bexar County sheriff ’s deputy not guilty of official oppression and two counts of tampering with a government record, rejecting prosecutors’ arguments that he conducted an illegal search of a car and lied about finding drugs “in plain view.”
The six-member panel acquitted Joel Chavez, 54, of the Class A misdemeanors Wednesday.
Chavez had pulled over a San Antonio physician, Dr. Joel Fernandez, after clocking him doing 84 mph in a 40-mph zone in 2019. He searched the vehicle and found drugs he identified as cocaine and MDMA.
The drug charge was later dismissed for insufficient evidence, but both prosecutors and defense attorneys spoke with the assumption that the drugs were real.
Prosecutors Oscar Salinas and Meghan Galloway said Chavez lied on a report as to where the drugs were located to make the search legitimate and to make the arrest stick.
“This is not complicated. He wrote a police report, he lied on a police report, and he got caught. That’s it,” Salinas told the panel in his closing argument.
Fernandez had a camera in his Porsche Cayman that captured Chavez pulling a metal dish out of the glove compartment and placing it on the passenger floor board. That’s how he was caught, Salinas said, because deputies did not have body-worn cameras in 2019.
Defense attorneys Jason Goss and Jasmin Olguin
argued that Chavez was a good deputy who was tired after he worked a double shift. He made a simple mistake when he wrote where he found the dish that tests later concluded contained cocaine, she said.
“They took an honest mistake and turned it into a lie,” Olguin told the jury. “What separates a mistake from a lie? Intent.”
Chavez was patrolling TPC Parkway near Bulverde when he pulled over Fernandez. The deputy wrote in his report that he saw Fernandez reach under the driver’s seat as he approached, so he searched the vehicle.
A metal dish with what appeared to be a white powder was “in plain view” on the passenger floorboard, he wrote. Believing it was cocaine, Chavez handcuffed Fernandez, put him in his patrol vehicle and searched the Porsche.
The jury saw the video on Tuesday showing the dish was in the glove compartment, contradicting Chavez’s report.
Both Olguin and Goss argued that Chavez had probable cause to search the car from the moment he saw movement in the vehicle that appeared to be Fernandez reaching under his seat.
“The irony of this case is that the state brought you Fernandez, and he committed perjury” on the witness stand, Goss told the court, citing the testimony of the doctor on Monday.
Chavez, who was fired in 2020, did not testify.
He might not quite have followed procedure but the drugs would have been found anyway when officers inventoried the vehicle after an arrest for reckless driving, Goss said.
The deputy “said something in the wrong way, in the wrong word — we agree it’s wrong — but they have to prove he knew it was wrong,” Goss said.
The contradiction between the video and the deputy’s report made the drug charges against the doctor impossible to prosecute, she said.
“Fernandez may be a liar, but what doesn’t lie is that video,” Galloway said. “This case is about ‘in plain view.’”
If convicted, Chavez could have faced up to a year in a state jail, a fine up to $4,000, and would have lost his peace officer license.