The incident: Cop arrests woman for suspicion of DUI, says she’s on meth. She denies it. He says he’ll let her go if she takes a drug test and it comes back clean. She takes the test, which comes back clean. He throws it away to keep her in jail.
The result: Now the cop has a year to learn what being in jail is like.
As reported by The New York Post, Richard Charles Barrios III, 29, a former deputy with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, was sentenced on Wednesday for throwing away a urine test that proved a detained driver wasn’t on drugs – before trying to have her jailed anyway on suspicion she was high on methamphetamine.
Barrios will spend a year behind bars for the stunt at his police station in November 2019, after pleading guilty in November to destroying physical matter, prosecutors said.
From the report: “The bizarre chain of events unfolded after Barrios pulled over the driver for a traffic violation and suspected she was on meth, the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office said in a press release. The woman was arrested for being under the influence of a controlled substance. Throughout the ordeal, the woman vehemently denied she was intoxicated and Barrios promised to free her if her drug test came back negative, prosecutors said.
The woman supplied the deputy with a urine sample. Barrios was caught on surveillance footage at the police station testing the sample and viewing the results before tossing the urine in the trash. The deputy refused to reveal the test results to the woman and tried to have her booked into jail, but she complained to another deputy who found the discarded sample and test kit in the garbage, prosecutors said.
The kit showed the woman’s urine sample was negative for all controlled substances. She agreed to another test, which yielded the same results. Deputies released the woman and afterward Barrios was later charged.”
