'Guilty Until Proven Innocent' So It Took Two Black Men Months to Prove that Cough Drops Didn't Have Cocaine Inside Them. MA Troopers Targeting Blacks Initiated False Prosecution and Incarceration

From [HERE] It started as the most mundane of Saturday mornings. Imran Laltaprasad had just picked up his buddy Francisco Torres Jr. in Weymouth, and the two were heading out to move some furniture for Laltaprasad’s brother. But they wouldn’t get very far. As Laltaprasad merged his Nissan Altima onto Route 3, he noticed a state police cruiser behind him.

It was a familiar sight. Since getting home from prison a year and a half before, Laltaprasad, who is 37 and Black, says he had been pulled over more times than he could remember. The stops—almost always for minor traffic violations—had become such a nuisance that he had once called a lawyer asking if anything could be done. There wasn’t. “You can’t exactly take out a restraining order against the police,” the lawyer said. Now, as Laltaprasad saw the cruiser’s blue lights flash in his rearview mirror, all he could think was, Here we go again.

Laltaprasad watched in his side mirror as two state troopers stepped out of the cruiser and strode toward his car. “License and registration,” he recalls John Dailey, an eight-year veteran of the force at the time, saying to them. Apparently, Laltaprasad had committed a marked-lanes violation, crossing over a double yellow line with both driver’s-side wheels. Laltaprasad wasn’t surprised. It was just the kind of minor and impossible-to-disprove infraction that he believed the police often used as a pretext to pull him over.

Meanwhile, the other trooper, Michael Gagnon, spoke with Torres through the passenger-side window. Fresh out of training for new recruits, Gagnon was doing a so-called left-seat, right-seat patrol with Dailey, the state police’s term for a ride-along with a veteran trooper. “When that’s happening,” one state trooper says, “they’re on the hunt to stop anything and everything just to give the new kid experience.” From the passenger side of the car, Gagnon asked Torres, who is Latinx, for his identification, and Torres told him his name and birthday and then watched as the two troopers returned to their cruiser.

A moment later, they were back. “Step out of the vehicle,” Dailey ordered Laltaprasad, according to Laltaprasad’s and Torres’s recollection of events. (A police document filed later backs up their account, although it does not specify which trooper gave the exit order.) Laltaprasad complied, but questioned the order as he stood up. “Why am I getting out of the car?” he recalls saying. “I ain’t do nothing.”

“Officer safety,” Laltaprasad remembers Dailey saying, adding that he had seen Laltaprasad shifting from side to side in his seat. Dailey and Gagnon had also run background checks on the two men from inside their cruiser and discovered that both had prior firearms convictions.

According to Laltaprasad, Dailey asked if he had any weapons. “Just my pocket knife,” Laltaprasad said, and handed it to him. (Laltaprasad, who has only one leg and still has some old enemies from his life before prison, says he just feels safer carrying a knife.) Dailey also patted him down and discovered $1,120 in cash; Laltaprasad was heading to Vegas for a boys’ trip later that day. Dailey walked Laltaprasad to his cruiser and placed him in the back seat. Next, he frisked Torres and sat him down next to Laltaprasad. Then, Dailey returned to the car to search it.

There had been a time in Laltaprasad’s life, before going to prison, when a search of his car would have been disastrous. He had been dealing drugs then. But now, after completing his prison sentence, he was living on the right side of the law: working a steady job, taking care of his daughters, and staying out of trouble. The cops were being punks, he thought. He felt they just wanted to mess with him. But he was confident that once they got it out of their system, he and Torres would be on their way.

A minute later, Dailey approached Laltaprasad holding a small black plastic bag of pills and asked what the bag contained, according to a police document. Now Laltaprasad was irritated. “Man, those are my dick pills!” he said, according to the document. “I’ve got a flight to catch. I don’t have time for this shit.”

But Dailey didn’t seem to believe him, Laltaprasad recalls, adding that the trooper said the pills looked like they contained fentanyl.

Laltaprasad was shocked, and growing more anxious by the minute. Hastily, he told Dailey to look in the glovebox, where he’d find the medicine’s original packaging and the rest of the pills. When Dailey asked if he could search the rest of the vehicle, too, Laltaprasad told him to go ahead. After all, he had nothing to hide.

A moment later, after going through the trunk, Dailey strode back toward him. He had found something, he claimed: a white powdery substance in a backpack. Dailey said it looked like cocaine, Laltaprasad and Torres recall. “What?” Laltaprasad exclaimed. “Listen, man, there’s no drugs in my car unless you put it in there,” he recalls saying. Then, Laltaprasad and Torres say, Dailey revealed another detail: The cocaine was wrapped inside Halls cough-drop wrappers. That’s when Gagnon read the men their rights. They were under arrest.

If what was happening hadn’t been so terrifying, Laltaprasad might have laughed at the absurdity of it all: That bag of Halls had been in his backpack for months, and the cough drops were mint flavored, so they were white and a little chalky. Still, Laltaprasad thought, there was no way anyone, let alone a cop, could believe the lozenges were cocaine. Unless, he said to himself, the officer intended to lie.

It was a cruel irony for Laltaprasad and Torres to find themselves handcuffed side by side. For the past year, the glue that held together their friendship was a resolve to never put themselves in this situation ever again. Both men had committed crimes in the past—and paid a heavy price. While dealing drugs in his twenties to make a living, Laltaprasad had survived a murder attempt that cost him his leg. He was left for dead after being shot multiple times, and he never found out who did it. Later, he was convicted of possession with intent to distribute heroin and cocaine and spent three and a half years in prison before his release in 2018.

Torres’s criminal record, by contrast, was the result of “one really bad night,” he says. In his mid-twenties, he went out drinking, blacked out, led police on a car chase, and fired shots into the air from a gun he owned illegally. He didn’t resent the punishment that followed: 18 months in prison. Frankly, he thought, it fit the crime.

Now both men were beating the grim odds that face ex-cons. They had steady jobs—Torres was a cook and Laltaprasad worked at an auto-body shop. Torres had found religion and was converting to Islam with Laltaprasad’s guidance. And they were dedicated fathers. Laltaprasad was in the process of gaining full custody of his two daughters, and Torres paid child support to the mother of his three children and saw his kids on weekends. They were leading decent, productive lives. But now here they were again, back in handcuffs for a crime that had never even occurred.

As the cruiser drove toward the state police’s Norwell barracks, the troopers asked where Laltaprasad was staying in Vegas. When he couldn’t say—his friends had made the arrangements—the troopers concluded he might be lying, according to a statement from state police spokesman David Procopio. Laltaprasad pleaded his case to them. He told the troopers how he’d been flying straight and was about to buy a house to live in with his children. He was so certain of his innocence that he implored Dailey, over and over again, to test the “drugs.” But Dailey said that would not be possible. “It seemed the more I said, the more determined he was to lock me up,” Laltaprasad later recalled.

At the barracks, Torres says, Gagnon placed the men in holding cells and then called in a K9 unit to search Laltaprasad’s car. Around 11:30 a.m., Sergeant David Nims and his K9 partner, Echo, a drug-sniffing dog, pulled up to the Norwell barracks, according to police records. Echo sniffed Laltaprasad’s car and found nothing. Next, Nims led the dog inside to a desk area, where Dailey had placed Laltaprasad’s backpack in a filing cabinet. Now Echo sniffed the area around the cabinet and indicated that it had detected drugs. The dog never sniffed the backpack itself. Still, in his written report, Gagnon included the dog’s positive indication near the cabinet as evidence implicating Laltaprasad and Torres.

Then there was the matter of weight. The precise quantity of cocaine can have life-altering consequences. Anything 18 grams or more is considered trafficking, a crime that can result in two decades of prison time. The police document claims that when Dailey weighed the Halls cough drops, the scale displayed a weight of 19.09 grams.

Back in the cellblock, Torres recalls, Sergeant Nims told them they would be charged with trafficking cocaine. Laltaprasad snapped. He kicked the door of his cell and yelled that the police would not get away with setting him up. Torres felt sick to his stomach. He had been holding out hope that the whole situation could be cleared up as a misunderstanding. But now he knew that wasn’t happening. “This is wrong,” he said.

Nims unlocked Torres’s cell and led him to the booking area. As Nims described the evidence against him, specifically the dog’s positive indication near the filing cabinet, Torres recalls repeating that detail back to him: “It hit on a filing cabinet?” What Nims was saying seemed crazy to Torres. A dog sniffing a cabinet was evidence of drug trafficking? He gave Nims a quizzical look, which seemed to set him off. “Put your hands against the wall,” Torres recalls Nims telling him. Then Nims reached between his legs from behind and grabbed Torres’s testicles. Torres knew that searches could feel invasive, but this didn’t seem normal.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Searching for drugs,” he recalls Nims responding.

Then Nims squeezed his testicles hard and Torres doubled over in pain.

“Stop resisting,” he says Nims told him. “Stop resisting or I’ll put your head through the wall.”

“Y’all are dirty cops,” Torres shot back. (In interviews, four people said that Torres recounted this incident to them shortly after it occurred. In an emailed response, Procopio said, “Sergeant Nims’s frisk was an appropriate attempt to search for concealed narcotics.” Procopio also said that there is no video footage documenting Torres’s booking.)

When they were finished, Dailey and Gagnon loaded the two men into their cruiser again and set off for the Norfolk County Correctional Center, where they were put in adjacent cells, connected only by an air vent near the ceiling. They could hear but not see each other. That evening, they dropped to the floor at the same time and prayed. [MORE]