The NYPD's ongoing ticket-fixing mess seems to have been good for former Bronx ADA Stephen Lopresti. After the defense hammered in the fact that the cops who arrested Lopresti for driving drunk on the Grand Concourse in December 2006 were involved in the scandal it took a jury all of 45 minutes to let him off the hook. "The corruption was ridiculous," Juror Isaac Johnson, 22, told the News. "They have no integrity. They don't even deserve a badge."
A relieved Lopresti, who has three previous DUIs and would have been disbarred if he'd been convicted, immediately thanked his attorneys for getting him off. "One thing I’m going to do is I’m going to go to church and thank my lawyers," Lopresti said outside the courthouse.
This is the second time that in the last month that a person arrested by a ticket-fixing cop has gotten off, arguably because of the scandal. Lopresti's defense lawyer Steven Epstein doesn't think this will be last though. "The NYPD and the district attorneys in New York City need to seriously consider the conduct of police officers and how they go about acting as public servants," Epstein told reporters. This verdict "makes clear that corruption won't be accepted in this courthouse or anywhere else."
Or, in the words of juror Guadalupe Torres, 58, the officer's ticket fixing was a clear example of "how crooked they are. They’ve probably done that so many times, but they say they did it once or twice. We reached a verdict immediately because it was a clean cut case."
