Jackson County, FL — Dozens of innocent people who were rotting in jail have been freed and their charges erased after the corrupt cop who put them there was caught on his own body camera planting meth on an innocent mother. Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Zachary Wester has since been fired and a slew of lawsuits are now rolling in.
Wester’s fall from law enforcement grace and the 119 people who were exonerated are due largely in part to the diligence of a single person, assistant state attorney at the 14th Judicial Circuit, Christina Pumphrey.
Pumphrey’s job as assistant state attorney included reviewing evidence before moving forward with charges against individuals. When she began reviewing cases, she found something very peculiar.
“This is an exaggeration, but it felt like his (Wester’s) name was on half the cases,” Pumphrey told The Appeal. “It was seriously disproportionate.”
When Pumphrey began watching the body camera footage from Wester’s arrests, she found something even more disturbing. Many times, Wester was seen conducting illegal searches. Also, his written affidavits did not match what she watched in the videos. But that wasn’t the most telling aspect of all these videos.
While it is no question that folks will claim that drugs found on them or in their possession “aren’t their’s” and “they don’t know how that got there,” nearly all of Wester’s cases had this. The videos showed that people were utterly shocked when Wester claimed to have found drugs in their vehicles. While a single person may have been lying, when everyone reacts the exact same way, something is up.
Although she reviewed multiple videos, Pumphrey never saw the actual act of Wester planting drugs or otherwise hiding them. However, all that changed when Wester pulled over Teresa Odom in February of 2018.
In that video, Wester pulls Odom over, claiming her tail lights aren’t working. However, it would later be revealed that her tail lights were, in fact, working fine and Wester had targeted her to frame her.
In the video, Wester is extremely nice to the woman, complimenting her, joking around, and making small talk. But in the back of his mind, he knew the entire time that he was going to plant meth on her and have her thrown in a cage—an insidious move indeed.
After threatening to have a K-9 come search her car, Wester tells Odom that she can avoid the K-9 if she just lets him search her truck himself—a huge mistake.
the guy should have gotten all 119 sentences automatically
If you read the whole article, the woman who discovered this was immediately chastised by the state attorney’s office, who were furious with her for sharing the footage and bringing it up at all; she turned in her resignation soon afterwards and decided to drop her whistleblower complaint because she was afraid it would compromise her new job.
The police officer has not faced any violence beyond being fired.
Dropped charges remain on the victims’ criminal record.
“The next time someone tells you that obeying the law will keep you out of trouble with police, show them this article. A single cop had over 100 victims. ”
“The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.” – Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method
