Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
“Who knows how many potential customers I lost” all because of a police information planting “evidence” – all because “the Schenectady County Sheriff’s Office — tried to ruin my life” a New York business owner asked.
Assistant District Attorney William Sanderson told Visiting Judge Polly Hoye that the police informant “seriously put into jeopardy the integrity of the criminal justice system and the grand jury procedures.”
The unbelievable video was captured by Donald Andrews, Jr., who owns a smoke shop on Mohawk Avenue in Scotia, New York.
The footage clearly shows a police informant named James Slater planting and photographing crack cocaine in the smoke shop. At first, this was assumed to be a police officer, but it turned out to be an informant who claims the police harassed him day and night, threatening him to commit this criminal act.
Instead of taking a stand, the paid snitch decided to try to get an innocent man locked up, apparently at the direction of the Sheriff’s department who told him that they wanted “something” on the law-abiding business-owner.
When Slater made his second trip to the shop he was busted making the plant.
In local WNYT-TV’s video report, Andrews’s lawyer narrates the footage…
“He comes in, places the crack on the counter. Crack, which under federal sentencing guidelines, would get him 4 years in jail. Under New York State law would get him 2 to 7 years in jail,” attorney Kevin Luibrand explains.
The Schenectady chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said this was clearly an honest business man being set up.
“Neither the Schenectady County Sheriff nor the Scotia Police Chief were available to be interviewed about the apparent planting of evidence,” they said..
Andrews was arrested for that crack-cocaine. It was only after he made bail and produced the video of what happened that the charges against him were dropped.
Now, he has filed a wrongful arrest lawsuit.
The informant is in prison, having received a 6-12 year sentence for perjury. “No one here was in my position,” Slater said. “No one here understands the pressure that you are put on by those people — how you’re haunted every day, texted every day, people at your front door. Every time you step outside you’re getting picked up by an unmarked car. It’s not a walk in the park. It’s you do what they say or you get done … there was a lot more to it than is being portrayed. I just want to put that out there.”