When Tampa Police Sergeant Ray Fernandez stopped attorney Phil Campbell on his way back from Mario’s Bar in Tampa late at night on January 23rd this year, little did he know what he was letting himself in for. The arrest of Campbell for DUI has now not only led to his own firing for misconduct, but at least a dozen other people Fernandez has arrested but not yet tried, have been released.
The story of the over eager police sergeant appears to be as newsworthy as the series of diatribes between D.J. Todd Schnitt and Bubba the Love Clem Sponge that started the whole thing off.
Tampa residents may remember the circumstances surrounding the Campbell arrest. Campbell was the attorney acting on behalf of Todd Schnitt in his defamation lawsuit against Bubba. Campbell was stopped by Fernandez and a colleague as he drove away from Mario’s bar with one Melissa Personius. Ms. Personius turned out to be a paralegal from the firm who was acting for the opposition. As the story unraveled, it appeared that Fernandez had acted on a tip off by an attorney at Adams and Diaco, Personius’s firm.
Phil Campbell’s charge of DUI was quashed by the state attorney’s office as a result of doubt over the story Fernandez gave about the arrest. It appeared that he may have lied about how much he knew about the events that night and that Campbell had been drinking with Personius. The fact that there had been a flurry of text messages between Personius, attorney Adam Filthault at the Diaco firm and Sgt. Fernandez, appeared to lend credence to the allegations that he had known all along.
Fernandez was fired last month from the Tampa Police Department and many of the people who had been waiting for trial as a result of arrests he had made are now no longer charged with DUI. According to the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office’s Bureau Chief of Misdemeanors, Douglas Covington, the attorney’s office was no longer going to use Fernandez as a witness as he was “unreliable”.
Accusations and counter accusations still continue to fly to and fro. A defense attorney for one of the 12 defendants, who is now no longer worried about a DUI trial, said that the presence of Fernandez in the witness stand for the prosecution could have been a “three ring circus”. A spokesperson for the Tampa Police Department commented that she hoped that the 12 defendants would think twice about drinking and driving again, even if their cases had been dropped. She said that being in handcuffs after an arrest was likely to make anyone think twice about drinking and driving again.
Meanwhile, the attorney representing the former sergeant said that the dropping of the charges was “irresponsible”. Phil Campbell’s own attorney, who had been involved in getting Campbell’s DUI charge dropped, said that he thought that there wouldn’t have been a prosecutor in the country who would have used a witness like Fernandez after what he had done.
The 12 DUI cases that have been dismissed may be the tip of the DUI iceberg here in Tampa as the state attorney’s office is now trawling through a further 40 DUI cases that Fernandez has been involved in over the last 13 years. These cases involved accused who had never showed up in court and who had warrants issued for their arrest. Sergeant Fernandez has worked for the Tampa Police Department for 19 years.
The involvement of Fernandez in the Campbell DUI arrest and alleged lies and cover up of what he had known before the arrest is also being investigated by the FBI and the Florida Bar.
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