By Krystal Smalley
ksmalley@wbcowqel.com

It took a panel of seven men and five women less than an hour to find Torin Jones not guilty of drug possession.

The 43-year-old Bucyrus man was on trial in Crawford County Common Pleas Court Thursday for the fourth-degree felony. Jones was offered a nine-month prison sentence and dismissal of a misdemeanor OVI charge Tuesday in exchange for his guilty plea but Jones rejected the offer and chose the Thursday jury trial instead.

The prosecution, led by assistant prosecutor Rob Kidd, attempted to prove that Jones possessed 9.825 grams of crack cocaine during a traffic stop on East Mansfield Street in Bucyrus on May 31. In his opening argument, Kidd informed the jury that a routine traffic stop by a trooper evolved into a unique investigation that rainy May night.

“It was the defendant and no one else who possessed 9.825 grams of crack cocaine,” Kidd argued.

Defense attorney James Mayer III, who practices in Mansfield and Columbus, admitted that the trooper conducted a lawful stop when he pulled Jones over for driving without headlights in the middle of a rainy night but his argument quickly turned from there.

“We are unaware of any evidence that will actually link Mr. Jones to that baggie of crack cocaine,” Mayer asserted while calling the video that would be presented a “red herring.”

Only one witness was called the entire day: Ohio State Highway Patrol Sgt. Brandon Spalding. The sergeant is a 16-year veteran of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, serving at the Bucyrus Post at the beginning of his career before being transferred to the Marion Post where he was promoted to sergeant. He returned to the Bucyrus Post 18 months ago.

On the night in question, Spalding was working the midnight shift and performing his traffic patrol in Crawford County. While cruising along Lane Street at 3:45 a.m. amidst a rain shower, the veteran trooper noticed a truck driving without any headlights. He flipped his patrol cruiser around in a parking lot and turned on his lights, signaling the driver to pull over along East Mansfield Street.

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When he approached the vehicle, Spalding testified he detected the odor of alcohol and noticed that the driver, whose eyes appeared red, was slightly nervous. The driver was not able to provide an ID so Spalding asked him to step out of the vehicle and walk to the back of his truck. Once there, Spalding asked for consent to conduct a pat down to search for weapons.

Spalding stated that during such pat downs he is not allowed to search pockets unless he finds possible contraband items during the pat down.

Spalding then led the driver to the passenger side of his patrol cruiser and sat him in the front seat, unrestrained. The trooper crossed to the driver’s side and began to verify the driver’s identity as 43-year-old Torin Jones. Spalding still smelled alcohol on Jones and conducted a horizontal gaze nystagmus eye test, looking for the distinctive lateral jerking when the eye gazes to the side. The bouncing motion of the eye becomes more pronounced as the impairment increases.

Spalding testified that Jones hit all six possible clues from the horizontal and vertical gaze nystagmus eye tests and failed two standard sobriety tests.

In order to conduct a walk-and-turn test, Spalding backed his car up to allow for room between it and Jones’ truck. When he rounded the hood of his cruiser to pull Jones out of the passenger seat, he saw something in the grass off to the right of his car. Using his flashlight to illuminate the object, Spalding saw a plastic sandwich-type bag twisted on the ground with what appeared to be crack cocaine. It was laying just one foot from the curb and near the headlight of Spalding’s cruiser, two pieces of mostly white objects about the size of a Hershey Kiss enclosed in a bag and sitting amongst green grass drenched with rain.

Before moving his car, Spalding stated, the bag would have been right at the passenger door of his cruiser. He did not remember seeing it when he first walked Jones over to the side of his car to conduct the eye tests.

A second trooper also spotted the bag when he arrived, though he was not called in to testify.

“How did the baggie get there?” Kidd asked.

“The only way it could have got there was if it was dropped by the defendant,” Spalding said.

The prosecution provided video from the trooper’s dash camera, stills from the video, pieces of crack cocaine found at the stop along with the bag it came in to the jury but failed to produce any DNA evidence or eyewitness testimony of actual possession, a fact which the defense was quick to jump on.

“It’s true that you never observed anything,” Mayer said, referring to his client possibly dropping the drugs.

Mayer also noted that Jones never left the sergeant’s side during the walk from the truck to the pat down to the cruiser.

“If you feel anything like contraband . . . you’re allowed to get that out,” Mayer said about Spalding’s pat down. “And you did not feel anything like that, correct?”

“That is correct,” Spalding said.

Mayer said that during an OVI investigation, it is a law enforcement officer’s primary objective to make observations, which Spalding testified to doing while speaking with Jones in his cruiser. The defense also noted that the eyes of two troopers were on Jones when he got out of the car.

Spalding did not bring the bag of suspected crack cocaine to Jones’ attention until after he arrested the man. Jones denied the drugs were his and acted inappropriately Mayer admitted, but redirected Spalding to his investigation that night.

Though there was a camera to take photographs in his cruiser and a video camera on his camera, Spalding said he did not utilize either to document where he found the bag of drugs.

During the prosecution’s redirect, Kidd asked Spalding about his experience with individuals attempting to get rid of contraband during a traffic stop. Out of the estimated 1,000 traffic stops he’s made over the course of his career, Spalding said, 30 to 40 of those stops involved someone trying to ditch contraband items. During those specific stops, he may have actually witnessed the actions a handful of times.

“How much movement is involved in dropping an item?” Kidd asked.

“Could be very little,” Spalding said.

“If you didn’t see him dropping the item could it mean he didn’t possess it?”

“No,” the trooper responded.

Though Mayer questioned Spalding about not attempting to retrieve fingerprints or DNA from the bag, under redirect questioning by Kidd Spalding stated that it would have been difficult to get any kind of fingerprint from it. He said the bag was not in good condition and wet from the rain.

Kidd also asked if it was odd that Jones admitted to having $1,700 on his person while driving around at 3 in the morning, hinting that it could possibly be related to drug activity. Spalding, however, said the large amount of cash may not mean anything by itself.

Spalding also testified that he noted a suspected track mark on the inside of Jones’ elbow while in the cruiser but Mayer was quick to note that crack cocaine was smoked with a pipe and drug paraphernalia was not found on Jones or in his vehicle.

Kidd began closing statements late in the afternoon, arguing that much of the evidence was not in dispute but the question the jurors would have to ask was if the crack cocaine had been in the defendant’s possession.

“It didn’t appear by magic,” Kidd contended. “We all know magic isn’t real. We all know bags of crack cocaine don’t appear out of thin air. It was there purposefully.

“There is only one possible explanation of how that crack cocaine got there. It’s because the defendant placed it there,” Kidd ended.

Walking to the podium set before the jury, Mayer buttoned his suit jacket and pulled it down crisply before gazing upon the jury.

“They talk about magic drugs – where are they on my client?” Mayer said. “We’re able to see the entire interaction; there’s no lost time. Ask yourself: when is this supposed to be happening?”

He argued that the sergeant’s testimony was not sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jones had possessed the crack cocaine that night, citing the lack of eyewitness testimony, the lack of photographs, and number of facts Spalding testified to during the trial but where not included in his written report of that night.

“They are trying to convict on mere speculation. Period,” Mayer closed.

“We’re not asking you to convict on speculation,” Kidd said during his final chance before the jury. “We’re asking you to convict on evidence.”

Kidd said there were only three explanations for the crack cocaine being at that exact spot that night: Jones dropped it, the police planted it, or the drugs just happened to be there. Due to the unlikely odds that a bag of crack cocaine just happened to be mere steps away from a state patrol cruiser where a traffic stop occurred, Kid eliminated that option. He pointed out that there was never any testimony to suggest that the drugs had been planted by police, either, leaving only one plausible option, Kidd believed.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only thing the evidence supports,” he added.

The jury began deliberating at 4:25 p.m. and signaled that it came to a verdict at 5:15.

As Judge Leuthold read the not guilty verdict, Mayer clapped his client on the back as Jones wiped tears from his eyes. Leuthold ordered Jones to be released.