Reginald Moore may be wishing these days that his DUI charge from last November had been prosecuted.
Had Kelvin Pulley, the Leflore County prosecutor, presented the evidence to the judge, chances are, whatever the verdict, it would have been a one-day story and blown over quickly.
Instead, Pulley’s controversial decision to drop the misdemeanor case for what he called a lack of evidence has only dragged the unflattering coverage out for the president of the Leflore County Board of Supervisors.
Pulley’s decision didn’t sit well with the Mississippi Department of Public Safety or the highway patrolman, Master Sgt. Johnny Delaney, who made the arrest. It also prompted this newspaper to dig into what the evidence was against Moore.
A public records request turned up not only Delaney’s arrest report, which gave a detailed account of the Nov. 21 traffic stop, but also a dashcam video of Delaney’s questioning of Moore.
On it, Moore acknowledges to having been drinking earlier in the evening — three 8-ounce glasses of wine, he claimed after being pressed for more detail by Delaney. A preliminary but inadmissible breath test administered by the trooper suggests it might have been more than that.
There are also a couple of other telling exchanges between the two: one, when Moore gets out his smartphone to look up the phone number of another state trooper, presumably hoping the trooper might get him out of the bind with Delaney; the other when Moore appeals to Delaney to let Moore’s lone passenger in the pickup he was driving to take the vehicle to her house.
Moore’s search for sympathy from the trooper — “my family would be torn apart if I was to be caught out here in this situation” — is open to interpretation. Delaney takes it to mean the DUI arrest. Others watching the video might think Moore was uncomfortable about being seen with the unidentified young woman.
He might have been spared those wagging tongues had Pulley not asked Justice Court Judge Jim Campbell to dismiss the case.
It is Pulley’s judgment that day in court — not Moore’s to drive the night of his arrest — that deserves the greatest scrutiny.
There are a lot of reasons why Pulley, the first-term prosecutor, should have been more circumspect about this case than many that come before him.
First off, there were multiple real or perceived conflicts of interest. Funding for Pulley’s public office is at least in part determined by the board that Moore heads. Moore’s wife, Dr. Kalanya Moore, serves on the school board that also employs Pulley as its attorney. And within a year of Reginald Moore’s arrest, the supervisor had been Pulley’s client in a civil matter regarding the estate of Moore’s late father.
All of that should have prompted Pulley to either cut Moore no slack, or to recuse himself and ask the county to appoint a special prosecutor to look at the same evidence that Pulley deemed to be unpersuasive.
There’s also the concern of what message Pulley sent by dropping a case in which a DUI defendant had refused to submit to a legally admissible breath test.
DUI refusal makes it tougher to secure a conviction. That’s one of the reasons that Mississippi, like nearly all states, imposes an automatic administrative penalty of a suspended license on anyone who exercises this prerogative.
Without a scientifically reliable reading of a driver’s blood alcohol content, the prosecution has to rely on the observations of the arresting officer or, as in this case, video evidence to try to prove that a driver is impaired. The outcome in court becomes much more subjective. Those who are familiar with the system know it and are more likely to refuse the test. By Delaney’s count, Moore had refused it on at least three previous occasions.
When a prosecutor doesn’t pursue a DUI refusal case, it encourages others to refuse to be tested when they are pulled over. That’s not something that someone in Pulley’s position should want to promote.
He seemed to be acting more like a defense attorney in Moore’s case than a prosecutor.
The situation reminds me a little of how former football coach Bobby Bowden, early in his career, responded when he was asked by an opposing coach why Bowden’s team ran up the score. “It’s your job to keep the score down, not mine,” he told the opposing coach. “If you don’t like the score, either recruit harder or coach better.”
It wasn’t Pulley’s job to get Moore off the hook. Moore could have hired his own attorney to try to accomplish that.
Pulley’s job was to represent the state in trying to win a conviction. If the video and Delaney’s testimony weren’t enough proof, that should have been the judge’s call to make, not the prosecutor’s.
• Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
