FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (WSVN) — A jury has began deliberating to decide the fate of a former Hollywood Police officer accused of a cover-up.
On Tuesday, the two women and four men jury must decide if 45-year-old Dewey Pressley is guilty of his role in an attempt to cover up a crash involving a police cruiser during a DUI stop, back on Feb. 16, 2009.
Though he refused to testify in his own defense in court, his actions were caught on police equipment at the scene.
Alexandra Torrensvillas was intoxicated, but ultimately had her case thrown out after Pressley was accused of using her state as an excuse to pin the blame of a police cruiser’s crash into the rear of her vehicle. A police dashcam video, which also recorded audio, was used by prosecutor Tim Donnelly at the trial. “Without these 12 minutes on this videotape, these dirty dozen minutes, we would think that this is a normal DUI,” he said, “that nothing is out of the ordinary here. But it isn’t a normal DUI.”
Hollywood Police Officer Joel Francisco had pulled Torrensvillas over at a green light, and he ended up rear-ending her car and would have faced a citation for following her too close. Hollywood Officer Dewey Pressley then arrived on scene, wrote the report and arrested Torrensvillas. This is the conversation outside of his police cruiser that night:
“We’re going to bend this a little bit, OK, because she is so drunk, so it is what it is,” said Pressley.
“Hey, you are the expert,” said another officer.
“Well, I don’t want to make things up ever because it’s wrong, but if I need to bend it a little bit to protect a cop, I’m gonna,” said Pressley. “We’ll do a little Walt Disney to protect the cop because it wouldn’t matter because she is drunk anyway.”
Francisco hit the car, which Torrensvillas had abandoned to rescue her cat. “She never says, ‘I slammed on my brakes,’” Donnelly told the jury, saying Pressley had tried to coerce her to take the blame for the accident. “Officer Pressley says, ‘So you slammed on your brakes, you abruptly slammed on your brakes,’ and then later on, in the 12-minute interview later on in the tape … he’s telling the other officers there, ‘Yeah, I got her to say … I told her to say, ‘You abruptly slammed on the brakes,’ blah, blah, blah.”
The defense insists officer Pressley was just talking big but never falsified any paperwork. “The only person that’s been in this courtroom that is guilty of falsifying records that have been filed in the court is James Leonard who swore, under oath, that Joel Francisco and Dewey Pressley should be arrested,” Defense Attorney Rhea Grossman said.
Technically, the 10 charges add up to 30 years in state prison. However, considering Pressley has no priors and a clean record, if convicted, he could face a much lower sentence.
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