The Arizona man arrested on drunken charges even though he had no alcohol in his system is now suing the Surprise Police Department.
Jesse Thornton, 61, is seeking $500,000 in damages after officers pulled him over last week and accused him of crossing the white line in his lane. According to local TV station KNXV, after passing both a sobriety and a breathalyzer test---where his blood alcohol level came back at 0.000---Thornton was still taken into custody because the arresting officer thought his eyes looked strange.
A retired firefighter, Thornton explained he had just left a local fitness center where he had been swimming, which may have caused his eyes to redden. Even when he tried telling officers he had bad knees and a bad hip, they allegedly still made him painfully sit on the curb and refused to adjust their squad car seats after taking him into custody.
“I couldn’t even sit on the ground like that and they knew it and I was like laying on the ground, then they put me in the back of an SUV and when I asked the officer to move her seat up ’cause my hip hurt she told me to stop whining,” Thornton told KNXV.
While in custody, Thornton’s vehicle was impounded and the Motor Vehicle Department later suspended his license due to the charges filed against him. MVD officials later required him to take a safe driving class.
Eventually, Thornton was released into the custody of his wife, whom he told KNXV had to leave work early to come and pick him up. And, because he was arrested on a Friday, he wasn’t able to get his vehicle back before Monday. He later told the station the whole ordeal ended up costing him more than $5,000.
“This is a case of D-W-B, driving while black,” Thornton’s attorney Marc Victor told the station.
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