Two former LA cops charged with planting evidence in dispensary

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Two former Los Angeles County Sherriff’s deputies were charged, booked, and released this week on $50,000 bail a piece, stemming from accusations that they had illegally planted firearms during an alleged bust at a southern California medical marijuana dispensary back in 2011.
Facing charges ranging from obstruction of justice and altering evidence, to perjury and filing false police reports, Julio Cesar Martinez (39) and Anthony Manuel Paez (32) are scheduled to be arraigned later this year, on June 17th. If convicted, they could face up to seven years in state prison.


While out on routine patrol on August 24th, 2011, the two deputies claim to have witnessed an armed drug deal go down on West 84th Place, just north of the Los Angeles International Airport.
Martinez and Paez reported that they tailed the alleged suspects back to a storefront medical marijuana dispensary, and upon further investigation, they claim to have discovered one handgun immediately upon entering the premises, near a trash can.
Soon thereafter, they say they turned up another pistol, this one on a desk next to a jar of Ecstasy pills. Two men were arrested on the scene, one for possessing an illegal firearm, the other for having a gun while holding a controlled substance.
Los Angeles county district attorney’s office spokesperson Jane Robison told the LA Times that those charges were dropped nearly a year after the arrests were made,
however, when the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department’s own internal investigation on the matter found some major gaps in the story that the two deputies were telling.

According to the complaint and new charges against the former law enforcement officers, the fools were caught on camera. The same department store security system put in place to keep the riffraff and common criminals deterred exposed the deputies’ report for the utter bullshit that it was.
As it turns out, rather than following proper police procedure and waiting for a search warrant, Deputy Martinez immediately kicked out a power box when entering the building, cutting the electricity and lighting to the room. It was at that point that Paez climbed under a desk and disabled the store’s security cameras.
Their criminal behavior was conveniently omitted from their own report of the incident, and it took over a year for the truth to surface, because unlike crooked cops, the cameras don’t lie.

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