Call the roll. Susan, please. Thank you. Yes. Ms. Lawless? Mr. Martin? Yes. Mr. McCord? Here. Mr. Myers? Here. Mr. Stennett? Yes, ma'am. Mr. Beard? Present. Mr. Blues? Here. Ms. Crosby? Here. Mr. Ellinger? Here. Mr. Farmer? Here. Mr. Ford? Ms. Gorton? Here. Ms. Henson, Mr. Kaye, and Mr. Lane. Thank you, Madam Clerk. This special council meeting has been called and scheduled as a disciplinary hearing for Earl Rayford. The council has received a motion to continue the hearing. Is there a motion to that effect by the council? Council Member Beard makes a motion second by Council Member Henson. Is there any discussion? Council Member Martin. I guess I would like to hear from our council. If we vote on this to continue it, does that automatically continue it and we all go and the motion to dismiss is not heard? Or can we? So that's going to put it, that puts it on a Thursday? Because the mayor is here now. This is a real meeting now. The motion to continue the hearing will just continue the hearing today. It doesn't mean you won't take up the motion to dismiss. You can take that up. Fair enough. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. All right, is there any further discussion? Hearing none, I'll ask for a vote. All in favor, please say aye. All opposed, no. The motion carries. Is there a motion to reschedule the hearing? Yes, ma'am. I move to reschedule the police disciplinary hearing to April 26th at 5 p.m. in the council chamber. Motion by the Vice Mayor, seconded by Council Member Kaye. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please indicate by saying aye. All opposed, no. The motion carries. So now my agenda suggests that I recognize Mr. Jacobs. Is that right? All right. And he will present his motion. Mr. Jacobs. Mr. Mayor, yes. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I am William Jacobs. I'm attorney for Sergeant Earl Rayford. I believe you've been furnished copies of my motion with some exhibits on it. I doubt you've had time to read it. It's not very lengthy, but I doubt you've had any time to look at it, so I may have to go through it a little bit with you before I make my argument. This is the motion to dismiss, right? It was the motion to dismiss. All right, sir. Thank you. One of the most important things I'm going to say to you is found in KRS 15520, which as many of you know is called the Police Officer's Bill of Rights. It sets out what can be done and what has to be done, what has to be done before a police officer can be disciplined. and perhaps the most important part of that statute is what I will read to you. It says this, Any charges involving violation of any local unit of government rule or regulation shall be made in writing with sufficient specificity so as to fully, fully inform the police officer of the nature and circumstances of the alleged violation in order that he or she may be able to properly defend himself or herself. Now the reason I've read that and want to emphasize how important that is, it means this, that the only thing that can be relied upon to discipline Sergeant Rayford has to be found in the charge. If it's not in the charge, he can't be found guilty of anything. When he first came to me, I saw the charge and talked to him, and I was having trouble finding out how he'd done anything wrong. What have you done wrong here? And he said it's in the charges, and he didn't think he'd done anything wrong either. So I got to digging into this and found out that he hadn't, and that's why I've got this motion on to dismiss. As a matter of fact, those of you familiar with the courts know that the courts have a kind of a time-honored method of deciding whether it needs to be hearing or not. And what we do, we file a motion and use the other side's testimony and show that there's no case there. Well, that's what I did here. The charge that is before you is it says that, I won't read it to you, it's on page two of the charges. Here it is. Due to Sergeant Rayford's actions, the original drug charge placed on the suspect was changed from trafficking in a controlled substance to possession of a controlled substance. This led prosecutors to question the circumstances surrounding the incident. Well, that is not true. That did not happen. And that's not based on his testimony or what he says. It's based on what Officer Jackson said about when he was presenting the charges. I've attached a copy of the, I guess you'd call it testimony or verbatim statement, of Officer Jackson in response to questions put to him by Internal Affairs. I think the officer's name is Gensheimer, I think. These are verbatim questions and answers to Officer Jackson, who placed the charge against the subject. Okay, so then when ultimately did you change the charge? Jackson says, when we got there, I hadn't actually filled out the citation with putting trafficking on it. So it was just at that point I made the decision that it was no longer trafficking. I'm just going to put possession. He was charged with possession. Right there, we're through with the charge, because the charge is that Sergeant Rayford caused the original charge to be changed from trafficking to possession, and there never was a trafficking charge ever placed against the subject. So right there, this whole thing falls apart. It goes on, Gensheimer asks again, he says, okay, so was that before you ever talked to Hoskins again, or did you talk to him after, before you ultimately did the ticket? Do you remember? Jackson says, I didn't have to change the ticket. So why am I? Gensheimer says, right. Jackson says, assuming that, I mean, it was probably, I think I talked to Hoskins somewhere after that. I think I filled out all the other stuff first, maybe, and then I put the, I never changed the ticket. So I think I just had it in my mind that he was going to, I was planning on charging him with trafficking, and once I heard that, and then I kind of just was holding off to see that, what was going to transpire, and then when Hoskins explained to me what happened, I charged him with possession. This thing, this charge cannot stand because what Sergeant Rayford is charged with is causing an original charge We changed from trafficking to possession, and there was an original charge of trafficking. Let me back up a little bit. The lead-in to this, where there were some facts there, involves Sergeant Rayford knew of this person who was going with his stepdaughter. Somebody told him he was using an alias. So Sergeant Rayford checked into this, see who this fellow was. He found out he was a fugitive, and there were warrants out for him. And so he did what a police officer is supposed to do. He called dispatch and told of the existence of this fellow. His real name was Mr. some kind of, I can't pronounce his first name, last name, Lacks. Mr. Lacks called dispatch and told him of the existence of this fellow and said in order maybe to have a pickup of him and then asked the dispatched officers to contact him, to contact Sergeant Rayford before they went out there. An officer did contact him. I can't remember if it was Jackson or Hoskins. I don't remember which one it was, but there were two officers involved in this, Jackson and Hoskins. These guys did anything wrong either. I don't think nobody did anything wrong here that I can see. Anyway, so one of them contacted him, and Sergeant Rayford told about the fellow, told him probably he was going to be armed, and told him about the existence of the warrants. And he told him where he might be located. The police officers went to where he was located. They did find him there. He was armed. He had drugs on him and had some money on him. Sergeant Rayford called about 45 minutes later and said, did you have any success? They said, yeah, we found him there. He was there. He was armed, and he had some drugs on him. And he said he told him, Officer Rayford told him he did a good job. and hung up. Later on he found out from his wife that his stepdaughter, Sergeant Rayford's stepdaughter, had just taken some money out of the bank that morning and this fellow that they arrested had the money. So Sergeant Rayford calls and says, did you find any money on him? And he said, yeah, we found some money on him. And it was right at almost exactly to the penny what she'd taken out that morning. This part doesn't matter whether he asked you to bring it to them or whether Officer Hoskins volunteered to take it out to the family. It doesn't make a difference. That's what happened. But before, this is, let me show you, this is Exhibit C. Excuse me, Exhibit B. this is a statement that was taken this is Hoskins' statement he was the one who had the money he said he says Sergeant Rayford told me to take the money and meet her which would be the stepdaughter at 618 Elm Tree Lane which was supposed to be the girlfriend's aunt's house I called Officer Jackson. Officer Jackson didn't have the money. When we hung up and asked him about it, he told me that Sergeant Rayford had just called him and told him the same thing, that he took the money and did not take the money in. Officer Jackson told me I was the one booking in the money. Excuse me. Officer Jackson told him, meaning Sergeant, he was booking in the money. Officer Jackson and I discussed that we had no longer charge. But Officer Jackson and I discussed that we could no longer charge trafficking without the money, so we would have to go with just possession. Now, here's what's important. After booking in a firearm and a crack cocaine, I made my way to 618 Elm Tree Lane. At that point, they'd already made their decision to charge possession. They'd already made the decision to take the money out there to Elm Tree Lane. And importantly, if you read the charges here, at no time in those charges, I'm sorry? Okay, at no time in those charges did it say that Sergeant Rayford ordered them to do anything. The word request is in there a few times, but there's no orders in there to these officers. The word secretive is stuck in these charges here. and if you read on in that I know it's boring for me to read to you but read on in there about what he did when it went, what Sergeant, what Proud I keep wanting to call him Sergeant Officer Hoskins did when he got to the location he was greeted by and introduced to Sergeant Rayford's wife who identified herself as Sergeant Rayford's wife at that point Hoskins still has the money he's still got the money in his hand if there's these secrets going on here he could have said, wait a minute, I didn't know that this is a family thing, so I'm going to keep the money. That doesn't make any sense anyway. Why would the fact that it was his family make a difference one way or the other about them with the money? Say he told them at the beginning, this belongs to my stepdaughter, which he did, but if they say he didn't, he told them that. Well, they said, oh, well, we can't do it. We can't take it out there. to try to wrap this up. I received a response from council, from the government council. And it's a lot of negative phrases. I assume you all have a copy of it too. a lot of negative phrases and kind of negative rhetoric, but none of these things that are in his response are contained in the charge. He said, number one, the case is basically about a police officer who got involved in a matter involving his family. If there was any policy about doing anything with your family in this situation, the policy had been listed in the charge, and it wasn't. Excuse me just a minute, Mr. Jacobs. Excuse me, right here. Excuse me, sir. Up here. I'm sorry. Right up here. Oh, I'm sorry. I heard your voice coming back. I was going to add, can you tell us, I think it would be useful for the council to understand where we are in this. It's my understanding that the motion to dismiss would be involving procedural. If we're going to go into the facts and the case, Mr. Enloe, I may need your help up here. Is that where we're going? No, no, no, no, I'm not doing that. Okay. But what I've got are just the statements of Hoskins and the charges and the statement of Jackson. There's their statement. In order to? They're attached to here. I'm not using his statements. I'm using their statements. Nothing I'm saying here. Okay. All right, then continue. If I was going off into something else, I didn't mean to. No, I'm just trying to clarify where we are. I'm trying to limit it, number one, to the charges and limit it to what Jackson said, what Hoskins said, and the law that says you've got to leave it in the charges. And all I'm talking about now is nothing in the response that the government has filed here is charged as being wrong. I mean, there's nothing involved in the family, interfering with the case. All those things in that two-page response of the government are not found anywhere in the charges. The charges can't stand. The big charges in there, but the only charge in there, except for that secretive part, is that he made them change the original charge of trafficking to possession. He didn't do that by their testimony. The final thing is, by them, if Sergeant Rayford had sat home and done nothing, if he'd have learned who this fellow was, learned there was warrants on this fellow, and done nothing, we ought to be in here charging him with something. But he did something. He knew he did what he was supposed to. What a police officer would do, he identified this fellow, called him up, I know where a fellow is, found out who he was, and when he found out that the fellow had some money, he also perceived the embarrassment of the department, and probably a county attorney and also the Commonwealth attorney of charging a fellow with trafficking. And it turns out somebody comes, lawyer comes in, was defending and says this money belonged to her. And they've taken up the grand jury's time and everybody's time because they think this money was his trafficking money when it wasn't. He did what he was supposed to do. He did what police officers were supposed to do, said the right thing, did the right thing. And to this, I'm still at work. What did he do wrong? That's what I say. He didn't do anything wrong. That's it. Okay. All right. I recognize Mr. Horne for a response. Thank you, Mayor. I don't know if you all found that as confusing as I did, but I found it very confusing, and let me try to respond to it. According to my email, Mr. Jacobs emailed this motion last night at 840. I saw it this morning. I did manage to get a brief response filed this afternoon, which I think it's only about two pages, and I don't want to read it to you, but I want to say that the mayor made a very good observation about the fact that Mr. Jacobs is going into facts. When Mr. Jacobs opened, he told you that the court has a process where they look at cases and decide whether or not they should be dismissed. The part he left out was if there's a dispute of facts, they don't do that. I don't know what to do in terms of the charges. I don't want to read the whole charge to you, but what he has done is pulled out one part of the charge, which is not even the ultimate issue in the charges. The ultimate issue is summarized in the very last paragraph of the charges, and this is what it says. Sergeant Rayford's request that the booking officer return evidence seized incident to arrest to his family member constitutes misconduct in violation of both the statute and the local police rule. As he alluded to, this involved two officers making a pickup on a warrant that Sergeant Rayford called in, and as it turned out, the money, this person arrested had money on him, and Sergeant Rayford called these officers and had that money returned to a family. And the charges, if you read them, set out the facts of the situation and summarized by saying, here is the ultimate issue. His motion didn't even address the ultimate issue. He has pulled out what was basically a side effect of his conduct, which is the officers ended up changing what they were going to charge this individual with because of the interference Sergeant Rayford had in the case. That's the ultimate issue. You, the council, the statutes envision that you're going to have a hearing on this. You're going to hear from witnesses. You're going to see documents. You, the fact finder, decide who's credible, who isn't, and decide what weight to give that evidence. That's the reason why you should deny his motion. All right. All right. Does any council members have any questions? All right. Hearing none, is there a motion? I don't have a motion, but… Got a question? I don't even know if I have a question. Would the motion be to… The motion would be… Either to dismiss or to not dismiss. Is that the motion? And I guess my confusion comes in with the fact is how can we vote to dismiss or to not dismiss when we only have very little information to make that decision on, I believe, only what was handed to us today. I don't know if anybody else has any background prior to today or tonight, but I just received information today regarding this. We already have passed a motion. Correct me if I'm wrong. We passed a motion to reschedule the hearing. So now we have a motion by Mr. Jacob asking for a motion to dismiss. But if we dismiss, then we will. There is no motion. I hear no motion to dismiss from the council. All right. Okay. So there is no motion by the council to dismiss. Is there any further action that we need to take tonight, Mr. Enloe? I would recommend that you take a vote on that question as to whether or not it should be dismissed or not. All right. Okay. All right. So then we would take, then the motion would be in the form of. I think the motion should be whether to grant the motion to dismiss or not. All right. So is there a motion to, how about this, someone can make a motion not to dismiss? Mr. Martin. Thank you, Mayor. I might suggest if someone is so inclined to make a motion to deny, that we make a motion to deny the motion to dismiss. All right. Mr. Blues. Thank you, Mayor. I move to deny the motion to dismiss and to proceed with the hearing on the date that we have postponed it to. So moved. Motion by Council Member Blues to deny the dismissal and to reschedule on the date that previous motion. offered. A second by Council Member Myers. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, take a vote. I'm not seeing you up here. Yeah, okay, you're just asking for a vote. We can take it electronically, can we, Madam Clerk? Alright. Ready to take a vote then. All in favor of the motion by Council Member Blues, please indicate by saying, by voting electronically. Abstain. All right. This is showing two. Is that abstains? All right. All right. The motion passes. All right. Is there anything further to come before the council? Mayor, we do have one outstanding issue. The parties have been unable to agree on a time limit for the presentation of the case, and we would like to request that the council set that at this time. it's the recommendation of the government that each side would be able to present their case in 90 minutes. And what that includes, just as a refresher, the presentation of the case is the direct examination of witnesses, any cross-examination, redirect and recross if necessary. All right. Council Member Gordon. I move that we set the time limit for 90 minutes for each side, which is three hours total. All right. It's a motion by Vice Mayor Gordon and a second by Council Member Ellinger. Is there any discussion on the motion? Mr. Enloe, do you have a comment? Mayor, as I have done in previous matters such as this, I have discussed time limits with the council. We did not reach an agreement on the presentation of the cases. We did agree on time limits for opening and closing statements. Those would be, I think, 10 minutes for opening, 15 minutes for closing, which would consume 50 minutes. So I don't know if the motion of 90 minutes apiece includes that time or that's additional time. Our request is just related to the presentation of the case. So in addition to the 90 minutes for each side, there would be the 50 minutes added on to the three hours for us each side to present evidence. All right. Council Member Beard. I just have been informed that I should have recused as opposed to abstain on the last vote. All right. Can we reflect that? All right. The clerk reflects the recusal. All right. Is there any comment or discussion? We have a motion and a second. We're ready to vote. All in favor, please indicate by saying aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. Anything else you guys got? All right. Anything else? Mr. Jacobs. All right. Thank you. Then we're prepared to adjourn. There's a motion by Vice Mayor and a second by Councilman McCrosley to adjourn. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Meeting is adjourned.