In the Commonwealth Attorney’s office actually:
A former top administrative assistant in the Fairfax County prosecutor’s office was convicted yesterday of a felony for erasing a man’s drunken-driving conviction and was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.
The jury verdict and sentence for forging a public document was more bad news for the office of Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr., which was criticized last week for reducing charges against a rape suspect who then received a 16-month sentence.
The brazenness with which this was pulled off is, quite honestly, mind-boggling:
In August 2004, Annandale resident Munir S. Dellawar was arrested on a charge of driving while intoxicated. Dellawar testified that he was trying to get his real estate license and wanted to avoid a DWI conviction. He said he had a friend who claimed to know someone in the courthouse who could help him.
The friend, Cesar Monteverde, introduced him to Ruiz. Dellawar, 30, said that he and Monteverde met with Ruiz and that she explained how she could make his case go away. He said Ruiz told him to plead guilty to DWI, regardless of his attorney’s advice, and then file an appeal when the attorney was gone.
The appeal file would then go to the commonwealth’s attorney’s office. “She said she would go and take that folder out,” Dellawar testified. He said that he asked her about the computer records and that Ruiz told him, ” ‘I have access to everything.’ Whatever information was left, she was going to scramble it.”
Dellawar said he did as he was told, pleading guilty in November 2004. A couple of weeks later, Dellawar said, he met Ruiz in the parking lot of the Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza parlor in Fairfax City. There, Ruiz provided him with a certified copy of his new court record, showing that his case had been reduced to driving in an HOV lane. A grateful Dellawar said he then paid Ruiz $1,000.
And none of this would have been uncovered if it weren’t for the persistence of one police officer:
But when Dellawar, who had the vanity license plate “R3LTOR,” was pulled over several months later, the officer who originally had arrested him heard the plate read on the police radio. Officer Douglas Middlebrooks also had been present for Dellawar’s guilty plea. He testified that he drove over and questioned Dellawar, who denied the DWI arrest. But after Dellawar was released, Middlebrooks persisted, and a police investigation led to Ruiz’s arrest.
It makes you wonder how many other files this person may have altered.
