State to pay over $100k for bad DUI stop

Ten years af­ter be­ing ar­rest­ed and charged with fail­ing to pro­vide a breath spec­i­men, a mo­torist has won a High Court law­suit against the State for ma­li­cious pros­e­cu­tion, wrong­ful ar­rest, and false im­pris­on­ment.

Jus­tice Robin Mo­hammed ruled in favour of Narace Dwarpaul and or­dered the State to pay more than $100,000 in dam­ages and in­ter­est aris­ing from his ar­rest and pros­e­cu­tion on June 11, 2016.

Ev­i­dence be­fore the court showed that Dwarpaul was head­ing home from work when po­lice stopped him dur­ing a rou­tine road ex­er­cise along the M2 Ring Road, La For­tune. Of­fi­cers claimed he failed a field so­bri­ety test and lat­er failed to pro­vide a valid breath spec­i­men af­ter three at­tempts, each re­turn­ing a “Void” read­ing be­fore the de­vice shut down.

Dwarpaul was charged but, on Sep­tem­ber 6, 2017, a mag­is­trate up­held a no-case sub­mis­sion and dis­missed the charge. In De­cem­ber 2019, rep­re­sent­ed by at­tor­neys Chris­t­ian Deena and Vish­wanath Ram­baran, he sued the State.

In his tes­ti­mo­ny, Dwarpaul de­nied con­sum­ing al­co­hol that night. He said he blew in­to the de­vice as in­struct­ed but was told he was wast­ing po­lice time. He was ar­rest­ed with­out cau­tion, hand­cuffed, and tak­en to the San Fer­nan­do Po­lice Sta­tion, where he was placed in a foul-smelling cell for sev­en hours and de­nied a phone call be­fore be­ing grant­ed bail.

Dur­ing the mag­is­trates’ court pro­ceed­ings, po­lice ten­dered a test record bear­ing a fe­male name and the year 2015 as Dwarpaul’s 2016 re­sult. Jus­tice Mo­hammed found this deeply trou­bling, not­ing: “The ab­sence of con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous records, the miss­ing test slip, the fail­ure to call the ini­tial of­fi­cer, the in­ter­nal in­con­sis­ten­cies, and the er­ro­neous test record all point to a pros­e­cu­tion not found­ed on rea­son­able and prob­a­ble cause.”

He fur­ther con­clud­ed that the po­lice act­ed with mal­ice: “The in­fer­ence is that he was pre­pared to use ques­tion­able means – in­clud­ing an er­ro­neous test record – to se­cure a con­vic­tion. I find that it is an im­prop­er and wrong­ful mo­tive.”

The State was or­dered to pay gen­er­al dam­ages of $85,000 plus $13,332.19 in in­ter­est, and spe­cial dam­ages of $7,500 plus $988.45 in in­ter­est. While the judge dis­missed claims for ag­gra­vat­ed and ex­em­plary dam­ages, he or­dered the State to pay Dwarpaul’s le­gal costs.