A prosecutor said a Tallahassee police officer’s decision to open and empty a sealed bottle of liquor she found in the car of a man found guilty this week of driving under the influence was a “mistake.”
The case of 56-year-old Calvin Riley Sr. has gained widespread attention after bodycam footage of his arrest from last May went viral online and raised questions about police misconduct.
Atlanta Black Star’s previous coverage cited an OurTallahassee report that included edited footage showing Officer Kiersten Oliver reaching into Riley’s car, pulling out an unopened bottle of vodka, breaking the bottle’s seal, and pouring its contents on the street before throwing it back in his car.
“This case involves an officer planting evidence,” said Assistant Public Defender Desiree Goodfellow during her opening statement in Riley’s trial. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. What you are going to see from the officer is shocking. It is egregious. It is outrageous. It is not an innocent mistake.”
According to a police report, Oliver saw Riley’s white Mercedes-Benz speeding and swerving with his headlights off just after 2 a.m. on May 7, 2023. She testified that she noticed his eyes were “watery” and “kind of bloodshot” after she pulled him over and that he was “fumbling” items in his visor to find his driver’s license, which he couldn’t produce.
She also said Riley’s car smelled like marijuana and alcohol and that she saw an open Tervis tumbler in the center console. She wasn’t sure if that tumbler smelled of alcohol or not, so she called in Officer Margaret Mueth, who had more DUI case experience, for backup. Mueth said in court the tumbler did “contain an alcoholic beverage.”
After Riley refused a voluntary sobriety test, he was arrested on a charge of driving with a suspended license and placed in the back of a police vehicle as what became the DUI charge began taking shape between the responding officers, who tried to iron out their findings on bodycam video. He did tell police he had a couple of beers at a bar before being pulled over, but it’s unclear what his blood alcohol content was that night.
After he was arrested, Oliver searched the car and found the bottle of vodka. She admitted in court that the bottle was sealed and that she opened and emptied it. However, Goodfellow pointed out inconsistencies between her hearing’s testimony and sworn statements she gave during a deposition about the arrest.
“Has that always been your testimony?” Goodfellow asked Oliver, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
“Everything that you just asked, I did not know that I opened the bottle in my original testimony,” Oliver responded.
“Every trial hearing, you testified to tell the truth?” Goodfellow asked. “And you testified that you did. So at that time, that was a lie?”
“Unknowingly, yes,” Oliver said.
Before the trial, Oliver said the reason why she emptied the liquor bottle was because of a police policy that bars officers from impounding liquids as evidence. When public defenders showed her that policy during a deposition, she couldn’t point to the section that contained that specific guideline.
During the trial, Assistant State Attorney Emma Hirschy stated that Oliver misinterpreted the policy.
“Seeing this bottle, she goes to open it, to dump it out, not realizing at the time that it was sealed,” Hirschy said. “She’s going to tell you that she didn’t realize that and that she made a mistake. And that’s all that happened. They didn’t take it into evidence.”
Oliver testified that the bottle never factored into Riley’s arrest since she found it after he was arrested at the scene. Mueth testified the same, but said she did list it in her arrest report because she didn’t want it to look like she was “hiding anything.”
In that report, Mueth wrote that “a search of Riley’s vehicle yielded a small (approximately 5 fluid ounces) bottle of vodka that was opened, in a pocket on the driver’s seat cover.”
However, Mueth said she “never examined” the bottle, only that “Oliver found the bottle.”
“What this boils down to is simple miscommunication,” Hirschy said according to reports. “They made a mistake. They both told us that it was a mistake. Every one of us is human, including these two officers. I’m not saying that it was OK to make that mistake, but they made a mistake, they’re honest and they owned up to it.”
Following a two-day trial, Riley was found guilty on April 8 of DUI. He initially faced an additional charge of driving with a suspended license, but a judge dismissed it at the request of Riley’s defense attorneys. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail and six months of probation. He also has to attend a DUI course, perform 50 hours of community service, and participate in random breathalyzer tests. His driver’s license will also be suspended for six months.
The jury saw clips of the 40-minute bodycam footage not previously seen by the public. The officers also testified that Riley yelled at them during the traffic stop. Riley didn’t testify but gave a short statement to the court saying he accepted responsibility “for getting upset” and letting his emotions take over during the arrest.
“I was only going through this emotional stuff because of the past I’ve been through with law enforcement and what I started going through that night with these officers,” Riley said. “It was just a repeat of what I experienced growing up here.”
Jeremy Matlow, Tallahassee’s city commissioner, said he’d be “requesting a full review and explanation of this incident by the City Manager” after seeing the edited bodycam video days before the trial, which he called “troubling to watch.”
He also said he plans to discuss issues about the arrest during a city commission meeting on Wednesday.
“The evidence presented at trial included all the hallmarks that drive distrust in law enforcement: phantom marijuana smells, fabricated evidence and incomplete body cam footage,” he wrote on X. “Thankful for those that stand up to injustice.”
