The attorney for the Ferrelview police chief is asking the Administrative Hearing Commission (AHC) to reconsider its recent ruling that found Chief Daniel Clayton had tampered with a public record.
Attorney David Barrett on Monday filed the motion to reconsider.
Clayton had until Dec. 6 to file an appeal on the matter. If the motion to reconsider is not successful, the motion to reconsider will apparently extend the deadline for filing a judicial review.
A judicial review would be heard in Cole County Circuit Court. Cole County houses the State Capitol of Jefferson City, home of the Department of Public Safety. If the court sustains the commission’s decision, it is considered final and then forwarded to the Director of Public Safety to determine discipline.
The AHC recently recommended to the Director of Public Safety that Clayton be disciplined in the matter. Discipline could include a suspension or full revocation of his peace officer license, a required license for police officers in the state.
In 2016, Clayton arrested a woman, who was a passenger in a car that had been stopped for failing to signal a turn, and took her to the Platte County Jail. She was not immediately issued a citation and was released from jail custody the next day.
Several days later, Clayton left two citations at the door of the woman who was a passenger in a car he pulled over more than a week earlier. The citations, one for failing to obey a lawful order and the other for resisting arrest, said the woman refused to sign the paperwork.
At the bottom of the citations, Clayton wrote on the signature line: “Refused in custody.”
But the woman was never afforded the chance to sign the paperwork, the AHC found, and Clayton backdated the citations to nine days earlier.
In his motion to reconsider, Clayton’s attorney says the chief “wrote the tickets and his report in accordance with his training and experience. He graduated from the Blue River Public Safety Institute on Dec. 19, 2012. He has prepared tickets this way in Mosby and Randolph under the direction of other police chiefs. As a chief now he did in this case what he trains and expects his subordinate officers to do.”
The motion references Platte County Sheriff’s Department Detective Nancy Penrod and goes on to say:
“The only evidence in the record that doing so is wrong is the testimony of Detective Penrod, who has only written a few tickets over the course of her career. Her testimony that the report and tickets were misdated was admitted over objection that she had not been endorsed as an expert witness. And her testimony was equivocal. On cross-examination she admitted that other people might do things differently. And although issues of credibility are within the commission’s discretion, Detective Penrod claim that the phrase, “refused in custody,” was written in very large print is plainly false when Ex. 9 is examined.”
The attorney’s motion goes on to state “there is now law, regulation, training manual or any other evidence that the way he dates his report and the citations is incorrect.” Clayton’s work at Ferrelview has been a controversial topic for years. City meetings at times have broken out in argument and with the chief’s work a topic of a lot of the discussion.
Several complaints have accused Clayton of treating residents roughly, though none of those have been officially substantiated. Multiple lawsuits have been filed referencing Clayton’s work, including one lawsuit that accuses him of false imprisonment, among other things.