that the police department has also disciplined him for two civilian complaints in recent years.“His lies were a poison that tainted any fair or legitimate case,” Assistant District Attorney Samantha Dworken said during opening statements in Manhattan Supreme Court Thursday.
Howard Evan Tanner, Franco’s defense attorney, said the drug sales did happen — that Franco “saw every last one of them” and that the footage isn’t proof that he didn’t . Tanner said that Franco might have gotten some details wrong and that others might have been “lost in translation,” but he disputed that the former detective intentionally lied and urged jurors to give him “the benefit of the doubt.”
In one incident, for example, Franco said that he saw a man give cocaine to a woman who then sold the drugs to an undercover cop. The man who Franco said gave the woman the cocaine was arrested. But prosecutors say footage of the encounter only shows the woman holding the door open for the man as he walked out of a building — not getting drugs from him.