OPINION:
Two days after my daughter’s delivery in 2013, I was holding her in my arms when the phone rang. It was my dad. He told me that my husband, a decorated police officer, had just been found guilty of felony civil rights violations.
That was when my world fell apart, beginning a 12-year-long nightmare from which only President Trump can awaken me — with a presidential pardon.
My husband, Dennis Spaulding, was a decorated police officer in East Haven, Connecticut, for eight years. He served proudly and with distinction, with a flawless record. Not once had he been disciplined.
All that ended with my dad’s phone call. What followed were 12 years of shame and embarrassment, tears and holidays missed, all punctuated by monthly 12-hour drives to Dennis’ prison in Michigan.
To save money, my in-laws moved their recreational vehicle to within 5 miles of the prison. That way, there was no need for expensive hotel rooms.
My mother-in-law helped me on those journeys (imagine 12 hours in a car with a newborn and a toddler), but nothing prepared me for the exhaustion of it all.
I was and still am a nurse. During Dennis’ incarceration, I advanced my studies to become a doctor of nursing practice to make up for the loss of Dennis’ income, and so I could schedule my work to take the children to visit their dad.
I worked from midnight to morning on Thursdays so we could arrive in Michigan by midnight. We made the return trip on Sunday. Then it was back to work Monday morning. I get tired just remembering it.
Christmas, Easter and birthdays were celebrated around the telephone, where we waited for Dennis’ call from prison. In a remarkable bit of cruelty, the federal Bureau of Prisons charges mightily for those phone calls and then limits them to 15 minutes apiece.
The worst part is that Dennis and his fellow officers were prosecuted just for doing their jobs.
While on routine patrol, Dennis uncovered a major motor vehicle and immigration fraud operating in multiple states. The illegal immigrant population was buying forged registration and insurance documents and license plates from Pennsylvania and other states.
Dennis’ investigation led to approximately 1,500 license plates being canceled by Pennsylvania motor vehicle officials and exposed a $2 million fraud by organized crime. It led to the arrests of the two female masterminds, together with hundreds of illegal immigrants who used the plates and licenses.
In a fairer world, Dennis and his fellow officers would have been recognized for breaking up a major organized crime ring, but under the Obama Justice Department, this was not a fair world — not if you were a cop.
“The East Haven Four,” as they came to be known, were pilloried in the New Haven press.
Before long, a church-based immigrant rights group from the “sanctuary” city of New Haven charged that the number of Hispanic immigrants being stopped was evidence of discrimination (never mind that the only people who would pay for fake license plates were undocumented illegal immigrants).
The activists found a willing audience at Yale Law School, whose faculty used the prosecution of my husband and his fellow officers as a class project.
Somehow, they persuaded the Obama Justice Department to launch a “pattern and practice” investigation — essentially, a fishing expedition to trawl the entire East Haven Police Department and see what they could find.
These “pattern and practice” investigations leveraged the power of the federal government to dictate police procedures in local communities where the federal government had no jurisdiction.
In our case, the effort was spearheaded by an ambitious Democratic politician, Tom Perez, who was rewarded by being named President Obama’s secretary of labor and, later, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. (That was before his political dreams exploded in a failed campaign to become governor of Maryland.)
Ultimately, all four officers were convicted, two by plea, and each was sentenced to prison. The town also surrendered, becoming a virtual “sanctuary city” that now dutifully records the race and ethnicity of every individual who gets pulled over or arrested.
It has been more than 12 years since I got that phone call from my dad, but the pain is still just as raw.
No police officer should ever have to go through what my husband and the East Haven Four have sustained. We can never have justice if cops are afraid to investigate crime because of the perpetrator’s ethnicity or the color of their skin.
President Trump, you have the power to bring justice to my family and to those of Dennis’ three fellow officers. Please, sir, exercise your presidential pardon power on behalf of my husband and the East Haven Four.
• Nicole Spaulding is a proud police wife and mother.
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