Here’s a not-quite-so hypothetical situation. You’re drunk. You’ve hurt yourself and you’re bleeding. A Birmingham police officer asks you a question: “Councilman, can I call you a cab?” In that case there would normally be two answers: Yes (the correct answer) and No (the wrong answer).
But if you’re Birmingham City Councilor Joel Montgomery, then there might even be a third answer, according to a Birmingham police report.
“Fuck this. Go ahead. Take me to jail. I want to go to jail,” the police report quoted Montgomery saying before he was arrested for public intoxication almost two weeks ago. Well, actually that first word was marked over in the report leaked to the Birmingham News this week, but if you know the councilor like we do, it doesn’t take much imagination to fill in the blanks.
At least Montgomery didn’t blame all the wars of the world on the Jews, the way Mel Gibson did.
Montgomery was arrested in the wee hours of the morning Saturday, April 7, after a Birmingham police officer found him in a Five Points South Parking lot adjacent to Cobb Lane. According to police, the councilor was badly bleeding and apparently drunk.
“The [defendant’s] eyes were red and bloodshot and his breath and person smelled strongly of alcoholic beverage,” the report said.
The last half of that sentence could be key as Montgomery’s case moves forward. One defense attorney we spoke with recently, before the report was leaked, predicted “strong smell of alcoholic beverage” would be somewhere in the report. When police officers are trained, it’s all but tattooed on their arms, he told us. Absent a breathalyzer, blood test or eyewitness testimony, it would otherwise be difficult to prove the suspect was in fact drunk.
Also a prosecutor would have to prove that Montgomery was a danger to himself and others (see picture above). Montgomery’s defense attorney, Tommy Spina, has said that Montgomery had only one drink and that he had disoriented himself after tripping over a curb.
According to the police report, Montgomery refused to give police his home phone number and place of birth, but he did remind them where he worked.
“Fuck all you police and firemen,” Montgomery said according to the report. “You owe me. I got you your fucking raise, bitch.”
Last year, Montgomery led a council decision to give a substantial raise to police officers, firefighters and rescue personnel. Mayor Bernard Kincaid has challenged the council’s decision, saying it did not have the authority to pass a raise, at least outside of the normal city budget process. The matter is now being litigated in court.
One thing that had not been reported yet was that the arresting officer was a woman. According to the report, Montgomery made several sexually suggestive comments to the officers “both while in the van as well as when in the jail.” The report said that Montgomery told the officers that, if they took his handcuffs off, he would give them “something good to look at.”
Another source familiar with the arrest this week told us that Montgomery told the officer to shut up or he would put something in her mouth to shut her up. The source asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to media and would get in trouble with his boss.
Four years ago, Montgomery threatened to sue Birmingham Weekly after we wrote in a column that council staff said he was a sexist. In his tenure on the council, Montgomery has gone through three female council assistants, firing at least one. That assistant, Betty Alexander, later sued Montgomery for sexual harassment. The matter was settled out of court, when the city agreed to pay Alexander $10,000.
In depositions taken in Alexander’s lawsuit, she recounted under oath how Montgomery had used abusive and profane language with her, including calling her a bitch. Much of what Alexander said in that case about Montgomery’s language and temper is consistent with the remarks included in the police report.
In a letter then to Birmingham Weekly, Montgomery said that he could not have been a misogynist because he loved his wife. That wife has since left him after it became public last year that Montgomery was having an affair with a neighborhood officer.
As police had said before, Montgomery was taken to Cooper Green Mercy Hospital for observation. According to this report, though, Montgomery refused to leave the police vehicle and refused medical care after hospital nurses tried to talk him out of the car. Montgomery refused treatment but also refused to sign the treatment refusal form.
This would seem to support his attorney’s claim that Montgomery was not given medical care before being taken to the Birmingham City Jail.
At the jail, Montgomery continued to cuss and make sexually explicit comments, the report said. He told the officers that he couldn’t find where he had parked his truck.
“Yet the [defendant] was unaware of his location when he started this,” the report says. “[The officer] stated that she would look for the [vehicle] and, if necessary, would do a report for him when he was sober.”
If Montgomery was in the kind of condition the report says he was in, then it is some wonder that the police didn’t arrest him immediately. Another hypothetical might be, if he were not a councilor, would the cops have offered to call him a cab?
We could extrapolate from the leak that at least some Birmingham police have not been happy, raise or no raise, with some of the defense rhetoric coming from Montgomery’s direction. As a criminal case, this one is somewhat atypical. It is common for defense attorneys to accuse the police of overreacting, but in this instance the police seem to have done the opposite, even offering to call Montgomery a cab.
The report does do Montgomery the favor of putting to rest some of the wild rumors that have been running rampant since his arrest. Some of our favorites included that he was found naked in his truck, that he had been found with a prostitute and that he had been injured fighting off an attempted rape by members of the “gay mafia.”
Still, some questions linger. Were there video tapes from any of the police cars or the Birmingham Jail? And, was this a crime of “moral turpitude”?
The Mayor-Council Act, a kind of constitution for the City of Birmingham, says that a councilor will be removed automatically in that case. The law says (emphasis added):
“Councilmen shall be qualified electors of the city, at least 21 years of age at the time of their election, and shall hold no other public office except that of notary public or member of the National Guard or naval or military reserve. If a councilman shall cease to possess any of these qualifications or shall be convicted of [a] crime involving moral turpitude, his office shall immediately become vacant.”
Perhaps the most bizzare Montgomery comment in the report has something to do with being in Iraq.
“I haven’t been this drunk before I fucking went to Iraq,” Montgomery said, according to the report.
Maybe he’s been on secret missions on behalf of the Bush Administration, but if Montgomery has served in the military or been to the Middle East, he has not mentioned it during his tenure in office or in either of his campaigns.
According to the report, Montgomery threatened to sue the police officers arresting him. Mayor Bernard Kincaid has remained mostly mute on the subject, wishing the councilor a speedy recovery. However, the mayor has said that the incident puts the city into a peculiar legal predicament. The municipal court would have to recuse itself, as would perhaps all of the city’s attorneys. The city council supervises the municipal court. Also, Kincaid has appointed a special prosecutor for Montgomery’s case.
On the council, Montgomery is the chairman of the Public Safety Committee.
— Kyle Whitmire
RELATED: Joel Montgomery gets pinched
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April 19th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
I would like to thank this fine officer of the Birmingham Police Department for potentially a life or two by keeping Mr. Public Safety off the roads. Perhaps that life might have been his own, or someone else’s. In either case, he certainly would have posed “a danger to himself or others” had he been allowed to get into his little pick-up truck and try to drive home (assuming that he would have ever found his misplaced vehicle, that is). His mugshot alone should be conclusive evidence that he was a danger to himself.
As for proof that he was drunk, how about a confession out of his own lips?! The words “I haven’t been this drunk before I f***ing went to Iraq” seem somewhat suspicious to me.
Moreover, this all happened in Five Points South on a Friday night/Saturday morning. I’m quite sure there were, and are, plenty of witnesses to Mr. Montgomery’s festivities, including: the bartender(s) who served him; other patrons of whichever club, bar or restaurant he chose to patronize until 2AM while buying only one drink; the paramedics, firemen, police officers and Five Points South area bystanders at whom he shouted obscenities; the nurses and medical personnel at the hospital; and finally, the workers and officers at the jail.
If it is true that Montgomery only had one drink, then it begs the question: What caliber of man behaves this way? Aside from Don Imus, I mean. Just as bad, what kind of person–other than Mel Gibson–talks so abusively to an officer of the law?
Regardless of how many drinks Mr. Public Safety did or did not have, I can imagine inebriates around the area thinking, “That Joel Montgomery character sure gives us drunks a bad name.”
April 19th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
“Some of our favorites included that he was found naked in his truck, that he had been found with a prostitute and that he had been injured fighting off an attempted rape by members of the “gay mafia.”
Naked in his truck. Ewwww! Thanks so much for that mental image. I’m going to have to wash my brain out with soap.
As for the gay mafia, they wouldn’t touch his nasty *ss.