Paul Carpenter, a Springfield police detective terminated in 2006 but ordered reinstated to the force by an arbitrator in August, will receive more than $190,000 in back pay and benefits under an ordinance up for a city council vote on Tuesday.
Under terms of the settlement set for a council vote, Carpenter, who has returned to work, will receive $120,946 by the end of this year and an additional $70,708 at a later date, for a total of $191,655.
Carpenter was terminated and charged with fraud after an investigation by Illinois State Police, but the criminal charges were dropped and an arbitrator ultimately found that the city had no grounds to fire him. He became controversial after prosecutors dropped a drug charge against Larry Washington, who claimed that police planted evidence against him. A plastic bag that Carpenter and his former partner James Graham said they had found in Washington’s trash and that contained cocaine residue came up clean in testing by state police. The officers had used the bag as evidence to obtain a search warrant to search Washington’s home. The wire fraud charge that was dropped against Carpenter stemmed from an allegedly verification of community work hours performed by a police informant that the officer had allegedly faxed to the informant’s probation officer.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2011.
