A police cadet in New England was fired and placed on a statewide blacklist after he was accused of groping a fellow trainee’s breasts during a handcuffing exercise, but the would-be cop now claims he was disoriented by pepper spray and thought he was patting down a man, according to court filings reviewed by The Independent.
In a federal lawsuit filed February 19 against the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, David Peters, 39, says trainers at the facility “knew that [pepper spray] exposure dramatically impairs vision, sensory-motor control, and judgment, yet they insisted that cadets immediately perform cross-gender handcuffing and ‘search’ tasks, including on a female in shorts and T-shirt, at a point in time when the likelihood of inadvertent or awkward contact was foreseeable and exceptionally high.”
