Police cadet fired for groping female classmate during frisk: I was ‘disoriented’ by pepper spray

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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.”

Instead, Peters’s complaint argues the drill should have been structured “to minimize the risk that a split-second misjudgment by an impaired cadet would be mischaracterized as sexual misconduct and used to end that cadet’s career.”

“This case is about due process and fundam