Touchdown!
Tennessee Titans quarterback Christopher Simms did an end run around Manhattan prosecutors today, winning a full acquittal in his toking-and-driving case.
A four-man, two-woman jury — all of whom had never heard of him before, with the exception of one male juror — found the hunky hurler not guilty after only an hour of deliberations.
“I’m very happy and relieved and really just happy it is all over with,” the hunky hurler said after court, his beautiful brunette wife, Danielle, at his side.
He harbors no hard feelings, he insisted.
“I love the NYPD. I’m mad that this happened, but I love New York City.”
In going to trial, Simms had risked up to one year jail. But he had steadfastly insisted that he hadn’t smoked pot, and that the DWI checkpoint cop who claimed the player had “confessed” was mistaken.
“I told [the cop] you’re way off-base,” Simms said of his conversation with Officer Francisco Acosta at the corner of West Houston and Washington Street.
When Simms was stopped on a Saturday night last July, his then-eight-months-pregnant wife was riding shotgun in their Mercedes SUV and two buddies — one of whom testified Tuesday to being the one who was high and reeking of pot — sat in the back seat.
“I told him I’m 30 years old, and I already have a four-year-old at home,” Simms said of his conversation with the cop.
Jurors apparently did not believe Acosta, who had testified on the first day of the trial, Monday, that Simms acted “like a zombie” that night, and reeked of pot.
“I was smoking marijuana in the car earlier — I took four puffs,” Acosta testified that Simms had helpfully told him.
To win the trial, Simms scrambled to avoid not just the damaging “confession” but the failure of his wife Danielle to testify on his behalf and his own failure to agree to a urine test when he was busted.
Simms was simply leery of unzipping in front of the drunk tank video camera, defense lawyer Harvey Steinberg told jurors this morning.
“He’s thinking, ‘I’m a little uncomfortable with the government having my urine,'” the lawyer said.
In Simms favor was that Acosta was the sole witness against him, making it the cop’s word against the player’s — and this is a cop who claimed on the stand that he knew marijuana was in play because the smell gives him a headache and, bizarrely, makes his tongue go numb.
Prosecutor Alexandra Glazer had countered in her own closing arguments that Simms’ odor and behavior — particularly his driving — points to his being stoned.
“He was driving so dangerously and so erratically… almost hitting Officer Acosta” as he swung his car onto West Houston from Washington Street and stopped at the checkpoint, suddenly “slamming on the brakes,” Glazer said.
“His eyes were red. They were watery. His face was flushed, his speech was slurred… He was moving in slow motion, like a zombie. He was dazed. He was unsteady on his feet– he was having trouble balancing,” she told jurors.