Touchdown!
Tennessee Titans quarterback Chris Simms did an end-around Manhattan prosecutors yesterday, winning a full acquittal in his toking-and-driving case.
A four-man, two-woman jury — all of whom had never heard of the QB before, with the exception of one male juror — found him not guilty after only an hour of deliberations.
“I’m very happy and relieved, and really just happy it is all over with,” the son of Giants legend Phil Simms said at Manhattan Criminal Court, his wife, Danielle, at his side.
He harbors no hard feelings, he insisted.
“I love the NYPD,” he said. “I’m mad that this happened, but I love New York City.”
His father led the Giants to victory in the 1987 Super Bowl against the Denver Broncos, with a near-perfect performance.
In going to trial, Simms had risked up to one year in 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 West Houston and Washington Street.
When Simms was stopped on a Saturday night last July, his 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.
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 weed.
“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 had to scramble around the damaging “confession,” the failure of his wife 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.’ ”
In Simms favor was that Acosta was the sole witness against him, 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’ “eyes were red. They were watery. His face was flushed, his speech was slurred . . . He was moving in slow motion, like a zombie.”