A Colorado woman is suing a Colorado Springs police officer, alleging that he used excessive force during an arrest for suspected DUI when he slammed her to the ground and pepper-sprayed her face.
The lawsuit also accuses the officer of submitting false evidence and alleges that the local police chief and district attorney failed to act on a judge’s concerns about the officer’s credibility.
The case arises out of an encounter in June 2023 between Jessica Halling, 39, and Colorado Springs Police Officer Gregory Campbell, who responded to a call from her neighbors.
In Campbell’s bodycam video, a man and woman are seen expressing a variety of complaints about Halling, including that she let her black lab run toward their son, scaring him; that she had reported them to the HOA for improperly parking their camper; and that she had been sitting in her parked car in front of her house for several hours.
Campbell then approached Halling, who was sitting in her car, and asked her, “Why am I getting phone calls about you?” from her neighbors, to which she replied, “Well, did you ask them?”
The officer then said he spotted open cans of White Claw, an alcoholic beverage, on the passenger floorboard of her car, and told her to get out. She did so and obeyed his instructions to face her car and put her hands behind her back. As he cuffed her, Campbell told her she was being detained under suspicion of DUI.
The two walked over to his police cruiser, and then Campbell asked if she had any weapons. Halling replied, “Please give me a lawyer.” Campbell responded, “That’s not what I asked you,” and began to frisk her, “running his hand down the front of her thigh area near her waist pockets,” her lawsuit says.
Halling twisted her hips away from Campbell and said, “get a female officer.” Campbell then lifted her up by her hands that were cuffed behind her and “slammed” her into the side of his patrol car, the complaint says.
The encounter then escalated, with Halling repeatedly asking for a female officer to handle her as Campbell “spun her body around and slammed her face down on the pavement …dropped his knee on her back, placing all of his body weight on her,” the claim says.
When he tried again to reach into her waist pocket, she recoiled and said, “I don’t want you as a male officer to f–king touch me. Get me a female officer.” She did not attempt to get up, verbally or physically threaten Campbell, the complaint contends (and the bodycam video shows), while Campbell kept telling her to stop resisting.
As Halling continued angrily demanding “female officer, female officer,” Campbell, who was still kneeling on her, pinning her to the pavement, removed her glasses and warned that he would spray her “if you don’t stop resisting.”
Halling kept up her mantra, and Campbell then twice pepper-sprayed her in the face at close range.
When a supervisor arrived, Campbell told him that Halling had tried to pull away from him and he “threw her hard to the ground,” and then, the lawsuit says, “falsely claimed that Ms. Halling tried to ‘wiggle out of his control’ and tried to stand up.”
The lawsuit claims that while Halling rotated her hips away from Campbell’s hand a few times when he tried to touch her waist and groin area, she never resisted his control or tried to escape or flee.
Halling was taken to a hospital where a blood draw was conducted to test for driving under the influence. Police video shows Campbell typing on his laptop and filling out paperwork in another room as the blood test takes place, and then someone hands him a box with two vials of blood.
Halling was subsequently charged with DUI and obstruction of justice.
During a jury trial in August 2024, Campbell testified that he did not throw Halling hard to the ground. He also testified that he did not personally observe the blood draw of Halling.
But, the lawsuit notes, he had signed a certification form sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation affirming that he had observed the blood draw, and submitted it as evidence in the case against her. That form was also used as the basis for revoking Halling’s driver’s license for 18 months, her attorneys say.
Judge Regina Walter, who presided over the DUI trial, found Campbell’s falsification of the blood draw certification to be a “fabrication” and “a lie,” and ruled that Campbell was “incredible as a matter of law.”
Walter, based on her review of his body camera footage from the day of the incident, also entered a factual finding that Campbell had engaged in “blatant use of excessive force” against Halling.
In response, the district attorney prosecuting the case requested a continuance in her DUI trial and a due process hearing on behalf of Campbell.
Before Halling’s criminal trial ended, a juror failed to show and a mistrial was declared. The trial was rescheduled.
When, during a hearing in August 2024, Campbell’s attorney asked the judge for more time to research case law on her finding that the officer was “incredible as a matter of law,” Walter granted it, but also made a point of reading into the record an email she had sent to the Colorado Springs Police Chief, Adrian Vasquez, and the Chief Judge for the 4th Judicial District, Erin Sokol.
The email, according to a court transcript obtained by KRDO, urged the police chief to review Campbell’s body-worn camera footage from June 23, 2023, “for training purposes and to determine whether you want to take any further action. Please be advised that Officer Campbell lied on the CBI toxicology request for laboratory examination. … He certified that he witnessed the actual withdrawal of blood for Jessica Halling.”
In a later hearing, Campbell’s attorney argued that the officer had been “inaccurate” in signing the blood draw certification, and Walter ultimately retracted the court’s finding that Campbell was “incredible.” But she reaffirmed that the blood draw results were not admissible because of Campbell’s falsification of that certification, the lawsuit notes.
Shortly after that, Halling entered a plea to an open container charge, and the remaining charges against her were dismissed.
On April 30, Halling was sent a copy of the police department’s internal affairs investigation of Campbell, which exonerated him for his use of the pepper spray. The department did not investigate him for dishonesty or falsification of evidence.
The lawsuit contends that his exoneration was in “blatant contradiction” of the CSPD policy on the use of pepper spray, which is only justified when a person is engaged in active resistance, poses an imminent danger, or an officer has been authorized to disperse a civil disturbance.
Halling, who was lying motionless, on her side, handcuffed, when she was sprayed, and was “completely compliant with Campbell’s control” “met none of those definitional requirements,” the lawsuit argues.
Halling’s lawsuit accuses Campbell of violating Colorado law regulating use of excessive force in his unreasonable and unnecessary deployment of “painful force and excessive aggression” against Campbell “in blatant disregard for his own agency’s policies.” The physical assault caused her to experience “great physical pain, injury and terror,” the lawsuit says.
Campbell also violated her right to due process by making false statements that were used against her at trial and resulted in the suspension of her driver’s license for 18 months, she alleges.
Her lawsuit seeks a jury trial to compensate her for damages, costs expended and other relief.
She also seeks court orders to strip Campbell of his Peace Officers Standards and Training (P.O.S.T.) certification as a sanction for his alleged unlawful behavior, and to compel Chief Vasquez and the CSPD to provide the P.O.S.T. Board with notice that Campbell violated its credibility provisions by falsifying a criminal justice record.
The lawsuit further asks the court to order District Attorney Michael Allen to add Campbell to the Brady List, a public information resource about police misconduct, which would impact future criminal cases involving Campbell due to his credibility issues.
“Let’s be clear. This wasn’t some random person making some unsubstantiated claim,” Halling’s attorney Kevin Mehr told Fox21News. “This was a judge telling the chief of police that his officer was guilty of using excessive force, lying under oath, and manufacturing evidence, and Chief Vasquez did nothing. If Office Campbell was willing to lie here, then how many cases has he done it on? Those lies need to be disclosed here and in every case he’s ever worked on. The police chief and DA’s office are legally required to do that, and they didn’t.”
The Colorado Springs Police Department told reporters this week it would not comment on pending litigation.
Campbell, Vasquez and Allen, the named defendants in the case, have 21 days, or until June 18, to file an answer to the complaint.
