VERNON, Ala. (WTVA) -- Have you ever been accused of doing something you know you didn't do? What happens when the accuser is a member of law enforcement?
"It really scares you how much power they've got, to make one false statement that could land a man in the pen for ten years," resident Jamison Carr said.
How did it all begin? It started with a confrontation.
On Feb. 22, Carr said he stopped at a car wash to clean his truck up, but what transpired afterward, he says, he could never have expected.
Carr said he was approached by a man with which he had an ongoing dispute.
"He was taunting me, wanting to fight. And of course, then I called 911 and pulled away on my truck to wait for Vernon police to show up," Carr said.
When Officer Brandon Stephens arrived at the scene, he asked Carr questions about what happened.
But it's after Carr left that he got hit with something unexpected: an arrest warrant for second-degree assault.
The reason for that?
In the police report, Officer Stephens said Carr told him he tried to run over Redus Sisson, and wrote that Carr told Stephens he wanted to kill the man.
What he may not have known is that Carr was videotaping the conversation the whole time, and the officer's recollection did not match what Carr actually said.
"He came all the way across there yelling, approaching me," Carr said in the recording.
"Did you hit him with your truck?" the officer asked.
"I didn't touch him with my truck," Carr said. "I went right through there. He got in front of my truck right there and said, 'Come on!'"
Both Carr and his attorney said nobody from the city of Vernon would look at this evidence, and so the case went to court.
"Of course, they pushed it on the grand jury. At the grand jury, they took the second felony assault charges and upped it to attempted murder," Carr said.
A Lamar County jury later found Carr not guilty of both charges, in large part, his attorney says, to the video.
Calls placed to Vernon's mayor, the city attorney and the police chief for comment went unreturned Monday afternoon.
Still, Carr's attorney doesn't think this was some grand scheme to frame someone.
"I don't believe there was a conspiracy here. What I believe is that somebody wrote something down, maybe thought they heard something, wrote that down, and at trial, it was different," attorney Daniel Boman said. "The video showed that it was different."
That video evidence provided by Carr helped him avoid a ten-year prison sentence for something he says never happened.
Some may wonder if it was even legal for Carr to record the conversation with the officer.
In Alabama, one only needs one party to consent for the recording to be legal.
