A petition has been started, on a closed Facebook page, to fire Albany County Sheriff’s Deputy Philip Milano.

A closed group is one that each member must ask to join and must be added by an administrator; postings and comments made on the page are visible only to members. This group, called “A Petition to Have Deputy Milano Fired,” has 382 members (381 excluding The Enterprise). At least two of those members are, according to their profiles on their own Facebook pages, local emergency medical technicians.

Chief Deputy Michael S. Monteleone of the Albany County Sheriff’s Department said he was aware of the group, adding that a petition is not a recognized way to try to effect personnel changes. Lodging a formal complaint with the department would be more effective, he said.

Melanie Trimble, director of the Capital district chapter of the New York civil Liberties Union,  suggested the same process. Referring to complaints about Milano, she said, “I would recommend that the people involved in the traffic stop voice their concerns in writing to the police, to the sheriff’s department, and make sure that they investigate this incident. Because they should certainly know that some of their officers may not be as well trained as they hoped.”

Besides the traffic stop described in the front-page story, Deputy Milano has been the subject of several other arrests in the recent past, in which there have been doubts raised about probable cause.

Karen Boas of Berne was pulled over at 1:45 am on June 27, 2014 by Milano and Sergeant Philip White. The police followed behind her and alleged that she went over the center line twice and had an excessively loud muffler. Boas told the officers she had taken her daily prescribed dosage of Clonazepam that morning.

White writes in the arrest report that she failed field sobriety tests and was arrested for failure to keep right, operation of a motor vehicle impaired by drugs, and an equipment violation for her exhaust system, among other charges. The Enterprise viewed the dashcam video of this arrest and noted that, during the field sobriety test’s one-leg stand test, Boas stood for 19 seconds with one leg outstretched in front of her, without wavering in the least; this was one of the tests that Milano said in the arrest report that she had failed.

At the station, she blew a breathalyzer test of 0.00 percent.

In a jury trial earlier this year in Westerlo, Boas was found guilty of drugged driving. She was found not guilty of the other charges, including the charges on which she was originally arrested. She has told The Enterprise that she wants to appeal.       

On July 13, 2014, Marcia Pangburn of East Berne was questioned by two sheriff’s deputies, Milano and Javier-Luis Martinez, as she sat in the graveyard a few hundred yards from her home on Thompsons Lake Road, mourning her father, brother, and infant son, who are all buried there.

She had driven there, she said, and she was sitting outside near her car, with the headlights trained on the graves. At the time, Sheriff Craig Apple said that the probable cause for stopping Pangburn had been that she didn’t drive to the graves on a roadway but cut through the cemetery.

Pangburn blew 0.01 percent on a breathalyzer test. She was eventually arrested for resisting arrest, and her car was towed from the scene. Pangburn told The Enterprise at the time, speaking of Milano and Martinez, “They were abusive. They treated me like a criminal.”

Pangburn has consistently refused to plead guilty to any charges and was scheduled for a jury trial last week that was postponed, as the Albany County District Attorney’s Office said it would dismiss the charges and she disagreed, Pangburn said.

Brian R. Hoover was pulled over by Milano on July 5, 2014, when the deputy said he saw him cross over the center line several times. Talking with Hoover, Milano saw a medication bottle in plain sight in the car, he wrote in the arrest report.

Hoover said he had taken 2-1/2 Xanax pills the night before and another half a pill that morning. Milano writes in the report that Hoover failed a series of field sobriety tests.

He was brought in to the public safety building for processing. A breathalyzer test showed that his blood alcohol content was 0.00 percent. Albany County paramedics attempted to draw his blood to test it for drugs, but were able to collect only a minimal amount.

Hoover was charged with failure to keep right and driving while ability impaired by drugs, which in his case is a felony because he has a prior conviction within the last 10 years. The case has been in Berne Town Court for a year.