A Rome City Police officer, Coleman White, has been reprimanded following his arrest of an innocent 19-year-old man.
Rome City Police was dispatched to Shorter University in early October after McClain Edward Fineran, a football player for the college, struck a parked vehicle around midnight.
Fineran, who had been studying at the school’s library, immediately contacted campus security, who in turn called Rome Police. After giving a field sobriety test, Fineran was taken into custody for driving under the influence of drugs.
Fineran told officers that he had not taken any type of drug or drank any alcohol and requested a blood test to prove his innocence. Officers also never found any evidence of medication or drug paraphernalia, alcohol etc.. inside his truck.
Fineran, who is from St. Simons, spent the night in jail was later exonerated after a GBI blood test and urine analyst both came back negative for any type of drug or substance.
According to reports, Fineran nearly lost his place on the football team and was nearly expelled because of the arrest.
A spokesman for Rome City Police said to CVN, “Another RPD officer, an experienced DUI investigator who has previously testified as an expert witness, reviewed the case in its entirety and confirmed that probable cause existed for the arrest based on the observations and field sobriety testing documented at the time.”
The case was Nolle Prosequi in Municipal Court weeks after the arrest.
Coleman received formal discipline for substandard report writing. Additionally, internal procedures have been adjusted to ensure incomplete reports cannot be released in the future.
Rome Police Chief Denise Downer-McKinney said in a statement to CVN, “Any time an arrest is made by the Rome Police Department, our officers must meet the legal standard of probable cause based on the information available at that moment. In this case, the responding officer had sufficient probable cause to make the initial arrest, and the decision to take the individual into custody was lawful and appropriate. A prosecutor’s decision to dismiss charges does not mean the arrest itself was improper; it simply reflects their assessment of the case at a later stage in the judicial process. After a review of the incident, the department issued a reprimand to the officer, not for the arrest, but for deficiencies in report documentation. Accurate and thorough reporting is essential in every case, and we hold our officers accountable to those standards. We remain committed to transparency, professionalism, and ensuring the public’s trust in the work we do every day.”
