In October 2024, the Arkansas State Police got a civilian complaint.
A woman named Amanda Prince had been arrested about a year earlier. She said the trooper who arrested her violated her civil rights and framed her for drug possession.
The complaint sent State Police Lt. Marcus Daniels into an investigation of his own department.
We can't play some of the words he uses to describe his fellow officer’s work, but he does say there's “room for improvement.”
“You're playing with people's lives, man,” he said in video obtained by Little Rock Public Radio through an open records request. “You know, you see all the time people be wrongly accused of stuff. Don't be that guy.”
That's him grilling former State Trooper Christian Walker Morphis, who arrested Amanda Prince back in 2023.
For 80 minutes, Lt. Daniels peppers Morphis with questions and comments that all kind of sound like: “you sure about that?”
“Once you tell a lie, you have to tell several little lies to keep that lie going,” he said.
Prince was within a mile of her Lake Village home when Morphis pulled her over. She was driving on a suspended license — this part she doesn't dispute.
“If you're coming from the ER or whatever we could possibly talk about it,” he said when he pulled her over. “But just because you want to go to the grocery store, that's not an excuse.”
Within a few minutes, Prince was handcuffed in the back of the Morphis’ car. He never did a pat down. He didn't check her for drugs.
And that's when things started to get weird.
When they arrived at the police station, Morphis told Prince that he found illegal drugs in the back of his car: 16 grams of cocaine in a small bag on the car floorboard.
It had to be her bag of drugs, Morphis insisted, because he said he “just left the car wash.”
Handcuffed, standing in front of the trooper about to book her in the county jail, Prince was angry.
“Bull crap,” she said. “That was not on me.”
“That's fine,” Morphis responded. “I have a camera that watched the whole thing.”
Something didn't add up. Prince told Little Rock Public Radio she knew the cocaine Morphis was holding out in front of him wasn't hers.
And a split-second event seen in surveillance video from the backseat of Morphis’ car backs her story up.
About 17 minutes in, a hand opens the front door of the car and throws in something that appears to be a small bag filled with white powder. At this point Prince is already in the backseat of the police car, enclosed in a metal cage, hands cuffed behind her back.
Prince didn't know about the video when she was booked for possession of drugs. She spent the next four days in jail. She was released on bond 30 minutes before the end of her 46th birthday.
Possession of cocaine carries a sentence of up to twenty years in prison under Arkansas law. On top of that, Morphis charged her with intent to distribute. Prince was facing decades in prison.
In her complaint, she said she was publicly humiliated by the whole ordeal — losing her job, her apartment, and her dad’s truck while she waited for trial. She said waiting for trial felt terrifying.
“Constant fear,” she said. “Constant sorrow really.”
In the lead-up to her trial, Prince wondered whether jurors would believe her over a state trooper.
She says a public defender told her: “You need to have your personal effects order. After trial, you're going straight back into custody.”
While jurors deliberated, Prince went to smoke a cigarette, thinking it may be her last minutes of freedom.
Somewhere she had heard that shorter deliberations mean guilty verdicts. So, when jurors deliberated for only about fifteen minutes she was worried.
Prince was acquitted of all charges.
“Two tons of relief,” she said. “I can't say that I'm one hundred percent relieved even to this day. It's something that still affects me day by day.”
The sleight of hand at the 17-minute mark of the backseat video didn't come up at trial. But on the stand, Morphis struggled to explain his decision making in the arrest.
Investigating the case, Lt. Daniels hounded Morphis on one issue: did you watch the internal police car video before charging Prince with drug possession?
In his initial report, Morphis said he did watch it back.
The report said Prince “appeared to be moving very erratically for a short period of time and appeared to be digging in her waistline.”
But in the interrogation, he says:
“I don’t remember, honestly.”
The video doesn’t match the description Morphis wrote in the report. Prince was handcuffed in a narrow cage that only covered half of the backseat. She was stone still, and never dug in her pockets. Prince told Little Rock Public Radio this was intentional.
“I was like self, keep your movements to a minimum because they record in the car.”
Midway through the interrogation, Lt. Daniels calls Morphis out.
“I'm just going to tell you, Morphis, that's a lie,” he said. “She never dug in her waistline.” He later added: “Morphis, you lost to a public defender. You knew your case wasn't strong.”
Then, Morphis changes his story.
“I feel confident in saying that at some point before I wrote those tickets I went back and I watched her in my backseat.”
Lt. Daniels investigated how Prince was arrested. He even simulated the incident with a police employee the same size as Prince and wearing a similar outfit. The police employee couldn’t pull a bag of drugs out of her pocket the way Morphis describes. Daniels levels with Morphis:
“Class A felony, but you're not one hundred percent the dope is hers.”
“No sir, I wasn't," Morphis says.
“But the way you articulate it in your report, you're saying things that she didn't do, man.”
Morphis doesn't defend the stop as a banner moment in his career. He told Daniels he was having a hard time in his personal life. He was “mad he was at work.”
“I had an attitude problem. I'm aware of that. I'm working on it. I can't tell you it's 100% fixed, but I can tell you we're miles from where we started.”
For him, this whole thing was "embarrassing."
“If we take away this uniform and all the honor that it brings and just me as a man, that's not the person that I want to be.”
Morphis wasn't fired for possibly planting drugs. His termination letter says Morphis was fired for not doing his job, not giving Prince a pat down and not filling out the report correctly — things that could have cleared the situation up, and saved Amanda Prince a lot of trouble.
“He was fine with sending me off for 20 years and that's scary, because that could be anybody's mother, anybody's aunt, anybody's wife.”
The State Police report still doesn’t address some of the biggest questions from the case, like where the cocaine came from, why Morphis didn’t follow proper procedure and what he’s doing now.
A State Police spokesperson said they do not comment on ongoing litigation. The state's Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training set a hearing to consider Morphis' decertification on June 10.
Meanwhile, Prince has filed suit in federal court against the Arkansas State Police seeking $1 million. Prince and her attorney told Little Rock Public Radio they would be willing to accept a settlement.
The agency has not yet filed a response.
