On Friday, Montgomery attorney Julian McPhillips filed two new motions in Dallas County Circuit Court on behalf of the three indicted Selma Police Department (SPD) officers he has been representing for the past couple of months.

Both are strike motions, requesting that the court dismiss the indictments, and call into question the state’s procedures in questioning the three officers.

The first motion alleges that “improper persons were present before the Grand Jury in violation of Rule 12.6 of the Alabama Rules of Criminal Procedure.”

The rule states that only “grand jurors, the witnesses under examination, the district attorneys or assistant district attorneys, or others authorized by law to present evidence to the grand jury, a grand jury reporter or stenographer, and an interpreter, if any” are allowed to be present during grand jury sessions.

According to the motion, Special Agent Susan A. Smith, who works in the Alabama Attorney General’s office, along with others who were investigating the SPD and questioning the officers outside of the Special Grand Jury’s presence, were “routinely present” in the grand jury room and appeared before the Special Grand Jury that indicated each officer.

The motion alleges that Smith appeared before the grand jury without the court’s approval and without having been sworn in.

Further, according to the motion, the presence of Smith and others, along with their “words, opinions, expressions or actions made before the Special Grand Jury” influenced the outcome of the hearings and adversely impacted the three officers involved.

The motion calls the presence of Smith and her counterparts a”blatant attempt to influence the Special Grand Jury and obtain and indictment” against the officers, as well as a violation of Rule 12.6.

The second motion claims that the three officers were interrogated “in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.”

The Fifth Amendment states that a person will not be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” and, according to the motion, allows for a person “not to answer official questions put to him in any other proceeding, civil or criminal, formal or informal, where the answers might incriminate him in future criminal proceedings.”

The Fourteenth Amendment states that no person can be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and that no person can be denied “the equal protection of the laws.”

After citing Supreme Court cases in which this assertion was applied to other police officers, the motion states that, after the SPD officers were “essentially terminated, all three of the officers were interrogated and the state “never provided them with the privilege to rightfully refuse to answer.”

“In direct violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the State never provided the Defendants with their Constitutional protections during its investigation of the Selma Police Department, and now unlawfully attempts to apply their compelled testimony against them,” the motion states.