A 37-year-old Stamford man whose been convicted twice before with driving with a suspended license was charged with the same offense on Monday by Darien police.
He was also charged with possession of marijuana, and has been convicted twice before on that charge. He is also the subject of a conditional discharge after he was issued a suspended sentence in May for misdemeanor assault, according to the Connecticut Judicial Branch website.
Darien police described what happened with this account, including accusations not proven in court:
Just before 2 p.m. on Monday, a police officer monitoring traffic on the Post Road near its intersection with Richmond Drive, saw a tan, four-door car headed west and with a paper temporary license marker attached to its back end.
The marker, a temporary substitute for a license plate, was “displayed in a manner that obscured the expiration date,” police said in an announcement. When the officer checked a state Department of Motor Vehicles database for the marker number, nothing showed up.
The officer pulled over the car, but not before it had entered the southbound lanes of Interstate 95 from the ramp at the Exit 13 interchange. The car was stopped near the Exit 10 ramp.
The driver, Johnson Pauleman, 37, of Raymond Street in Stamford, was identified with his state ID card.
A K-9 officer monitoring traffic on Post Road near Richmond Drive observed a tan 4-door sedan traveling W/B on Post Rd with a rear paper marker plate displayed in a manner that obscured the expiration date of the marker plate. A DMV records check came back with no information for the vehicle.
The officer car entered Interstate 95 at the Exit 13 entrance ramp and drove south
The vehicle merged onto the I-95 entrance 13 ramp and began traveling S/B. The vehicle was subsequently pulled over near the exit 10 S/B ramp. The operator was identified as Johnson Paulemon by his CT State ID Card.
He said he believed his driver’s license was suspended. The owner of the car was a passenger who gave the officer papers showing that it was validly registered. A DMV records check showed Paulemon’s driver’s license had been suspended for several years, and he has been charged with driving with a suspended license “numerous times.”
The state Judicial Branch website says he was convicted of driving with a suspended license both in 2009 and again in 2015.
The police officer had Darien Police K-9 Kenny with her. The dog conducted a “free air sniff” of the outside of the vehicle, and the Kenny indicated that he smelled narcotics near one of the driver’s side doors. In the car, police found a glass pipe with suspected marijuana residue, along with more than one package of cigar wrappers typically used to smoke marijuana.
Both Paulemon and the passenger said they had recently smoked pot in the car.
The passenger was released with the car, and Paulemon was arrested on a charge of illegally driving without a license. At Police Headquarters, police found five plastic baggies on him that contained a total of 5.79 grams of a substance that looked like marijuana. An initial test indicated it is. He was charged with possessing less than half an ounce of marijuana.
Paulemon has been convicted of possessing marijuana in small amounts in 2013 and 2017. In state Superior Court in Bridgeport in May, he pleaded guilty and was convicted on a third-degree assault charge and given a suspended sentence of a year in prison, with a conditional discharge of two years.
He was released after posting a $1,000 bond and is scheduled to appear Aug. 10 in state Superior Court in Stamford.