Texas cop gets community service for destroying woman’s eyeballs with pepper spray because she ‘annoyed’ him

A former Texas police officer was sentenced to community service after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge related to the blinding of a woman he arrested for drunken driving.

Enoch "Jeremy" Clark pleaded guilty this month to one count of assault by a public officer, and felony use-of-force charge was dismissed as part of a plea agreement, reported The Press-Enterprise.

Riverside County Superior Court Judge John Molloy sentenced Clark on Monday to 1,440 hours of community service in the case, which also triggered a civil suit.

Hernandez and her family settled the case for $18.5 million in 2014.

Prosecutors said Clark, a Beaumont police officer at the time, became “annoyed” when 32-year-old Monique Hernandez resisted his attempts to place her in handcuffs during a Feb. 21, 2012, arrest.

Clark fired a JPX pepper-spray gun about 10 inches from the woman's face -- which sliced her right eyeball in half, fractured her right orbital bone, and severed the optic nerve in her left eye -- and prosecutors said Hernandez had done nothing to justify the gunpowder-powered device.

Beaumont police train officers not to fire the pistol-shaped device, which has a muzzle velocity of 400 mph, less than 5 feet from a target.

Clark’s first trial, in 2014, ended with a hung jury after two jurors held out for acquittal, and a second trial was ended after six days in 2017 over an unspecified issue related to evidence shared between both the prosecution and the defense.