Professors Detail Brutal Tangle With Police Suzanne LaFont, her husband, Karl Anders Peltomaa, and their dog, Leika, in the hall where a violent arrest occurred in April. The call was a routine medical emergency, a sick man having a bad reaction to medication. But before it was over, it involved the police and led to the wrongful arrest of a City University of New York professor on the Upper West Side. And it all started with a glass of wine. Suzanne LaFont, 59, an anthropology professor at CUNY, and her husband, Karl Anders Peltomaa, 50, had just returned to their garden apartment on West 83rd Street after walking their dog one night in April. They sipped red wine in a cozy living room, surrounded with African art that Ms. LaFont had collected during her field work. But the wine did not agree with the painkillers Mr. Peltomaa, a professor of physics and math at The Art Institute of New York, was taking after having open-heart surgery a few days earlier on April 5. "My heart started racing," he recalled on Thursday. I felt nervous that something was going wrong with the repair to my aorta. Ms. LaFont dialed 911. She asked for an ambulance and told the dispatcher her husband had had surgery. "He's on a lot of medication," she said. And he's freaking out. Moments later, Mr. Peltomaa was in handcuffs and Ms. LaFont was under arrest - beginning a nine-month legal predicament that ended only on Wednesday, when a criminal court judge in Manhattan dismissed the charges "in the furtherance of justice." The judge, Steven M. Statsinger, said in his ruling that the police had mishandled a call to a medical emergency and ended up injuring an already sick man. "Defendant's motion describes facts so extreme and unusual that this can truly be deemed sui generis," Judge Statsinger wrote. The confusion and trouble began that day when Officer Anthony Giambra arrived at the apartment door a few minutes after the 911 call, as an ambulance and fire truck pulled up outside. Ms. LaFont started to tell Officer Giambra about her husband's condition, but the dog broke loose and raced into the street. She went after the animal. When she returned, Officer Giambra had thrown Mr. Peltomaa up against a hallway wall and was trying to handcuff him. The professor's surgical wound was pressed hard against the surface, she said. She gripped the officer's shoulder and yelled at him to stop. "You're under arrest," the officer told her, as another officer hustled her back into her apartment and handcuffed her. In a sworn complaint, Officer Giambra said Mr. Peltomaa was "an emotionally disturbed person" who "indicated that he was willing to be placed in handcuffs for his protection." But, the complaint said, when the officer tried to "place Mr. Peltomaa in handcuffs to restrain and protect him," the physics professor fought back, kicking the officer in the groin and shins. The officer said Ms. LaFont then pulled on his arm for a full minute, yelling "Get off him!" Officer Giambra and his commanding officer, Capt. Michael Falcon, did not return telephone messages on Thursday. The Manhattan district attorney's office declined to comment on the judge's decision. Mr. Peltomaa denies he ever fought with Officer Giambra, though he recalls being confused about why he needed handcuffs to go the hospital. After he was cuffed, he said, the officer shoved him down face first on the tile floor, splitting open his chin and dislocating his thumb. Then the officers flipped Mr. Peltomaa over, grabbed him by his clothes and dragged him to the ambulance. Ms. LaFont said she was taken to the precinct and put in a squalid cell. Officer Giambra, munching a candy bar, told her Mr. Peltomaa was fine and would be home before she would. "He said he needed to teach me the lesson that you are never allowed to touch a police officer," she recalled. Mr. Peltomaa would spend two days in St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center with five stitches in his chin and electronic monitors keeping tabs on his ailing heart. Nineteen hours after her arrest, Ms. LaFont was brought before a judge in Manhattan Criminal Court to face charges of obstructing governmental administration and harassment. The prosecutor on duty offered her a common deal for people who have tussles with the police: plead guilty to disorderly conduct and be released with a penalty of "time served." Ms. LaFont refused. "I didn't believe I did anything wrong," she said. Over the next months, she also turned down offers from prosecutors to drop the charges in return for meeting certain conditions. What she wanted, she said, was exoneration. Ms. LaFont and Mr. Peltomaa say they have tried to slip back into their comfortable routine: walking their dog, bird watching, teaching classes, summering in Sweden and attending Broadway plays. The repairs to Mr. Peltomaa's heart valve have held up. But his thumb still hurts. "I don't think I can forgive what they did," he said. I am continuously terrified I am going to meet this officer. For months now, Ms. LaFont has also avoided walking with her dog, Laika, past the 20th Precinct station house, for fear she might cross paths with Officer Giambra. The experience, she said, shook her faith in the police: Her heart races when she sees the officer around the neighborhood. "It was terrifying," she said. It was really a life-changing event to witness police brutality to my husband. I was so afraid that they were going to kill him. But on Wednesday, Ms. LaFont made a point of going past the station house on 83rd Street. She said she even strutted a bit.