Protect innocent while prosecuting drunk driving

Jackson, MS.  Aug. 31 – In 2010, there were 231 Mississippi alcohol related fatalities, a disturbing number. We don’t really know if alcohol caused these accidents or not, but we do know one of the drivers was drinking.

For the one-third of Americans who don’t drink, the legality of drinking and driving must seem like an abomination. Indeed, alcohol consumption even without a two-ton vehicle causes untold wreckage of lives and human misery.

But two-thirds of Americans find moderate alcohol consumption a very pleasant aspect of life. It enhances conviviality, allows one to relax after a hard week’s work and is good for your health. Moderate alcohol consumption can reduce the risk of heart disease and senility…

The temperance battle has been one of the great social battles of our country. We tried to ban alcohol, but failed. Now we keep an uneasy social truce over the liquid drug.

The American love-hate contradiction over alcohol couldn’t be clearer than in our DUI laws. Drinking and driving is legal – but only up to a point.

The American Medical Association, at the request of the Department of Transportation, originally deemed impaired driving to occur at a .15 blood alcohol level. Today, half that level – .08 – is considered impaired and illegal. The human body hasn’t changed during that time, but Mothers Against Drunk Driving has since become a powerful political force that no politician dares to question. Driving While Intoxicated has become Driving Under the Influence. The range of acceptable drinking and driving is much more narrow.

Meanwhile, there were 33,153 Mississippi DUI arrests last year, an astounding number. If DUIs were randomly distributed, every driver in the state would get at least one during his lifetime.

A Colorado study showed that 20 percent of those arrested for DUIs had legal blood alcohol levels. The problem is that residual alcohol in your mouth can distort the results of the unreliable portable breathalyzers police often use to make an arrest.

Applying the Colorado study to Mississippi, 6,500 innocent Mississippians are arrested for DUI each year. Many lack the knowledge or money to fight the charge and just plead guilty.

For the innocent, the personal cost of an undeserved DUI is immense: Lost reputations, job opportunities and the 90-day license suspensions. Car insurance rates skyrocket. A DUI often ends up costing $15,000.

If police followed the rules, they would never give a breath test without waiting for at least 20 minutes. But Mississippi police are not that patient, especially when quotas need to be met and $30 million in fines is on the line.

Police often administer breath tests without probable cause: red eyes, the smell of alcohol, weaving within your lane, a bad taillight, making a wide turn, and other vague and arbitrary reasons are often used by police as probable cause, even though they don’t stand up to judicial scrutiny.

Police are routinely asking, “Have you been drinking?” even though drinking is a legal activity. If you answer yes, count on being tested.

The police need to concentrate on drivers displaying clearly erratic driving, slurred speech and inability to walk straight – these are the behaviors on which genuine probable cause should be based. These are the people who are a danger on the road.

Then there is the infamous “sobriety field test” where the police ask you to do various acrobatic stunts. Studies show perfectly sober people fail this test half the time.

In its eagerness to battle drunk driving, the U.S. Supreme Court has carved out a special place for DUI enforcement, suspending many of the typical civil rights protections afforded by the Constitution.

The clearest case of this is the road block, where drivers are detained for no probable cause. Many legal experts believe road blocks violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. In allowing road blocks for DUIs, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled several state supreme courts, which found them to violate the rights embodied in state constitutions…

Current Mississippi law gives drivers the right to a blood test, but the statute is watered down and police ignore it. Police should be required to inform drivers that a more accurate test is available. Then police should be required to assist the driver in getting a blood test if they so choose. Any emergency room can do it. The more accurate blood test would further convict the guilty, but it would save thousands of innocent people from getting a huge blight on their record.

Breath samples can be saved for later verification by an independent lab. The cost is about five dollars. But under Mississippi law, the police do not have to save the samples. In essence, they are allowed to destroy the very evidence used to convict.

Like any profession, there are good police and bad police. In this age of smart phones, it is simple to audio or video record your interaction with police. Incredibly, dozens of American citizens have been arrested for recording their encounters with police based on outdated eavesdropping laws. The Legislature needs to change this. Any citizen should have the right to record his interaction with police to ensure proper adherence to the law.

Research has shown that law-abiding citizens who go out to dinner on Saturday night and have wine with dinner are not the cause of alcohol related traffic deaths. The deaths are caused by chronic alcoholic repeat offenders. These are the dangerous people who are weaving down the road and running red lights. The police need to spend their time watching for the true menace and not randomly stopping the two-thirds of Americans who like wine with dinner…

With 33,000 arrests each year, it’s high time the state Legislature passed some basic measures to protect its law-abiding citizens from false DUI arrest. With fewer breath tests to do on law-abiding drivers, maybe the police could keep a better lookout for the real drunks swerving down the road.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. As Mr. Taylor says, there is a new awakening in America that perhaps MADD’s prohibitionist agenda has gone too far.

Turns out there was more to the story. The defendant was on home detention, with GPS monitoring. The grounds for the revocation? He was behind on his home detention payments. You see, it costs about $70.00 a week to be on home detention.

Jail is for poor people. Home detention may not necessarily be for rich people, but it certainly is hard for the indigent.

This schedule, especially our non-conference portion, may be the best we have put together in my time here. This is a testament to our program and what we can offer for other teams to come here and play. We will face some of the best programs in the country. We will have a tough challenge ahead of us, but also know it will be a great opportunity in helping us reach our ultimate goal; going to Omaha.

Opening Day is February 17 and Coastal starts the season by hosting five consecutive weekend tournaments. The Chanticleers get an early test on day two when they face College World Series semifinalist Virginia.  Other ACC teams coming to Conway include NC State, Virginia Tech and Boston College.

Teams from the Big Ten include Michigan, Ohio State, Iowa and Illinois. The Chants also host Big East teams Pittsburgh, St. John’s, West Virginia, and a rematch against last year’s Clemson Regional Winner, UConn.

Coastal will travel to Chapel Hill for a road game against CWS participant North Carolina on March 27. Other significant road games include the annual battle in Tiger Town against Regional Host Clemson, as well as a trip to Ann Arbor on May 8-9.

Here is the complete schedule. Conspicuously missing is National Champion South Carolina.

Georgia is a college football traditional powerhouse. Just mention the word Athens, or the phrase “between the hedges” and college football immediately comes to mind. Coastal Carolina on the other hand is better known for its baseball program. The Chanticleer football team has only been in existence since 2003. Officially, that is. But before that, there was club football.

Dave Bennett, current Coastal coach, gives Andy Lanier, a Georgia fan from Blakely, Ga. credit for starting football at the South Carolina college.

Lanier organized and coached club football at Coastal in 1987-1988. Club football was not sanctioned by Coastal and the team had to rely on donations for equipment. After he was turned down by the University of South Carolina and Clemson, Lanier called on Georgia. Equipment manager Howard Beavers donated the uniforms and equipment for the Chanticleers’ first football team.

After Mr. Beavers, Coach Dooley and Georgia were so generous, Lanier said, we just had to become the Bulldogs. That was my preference anyway.

Today’s’ game is a great opportunity for Coastal. It is the first meeting between the teams; a meeting come full circle.

In April, Janet Goodin of Warroad, Minn., was crossing into Canada for an evening of bingo with her daughters when an officer with the Canadian Border Service conducted a routine search of her van. The officer found an old bottle of motor oil, did a field test and told her that it contained heroin.

“I can’t even describe the feeling of amazement,” Goodin, 66, said in an interview. “I said, ‘That’s not possible, it’s leftover oil.’”

The bottle was re-tested, and agents said it again revealed the presence of heroin. Goodin was arrested, handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was strip-searched. The motor oil was sent to a Canadian federal laboratory, which eventually determined there was no heroin in it. After 12 days behind bars, Goodin was released.

Goodin’s case has been seized upon by critics who question the reliability of field drug-test kits, which are used widely by law enforcement.

“She is what you call collateral damage in the drug war,” said former FBI special agent Frederic Whitehurst, a North Carolina attorney and forensic consultant with a Ph.D. in analytic chemistry, who has publicly raised concerns about field drug-test kits. “When you run the tests, you run into all sorts of problems from overzealous cops.”

Goodin was actually arrested twice: first by the Border Service, which performed the field test, and then by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which took over her case from the Border Service.

The Border Service won’t explain how they made the mistake. But Sgt. Line Karpish of the RCMP said her agency used “reasonable grounds” based on information it got from the Canadian Border Service. She noted that drugs are smuggled into Canada by all types of people. “We find it in diapers, we find it on old ladies, young ladies, beautiful ladies,” Karpish says. “You can’t let ‘grandma’ cloud your judgment about the police force. That’s why terrorists use kids.”

No, Sgt Karpish, we don’t want “grandma” to cloud your judgment, but we do want you to be a little more responsible when it comes to holding people in jail over faulty drug tests.

Twelve days is absolutely unreasonable. Has anyone ever noticed that time doesn’t seem to matter to the people responsible for holding someone else in jail?

As Radley Balko points out, you can now add oil to the list of false positives. Chocolate chip cookies, deodorant, billiards chalk, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, patchouli, spearmint, eucalyptus and breath mints.

The alternate title to this post could be: No thanks, I have a paralegal and he’s not in jail. Better yet, it could simply be this. If he’s so smart, why is he in jail too?

Despite decades of awareness campaigns about the public health hazard impaired driving poses, and all of the tough rhetoric about South Carolina’s zero tolerance for drunk driving, the DUI conviction rate here remains low.

That could be considered a success, not a failure.   Read the above quote again. It definitely should be considered a success.

You see, it all depends on what you are looking for. Either you want less people driving drunk on the roads or you want more people convicted of driving drunk on the roads. I don’t see how you could possibly want both.

But the article doesn’t address that little paradox. It would rather focus on grabbing your attention with a headline stating that the DUI laws are flawed. The article would rather generate a little controversy by implying that the laws are too complicated for the police or assistant prosecutors to figure out so that cases can be successfully prosecuted. That is simply not the case.

The DUI laws are complex and they should be. DUI is the one law that someone can be charged with when we don’t even know if a law was violated. Every other criminal charge begins when we know a crime was committed. We may not know who did it, but we know it was done. Not so with DUI.

If you take a close look at the cases made for driving under the influence, you will see that the majority of them are made by the same police officers and highway patrolmen. Over and over again. It’s what they do and they are good at it. The same can be said about the assistant solicitors prosecuting these cases.

The article goes on to cite numbers regarding the unsuccessful prosecution of DUI and DUAC cases. If you really want to talk numbers that matter, here is a quote in the article from Solicitor Greg Hembree:

The highway patrol has put a lot of emphasis on making a lot of cases and generating a lot of numbers,” he said. “That has led to some low-quality cases.

It’s not the DUI laws.

Sappelt was called up from Triple-A Louisville where:

He was hitting .313/.387/.458 at Louisville with seven home runs and 27 RBI. He’s been hot lately. He hit .415 over last 10 games.

Sappelt was the Reds’ minor league hitter of the year last year. He hit .342 with 32 doubles, 11 triples, 10 home runs and 74 RBI while moving Single-A Lynchburg to Double-A Carolina to Triple-A Louisville.

Sappelt is a former Big South Player of the Year and helped lead the Chanticleers to a Super Regional against UNC in 2008.

I have written about discretion before and how it starts with the officer on the street and continues up to the prosecuting attorney. Well, this is a good example and it comes from the top prosecutor for this county.

Pierce was found guilty of resisting arrest recently and sentenced to 18 months probation. According to Hembree:

Certainly the most serious charge was resisting arrest. Once she was convicted of that, it was the maximum sentence. If we took her in on that case, she would not get an additional bit of punishment. It would run concurrent to what she is serving.

Could the state have gone forward with this case? Sure. Would they get a conviction? Who knows? Probably, but who cares? What good could come from prosecuting this case?

Another word for discretion is judgment.  Solicitor Hembree has shown good judgment in dismissing this case. Nothing else could be served from going forward with it.