Bread, pizza and hot dog buns can set it off

By Mary Pat Flaherty, Washington Post Staff Writer - Read original article HERE

Nearly 400 people were convicted of driving while intoxicated in the District since fall 2008 based on inaccurate results from breath test machines, and half of them went to jail, city officials said Wednesday.

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said the machines were improperly adjusted by city police. The jailed defendants generally served at least five days, he said.

Nickles's office has begun notifying the drivers, a move that immediately triggered at least one lawsuit against the District and could lead to requests for expungements, new trials and even deeper skepticism about the integrity of testing. Challenging test results is at the heart of drunken-driving cases, and this revelation will only strengthen those challenges, defense attorneys said.

The District's badly calibrated equipment would show a driver's blood-alcohol content to be about 20 percent higher than it actually was, Nickles said. All 10 of the breath test machines used by District police were wrong, he said. The problem occurred when the officer in charge of maintaining the machines improperly set the baseline alcohol concentration levels, Nickles said.

The flawed testing does not jeopardize cases involving accidents or injuries, including fatal crashes, because blood or urine samples would have been taken as additional evidence, Nickles said.

Nickles said he does not believe the new findings will change the results of the routine DWI cases, either, because officers often relied on field sobriety tests and other observations for their arrests. Still, Assistant Police Chief Patrick Burke said he could see "reduced charges in cases."

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Courtesy of The State

The General Assembly needs to order all law enforcement agencies to process the racial data they collect on their traffic tickets to provide a snapshot of whether there is evidence of racial profiling.

That's the conclusion of a 26-page report on racial profiling in state traffic stops just released by the S.C. Progressive Network.

The state Highway Patrol analyzes the race of drivers given warning tickets by troopers because of a 2005 law. But it doesn't analyze the race of those given actual citations for such offenses as driving under the influence of alcohol, speeding or breaking the state's seat belt laws.

Other law enforcement agencies collect similar racial data on tickets of their own volition, but also don't analyze it.

All of that needs to change, according to Brett Bursey, director of the S.C. Progressive Network.

"After all, the race of over 2 million drivers a year is already recorded on all traffic tickets, but that data is not put in a form so it may be examined for patterns," Bursey said.

Racial profiling is a term that refers to the improper targeting of a motorist because of his or her race, not because of a driving issue.

Bursey said that since the General Assembly is required this session to review a 2005 state law that mandated that warning ticket data be analyzed, now is the time for that issue to be studied anew.

The 2005 law requires the Senate Transportation Committee and the House Education and Public Works Committee to make recommendations on how that law can be improved - if any are deemed necessary.

Rep. Joe Neal, D-Richland, a longtime supporter of better racial traffic stop data, agreed with Bursey.

"This goes to public confidence in laws and justice. To ensure our system is truly color blind, we need to understand what actually is happening when tickets are given," Neal said.

Analyzing existing racial traffic stop data apparently would not be difficult or cost much money, law enforcement officials indicated.

Neal and Bursey say the state already collects and analyzes racial data in two law enforcement areas: prison populations and suspects arrested for serious crimes like murder.

And one major agency - the Richland County Sheriff's Department - has been collecting and analyzing racial data on its 20,000-plus annual traffic stops for 10 years.

"It's fast and it doesn't cost anything," said Sheriff Leon Lott.

Lott's data gives an overall picture of how the race and ethnicity of stopped motorists compares with county racial demographics. The individual traffic stop records of each of Lott's 500 deputies can be easily examined for possible profiling, he said.

Three years ago, Lott said, his data helped prove a deputy was targeting blacks and Hispanics. The officer was arrested and fired.

Statistics alone aren't proof of racial profiling, Lott said. Further investigation is needed to establish the complete situation, he said.

"The statistic is the baseline to start looking," he said.

A spokeswoman for the S.C. Department of Motor Vehicles, which handled 1.9 million adjudicated traffic tickets last fiscal year, said it wouldn't be difficult to write a software program to extract an overall racial picture of citations in which people have been found guilty of violations.

DMV official Beth Parks estimated it would take about two hours and cost at least $200 to arrive at a computer-generated racial profile of last year's citations to which people were found guilty. She did not have an estimate of what percentage of the 1.9 million citations itwould be.

Last year, as the 2005 law required, the DPS analyzed - and made public - overall race data on 377,676 warning tickets the Highway Patrol issued.

But those warning tickets are only 41 percent of 904,348 tickets it issued last year for seat belt, DUI and other violations.

Last week, DPS director Mark Keel, at The State's request, examined how his agency handles racial data in the 59 percent of actual citations.

"We have learned we do have the ability to do things with this data that we have not fully explored and fully utilized," Keel said.

For example, said Keel, DPS can access each trooper's record of the race of the people who get citations. Racial breakdowns of all citations in individual counties also are available, Keel said.

In the past, such matters as reducing the highway death rate and dealing with budget concerns, have taken much of his attention, Keel said.

But DPS already is having conversations about how to make better use of the data, including possibly making some of the overall patterns publicly available, Keel said.

Keel also said troopers' supervisors already monitor their officers' performance, and any racial profiling should be detected now, from an examination of troopers' tickets issued as well as video made at traffic stops. Before Keel assumed his job in 2008, a few of those videos made the news because they showed troopers mistreating motorists, some of them black.

An official at the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state laws, said a "fair number" of states track and process racial profiling data for traffic stops. She did not have specific numbers.

Lott said he has had good results gathering such data.

"It's another tool," Lott said. "You do it because it's the right thing to do."

Bursey said he hopes law enforcement will take the lead on creating a transparent database. "Good cops don't mind sharing this data with the public."

(The Progressive Network's report can be viewed at www.scpronet.com.)

Reach Monk at (803) 771-8344.

Watch this video from NBC4i.com, where reporter Ana Jackson takes the test. Click HERE

Courtesy of The State

The buzz hit after the first drink.

It grew after the second and the third.

But I didn't feel all that impaired.

My friends drinking with me said the same thing.

Then, we stood before police officers at the S.C. Criminal Justice Academy who are learning how to conduct the standardized field sobriety test. We were their voluntary lab subjects.

"I didn't feel drunk, but once I did the testing I was, 'Oh, I am,'" said Candace Perry, a 33-year-old Columbia resident who volunteered to drink for the class.

Twenty-four officers from across the state are taking the course, just in time for the holiday party season.

While drunk driving is a year-round problem in South Carolina, officers at the academy said the Christmas and New Year's holidays give people more opportunities to drink alcohol.

"There are a lot of parties going on and people get together to celebrate," said Hubert Harrell, the academy's director. "They think, 'I'm OK' and they go get in their cars and they end up hurting somebody. There are a lot of people who won't be here after the holidays because of DUI."

In 2007, 549 people were killed and 3,894 people were injured in alcohol-related traffic collisions, according to the S.C. Department of Public Safety's latest available statistics.

In South Carolina, it is illegal to get behind the wheel with a blood alcohol content of .08 percent.

For most people, that level of intoxication may make them talk more or be bolder on the dance floor. But it doesn't make them falling-down drunk.

That is what the academy wants police around the state to understand, said Dale Smith, traffic safety program manager.

"We're trying to get our officers to see what a .07 or .08 or .09 is," Smith said. "We want them to see what a low-level DUI is. If you can't stand up, it's a given that you're impaired."

So the academy rounded up eight volunteers who on Wednesday morning agreed to drink Taaka vodka (trust me, it's the cheap stuff) until they went just beyond the legal limit.

For me, it took 180 milliliters of booze. That's about four shots of hard liquor. A shot of hard liquor has the same alcohol content as one beer or one glass of wine.

Perry drank about the same amount.

Another volunteer drinker, Jon Marr, 27, needed more liquor to hit .08.

Once we hit the legal limit, we headed to a gym, where officers took turns performing the field sobriety test on us.

The test includes standing on one leg for 30 seconds and walking heel-to-toe along a straight line while counting out nine paces.

These felt somewhat easy to master: You try to maintain balance and control and simply follow instructions.

But there were subtle clues the officers picked up.

For example, I tended to slightly sway while standing heel-to-toe listening to officers' instructions, even though I never actually stumbled while walking.

The third piece of the test is the one that got me - and my fellow drinkers - every time.

It's called the horizontal gaze nystagmus. You and I recognize it as the "pen test."

The officer asks the suspected drunk driver to focus on the tip of a pen or his finger and follow its movement with eyes only. Do not move your head.

The test works because people have six muscles around their eyes that they can't control individually.

"They're arguing amongst themselves and can't get their act together," said Wayne Harris, a sobriety test instructor. "It's involuntary."

Because of that so-called argument, a drunk person's eyes jerk when following the pen. There's no way to hide it.

After each of us was tested eight times, officers explained whether they would have hauled Perry, Marr or me off to jail.

Each of us would have been arrested seven times and only let off the hook once.

Even when officers found few clues of drunkenness in the leg stand or walking, they noticed our eyes jerking.

Perry and Marr said they learned a lesson during the experiment.

Both are social drinkers who have a couple of drinks over dinner with friends. Now, both said they would be more quick to find a designated driver.

"I felt more sober than the tests showed," Marr said. "I wouldn't have necessarily jumped in a car to drive, but I wouldn't have felt uncomfortable doing it."

Another volunteer drinker will apply his experience at his job. Shawn Mosteller, a bartender at Sharky's and Red Hot in Five Points, said he realized the belligerent drunks are not the only ones too tipsy to drive.

"We're supposed to cut people off," he said. "It's already too late if they're acting foolish."

DULUTH, Minn. – A Minnesota man has pleaded guilty to driving his motorized La-Z-Boy chair while drunk. A criminal complaint says 62-year-old Dennis LeRoy Anderson told police he left a bar in the northern Minnesota town of Proctor on his chair after drinking eight or nine beers.

Prosecutors say Anderson's blood alcohol content was 0.29, more than three times the legal limit, when he crashed into a parked vehicle in August 2008. He was not seriously injured.

Police said the chair was powered by a converted lawnmower and had a stereo and cup holders.

Sixth Judicial District Judge Heather Sweetland stayed 180 days of jail time Monday and ordered two years of probation for Anderson. His attorney, David Keegan, did not immediately return a call for comment.

Duluth News Tribune - http://www.duluthsuperior.com