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600 W. 13th Street Austin, Texas 78701 Corner of West 13th Street and Nueces.

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Board Certified - Criminal Law - Texas Board of Legal Specialization

Criminal Law Blog

March 25, 2005

Austin DWI Defense Attorney: Heavy-Handed DWI Enforcement Means the Innocent Are Arrested With the Guilty.

A friend asked me recently why I bother to write web logs about DWI cases when so much has already been written.  The answer: I enjoy writing about the laws and technical information relating to DWIs because this area of the law touches lives of people who are not ordinarily considered “bad.” With the extremely vigorous enforcement of DWI laws going on now, many innocent people are scooped up in law enforcement’s rush to enforce DWI laws.

A client I’ll call Vanessa went to a bowling tournament in the Central Texas area where she ate a hamburger and some fries for dinner.  She drank one beer. 

After the tournament ended, she started driving to her motel.  The police stopped her for an expired inspection sticker.  When the police officer asked for her license and insurance, the officer smelled alcohol on her breath.  So he asked Vanessa to step out of the car and perform field sobriety tests. Vanessa performed them pretty darn well. 

Just the same, the officer arrested Vanessa and booked her into the jail. 

Then it came time for Vanessa to decide whether to blow into the breathalyzer machine.  If I had been there, I would have advised against blowing.  But I wasn’t, and she blew, and this time, it worked out okay.  Vanessa knew she’d only had one beer and so she figured it was safe for her to blow.  Her result was a .056. 

The officer should have seen the .056 as a big problem, but he didn’t.  Instead, he left Vanessa to spend the night in jail, to have to hire a lawyer, and to have to go through all the hassles of coming to court in Austin even though she lived in the Rio Grande Valley. 

In fairness to the officer, he can legitimately go by two different definitions of “intoxicated.” The objective one says that if a person’s blood alcohol content is 0.08% or higher, he’s intoxicated.  The other is a more subjective view of a driver’s performance of the field sobriety tests, among other things.  The officer might well have thought, subjectively, that Vanessa was intoxicated. 

But the prosecutor handling the case didn’t think so, and dismissed it. 

When the police are so heavy-handed that they ignore their own evidence of the absence of intoxication, they only hurt their efforts to enforce DWI laws.  That’s because the more aggressively the police try to lock up every possible DWI suspect, the more people hear more stories of how unfairly DWI suspects are treated, and pretty soon people lose respect for the rule of law.  No one wins when that happens. 

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