Good field tests and bad Illinois DUI Officer
Here's an example of somebody doing very well on the DUI field sobriety tests. Most police DUI investigations would have stopped after the performance on these tests, but not this one. First watch the video, and then read the blurb below it:
Does video catch cop in lie? :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State: "The video from top DUI cop Joe D. Parker's squad car shows a man walking a straight line, without stumbling or flailing his arms.
When prosecutors viewed this video of Officer Joe D. Parker's July 2008 sobriety test of motorist Raymond L. Bell, they dropped DUI charges.
But Parker, a Chicago Police officer who has won acclaim for being among the leading DUI enforcers in the state, told a different story in his police report.
He wrote that Raymond L. Bell lost his balance and used his arms to steady himself. And he arrested the 33-year-old Oak Lawn man on charges of driving under the influence, speeding and negligent driving.
Now, after reviewing the squad-car video, Cook County prosecutors have dropped the July 2008 charges against Bell.
And they're considering filing criminal charges against the 59-year-old Parker, who is one of three Chicago cops whose prolific DUI-busting has now come under scrutiny. Dozens of DUI arrests by Parker alone are under review, sources say.
'There is an ongoing investigation, but we are not going to comment in further detail,' said Sally Daly, spokeswoman for Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez.
Prosecutors have charged one of those cops -- Officer John Haleas -- with trumping up a DUI case. A review of his DUI arrests led to 156 cases being dismissed, Daly said."
That pretty much says it all about what to expect from some police officers in Illinois DUI cases.
One man's assessment of stupid DUI laws
Here is a very well-done video we found on YouTube which discusses the question of whether DUI laws are rational. The quality of the video production is superb, and the discussion may be eye-opening to some.
The narrator discusses the death toll from impaired drivers as an insignificant number. We couldn't disagree more with that proposition. Even if, as the narrator says, drunken drivers kill fewer people each year than the flu, there is a major difference. Any DUI death is the direct result of somebody's decision. You can point directly to the actions of a human being that took another human being's life.
You simply can't compare death by a virus to a death by a drunk driver, so the analogy fails in my opinion. Nevertheless, if the scenario of the narrator's DUI arrest is accurate (which I find difficult to believe), then the law has gone too far. A person riding or walking a bike while drunk is little danger to anybody other than him or herself. Unless we are going back to the prohibition (which didn't work the first time around), then we need to stop criminalizing drinking through back door methods such as enacting stupid DUI laws.
