WHAT TO DO AND NOT TO DO IF STOPPED FOR DRUNK DRIVING

1.      Do not flunk the attitude test; be civil and polite, because being otherwise will never help you, and it will generally always hurt you in the eyes of the jury and judge.

2.      Do NOT ever say that you have had any alcoholic beverage to drink, nor when, nor where, nor how much.  Indeed, do not talk to the police at all, other than to give your name: any statement, before or after an arrest, will be taken down, possibly twisted, and always used against you.  It NEVER, EVER HELPS to talk to the police in such circumstances, NEVER.  They are not there to help you; they are there to put a case together against you.  There are powerful grant money and penalty assessment incentives for government to press DUI through arrest to conviction; there is no similar incentive for the cops to be good or helpful to you.  And this is not a Miranda-based cautionary note, because Miranda applies only when you are in custody and then only when they are interrogating you.  The rule about not talking to the police about anything applies at all times, before and after custody, and whether or not you are being interrogated.  Keep your mouth closed [except to blow into the breath device].

3.      Do NOT agree to take any field sobriety test, no matter if you have been drinking or not, and your explanation for declining to do such is that you have been advised [because I am doing so right now] that there is no established correlation between the performance on any such test and impairment by alcohol. [You should give some such reason to preempt a later claim that you refused because you sensed you were guilty.  You are, instead, politely declining because you know it is a stacked deck in which the police want to give the false impression that you could not perform things because you are drunk.]

4.      Do NOT agree to take the pre-arrest breath test [preliminary alcohol screening device, or PAS], unless you are under 21 or on probation for drunk driving, whether or not you have been drinking.  Your explanation for refusing this test is that you have been informed [because I am doing so right now] that they are inaccurate and can be tampered with in the field to give false high readings, and if you are still absorbing alcohol [which for some people can be anywhere between 20 minutes and 6 hours after drinking stops], they always give false high readings any way..

5.      If you are arrested for drunk driving, you will be given a choice of blood or breath test.  Choose the breath test.  You do not have an “absolute right” to a choice [any attorney who says you have “absolute” rights to anything generally does not know what he or she is talking about and should be avoided at all costs], but you have a statutory right to a choice under most circumstances and there are things that can be done if you are not given that right.  If you choose the breath test, they are supposed to tell you that you have a right to a back-up test of blood or urine for retesting.  They generally only tell you that you have a right to back-up test of blood, if they tell you any such thing.  Tell them you want a back-up test of urine.  The cops will generally lie to you and tell you that you do not have such a right.  Lies by cops don’t bother judges, but they often bother the more concerned jurors.

6.      After you submit to whatever test you have chosen [always breath], then be quiet until they release you.  Never, ever talk to the cops, never try to explain, never try to get them to help you, never ask for a break, because your pleas just embolden cops to harass you more.  They are not going to help you, so just be quiet.

7.      After you get out of custody, make sure you call the DMV number on the pink form you have been given within 10 days of the arrest and tell them you want a hearing, or you will lose your chance for a hearing with the DMV.  If you are hiring an attorney within 10 days, he will make that call for you. 

8.      And you should always hire an attorney for these sorts of things.  If you needed brain surgery, you would not start drilling on your own skull, but would instead hire an expert, and DUI is no different.  A properly experienced DUI attorney can do more about these sorts of charges than you can imagine, because DUIs are prosecuted based on a presumption that they will not be fought, and based on a hope that jurors will be part of the neo-prohibitionism regime which has promoted the “Salem Witch Trials” public and fiction-based hysteria about DUI, and based on junk/voodoo science that would not be admissible in any other sort of criminal case, and which can accordingly be attacked, if you have an attorney who knows what he is doing and who has brought on a forensic expert who knows what he is doing.

9.      Do not drive under the influence of alcohol, but do not fall for the propaganda of “no drinking and driving,” because it is not illegal to drive after you have been drinking, nor for the exhortation of “Call 911 if you see a drunk driver,” because you cannot see a drunk driver.  The system wants to turn the populace into government-loving stoolies against each other as was the practice in the ‘30s Germany, finger-pointing/phone-dialing at every vehicular weave.  I weave all over the road and don’t drink alcohol.  Don’t become a stoolie – that is the lowest of the low.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS RUMINATIONS ABOUT CRIMINAL DEFENSE

There is a growing crisis the realms of criminal defense, or rather constitutional defense that arises out of incidents wherein people are charged with crimes.

We are increasingly a police state, yet none dare call it such.  But things are out of kilter and the systems installed by the Framers are having diminishing effect in protecting liberties.

First off, it is interesting to note that the Federalist Papers contain no discussion of setting up a national policing operation; the focus there, and elsewhere with the Founding Fathers, was how the structure and substance of the Constitution, and the three branches, and federalism would protect people from overweening government.  The focus was always on protecting individuals.

In those days, it was implicitly understood that most criminality would be the focus of the states, although a proactive constabulary was considered anathema to the regime of liberty being installed here.  Executive agents running hither and yon, searching, snooping, investigating to justify and finance their existence was nothing the New Order, the Marvelous Experiment in Philadelphia, would ever tolerate, on the national or state level, because liberty was the goal and power the exception.

Along comes the Civil War, where Abraham Lincoln [the wealthy railroad lawyer pretending to be a poor defender of the impoverished] discovered and exploited the notion that cries of “war” and “emergency” could invite [to extremist minds “justify”] executive forays outside of the intended boundaries of the Constitution, and it became a short step from there to proactive constabulary and imperial presidency.

Thereafter, we started seeing the spread of city and county and state police forces with anticipatory patrolling, instead of reactive assistance, functions, all of whom had to rationalize their existences by “finding” crimes to report, investigate, solve, prosecute.  The populace increasingly and naively came to think of these executive snoopers and invaders as having something to do with preserving, instead of obliterating, liberty, so the bizarre hero worship of the zealous gendarme rose up.

Leaping forward, that great architect of liberty Richard Nixon studied the lesson of Lincoln and announced a “war on crime,” because the Great Emancipator taught that the clarion call of “war” causes the legislature to cede power and the judiciary to blink – it’s a political question, the judges say, if your invasion of individual liberty is accompanied by a “war” cry.

Nixon’s chief justice, Burger, was largely crying in the wind of his desire to eviscerate liberty in the presence of “war” on crime until the other three Nixon justices took office, Rehnquist, Blackmun, and Powell.  The 4 of them, usually with the conservative White, invited a rewriting of individual liberty, with “balancing tests” [when the Framers actually had already done the balancing, with liberty the unquestioned default], and with the fiction that the court “created” the “exclusionary rule,” which they lied about as having no constitutional basis [Holmes and many others realized and had held quite the opposite].  Those two heresies, balancing and the false claim that the exclusionary rule was manufactured [and hence could be cut back], started to give birth to the current craziness where power is the default and liberty the exception.  And the incorporation doctrine caused there to be little difference in the focus as between federal and state policing, from a standpoint of governmental philosophies hostile to liberty.

Well, so what, we still have the civilian jury to ultimately protect us, don’t we.  Uh…., No.  The citizenry increasingly perceives government as its friend, the accused as a dirtbag, and the shiny badged cops as their heroes.  We have turned the criminal justice system on its ear, with judges too flaccid or constabularial to protect us, and with jurors all too eager to placate their cop pals by convicting us.

The result of that is that the conscientious constitutional defense attorney needs to tread carefully when preparing and setting up his cases, because the system is on anti-liberty attack mode most of the time.  Some things need to be hit aggressively; some things need to be hit gingerly or not at all.  The courts, state and federal, are no longer in the business of skepticism about the government case [which is the real but misunderstood essence of the burden of proof being on government, whether at preliminary hearing or at trial, etc.], but instead are hostile to defendants who want to put their cases to the test, or who just plain, feel, or know, they are not guilty.

People who are not a part of the system cannot enter any court these days with a feeling that the system will protect them.  They walk into the courthouse and are immediately searched, having to disprove that they are a threat, while the cops from whom they seek protection and a remedy saunter in and out without interference or harassment.  When the court is moved to suppress evidence or otherwise forced to grudgingly side with an accused against a cop, the court always reluctantly gives the defendant his remedy, often apologizing to the cop for having had to suppress the illegally seized evidence, or whatever; the court never apologizes to the defendant for his constitutional rights having been violated.  Never.  And the Constitution violating cop is never scolded.  Never.

If there are sweet-looking little girl “victims,” or pitiable elderly “victims,” or female abuse “victims,” the defense attorney needs to be careful, lest aggressive attempts to vindicate one’s client at a preliminary hearing come back to haunt the client.  Attack a sympathetic “victim” at a prelim., and the full wrath of the court will descend on you…, or rather, on your client, even though the “victim” has been aggressively propped up [and sometimes schooled in what to say and how to say it!] by the government’s victim-witness machinery.  That kind of case requires what is left of the jury to hear a carefully engineered defense, because no judge is going to dismiss sympathetic victim cases. Never.

Of course, there are reactionary and foolish attorneys who would bulldoze ahead, taking such witnesses head-on, but that would be counter-productive to the clients’ interests and would simply embolden the victims to press their possibly hyped or manufactured claims and to get those attackable positions fixed in stone.  It’s a minuet right-thinking attorneys dance daily: how aggressive, how passive, how assaultive, how diplomatic need one be to give ultimate protection to a client.  If you get too thoughtlessly aggressive too early, all will be lost.

But that games playing would not be necessary, if we could count on judges being neutral, on burdens being consistently and faithfully assigned to the government, and on both of those existing in a dynamic where it is understood that the juries hearing this stuff would be balanced, neutral, unbiased, and devoted to the doctrine of distrust of government which was the intended hallmark of due process, with burdens fully on government, and with beyond reasonable doubt proof before there could be guilt.

Either everyone is protected, or ultimately no one will be.  And not everyone is right now.  And it is sad and ominous.

Jurors need to have guts and insight....

As we approach the now iconic date of “9/11,” it is important to take stock of who and where we are and how enduring we are going to invite and allow our values to be.  The real danger of talking of dangers, real and imagined, is that liberties become eclipsed by cries of “security,” and when cries of security trump liberties, the marvelous experiment in Philadelphia becomes for naught: we become no better than the banana republics that we pretend our self-decreed “exceptionalism” has allowed us to rise above.

Exploiting the hysteria associated with 9/11, the Bush administration purposefully engineered and presided over the most sustained period of constitutional decay in our history, and we have to reverse that before constitutional gangrene consumes the body politic.  Terrorism and alarmism by our own government against our own people is far worse than any attacks on our buildings by outsiders.  

Two of the many original and founding notions that we must restore with vigor are the presumption of innocence and the necessary doctrine that prevents one from having his liberty taken by government by criminal conviction unless a civilian jury, embracing that presumed innocence, is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the truth of the government’s claims. And even when there is sufficient evidence, a jury is not required to find a person guilty, in contrast with the inverse standard that when there is insufficient evidence, a jury is mandated to vote not guilty.

What seems too often lost in such discussions is the fact that government has enormous incentives for convictions, and no true devotion to objective, neutral justice.  The yearning for justice is just that, a yearning.  And the claim that such is the goal of government is a civics book nostrum increasingly divorced from truth.  Government is to justice what cancer cells are to health, and that is why the Framers announced that government is evil, sometimes a necessary one, sometimes an intolerable one, but always evil, if liberty and justice be the goal.

Time and again, in the courts in this and other areas, one hears prospective jurors voice various police state sentiments such as “if he weren’t guilty, he wouldn’t be here,” or “where there is smoke, there is fire,” or “I would always tend to believe what a policeman says,” or “if the case has been around this long, there must be validity to the charges,” or other similar Sieg Heil!-type idiocies that reveal only that we fought our Revolution in vain, and that people are increasingly ignorant of our own history and of the news all around about government and police corruption.

We will lose it all if the citizenry does not wake up to the fact that liberty, not power, is the necessary foundation of this Republic, and that the citizenry, speaking robustly through jury pools, is the ultimate protector of that liberty.
Every time a juror presumes their government is telling them the truth, we inch ever closer to the abyss.  Jurors need to have guts and insight, or all will be lost.

Red Light Camera Traffic Court Scam

A cherished friend [who shall remain anonymous unless he speaks up] reminded me of the immortal epigram of the American sage Will Rogers, who said "We are all ignorant, only on different subjects." That was in the context of my distress expressed to him that people want me to help them with appeals of their patently unlawful traffic court outcomes, but about which they did not voice an objection in the trial court. And the particularly outrageous stuff going on in a generally corrupt traffic court system is the red light photo enforcement scam that, if such a money-making scam were practiced by a private individual instead of government, it would land them in the cell next door to Bernie Madoff.

Let's begin at the unfortunate beginnings. At the dawn of recent time, the voters, fed up with run-away government and nanny state programs that kept raising our taxes while diminishing our individual responsibilities, passed Prop. 13, which limited the government's ability to pass taxes. The thinking was that if government had a hard time passing taxes, and that came about because of popular finger-wagging at government about its ovrereaching nature, government would heed the voters' call and cut back programs. The voters were naive about the voarcious appetite of rapacious government.

Instead of cutting back programs, government hacks started looking for ways other than "taxes" to fund their bloat. From that search evolved assessments, fees, and other euphemisms for taxes, but which could get passed by simple majority votes of state and local deceivers. And the greatest opportunity for bypassing the electorate's message in Prop. 13 has become the penalty assessments associated with traffic infractions and DUI offenses: DUI and traffic offenses are the golden goose for corrupt and out of control government.

So, the Vehicle Code exponentially exploaded with nattering offenses of all sorts, which exist in no other state, because a statutory fine of, say, $100, now translates to around $500 going into governmental coffers from hapless motorists. And the politics of traffic court are that if the shiny badged cop says you did something and you say you didn't, the cop always wins, even though the fiction is created that the factual proof [including the cop's credibility] to be carried by government is beyond a reasonable doubt. But our traffic court judges never seem to have any doubt about their cop friends' credibility, and no wonder: part of the penalty assessment from the conviction goes to the courthouse construction fund! The judges get a piece of the illicit action!

Now, the thought is "why should we inconvenience the poor, overworked[!] cops by having them come to court; let's just take a picture of a car, assert that it is the motorist's, and most motorists will pay the mailed fine without contesting the matter." Heinrich Himmler would approve.

And the overwhelming majority do simply pay the mailed fine, it being too time-consuming for most working stiffs to play the traffic court arraignment and trial game. And there has grown up a little, perverse, and unconstitutional twist to the game if you want to contest such things: the judges in many courts, at least in Riverside County [most other counties do not], will demand you pay the fine in advance, labeled "bail," if you plead not guilty and want a trial. Of course, you have a statutory and constitutional right to court trial on such things, and you can never be required to post "bail" in this Republic if you are not a flight risk [and if you showed up for arraignment, you are not!], and you can never constitutionally be required to pay a fine in advance of conviction, but that does not deter traffic court judges in this county from extorting pre-payment of the "fine," labeled "bail," to "let" you enjoy your constititional right to trial. All convictions from such trials are illegal!

Then the Red Light camera scam comes trotting in. I have argued on the radio and elsewhere that those are generally illegal, as processed, and that they should be fought. But by "fighting" them, I mean you have to make objections to the evidence that the self-interested cop tries to introduce: "hearsay," "multiple hearsay," "confrontation," "foundation." You cannot let the stuff come in without voicing objections and then expect to win on appeal, because the appeals panel must look at what came in without objection, not whether it should or should not have come in had there been the proper objection. It is most telling that the judge will ask of you [grill you!] the government's questions [even though courts are supposed to be neutral], but he will not voice the objections for you against the government position that should be made if you knew the law. And your not knowing the law and its complexities is not your fault; there are all sorts of things all of us are ignorant of in others' realms: "We are all ignorant, only on different subjects."

So, to stop this corruption, first, demand a traffic trial and refuse to pay any "bail" to get that trial, and do not waive time for trial. If they have not given you a trial, due to this illegal "bail" garbage, within 45 days of your arraignment, the case must be dismissed. Then, if it is a Red Light Camera case, object to all stuff coming in other than by a percipient [on scene, visually observing, human] witness on the grounds I listed above.

We must stop running around the globe to self-righteously fight governmental corruption, because in this supposedly "exceptional" country we have quite enough of such to deal with and to try to cure ourselves.

Eyewitness Testimony is Patently Unreliable

Although I have written and argued this matter many times over the years, this Reason Magazine article on the subject so effectively and clearly encapsulates the issue that I need not reiterate my own points, but I shall simply bring you this cogent piece. This is a further example of why jurors need to look skeptically at things their government is presenting to them in trials, because things are rarely what they seem to be - or rarely what self-serving government wants people to think things are.

 

Injustice, In Plain Sight

The trouble with eyewitness testimony

Steve Chapman | August 29, 2011

In 1989, a Waukegan, Ill., woman was raped after three men invaded her apartment. She told police the rapist had a tattoo, wore an earring in a pierced ear, and spoke English. Two days later, the cops took her to an office and said, "Watch the one sitting on the chair."

Alejandro Dominguez, age 16, had no tattoos or pierced ears, and he reportedly could speak only Spanish. The woman, however, said he was the attacker, and largely on the strength of her testimony, he was convicted. Not until 2002 did DNA analysis prove Dominguez was innocent.

It's a dismally familiar tale: a victim making an eyewitness identification that later turns out to be horribly mistaken. This type of mistake is universally known as the most common cause of false convictions. Yet law enforcement authorities, courts, and juries continue to treat it as pure gold.

But change is on the way in New Jersey, where last week, the state Supreme Court ran out of patience with a method that puts so many innocents behind bars. It mandated new rules that will help to prevent errors while giving defendants more avenues to expose them.

The justices said that "courts must carefully consider identification evidence before it is admitted to weed out unreliable identifications" and "juries must receive thorough instructions tailored to the facts of the case to be able to evaluate the identification evidence they hear."

Like other evidence, it must be subject to careful scrutiny and challenge. The burden of disproof will still fall on the accused, but it will be easier to meet. Chances are good that, as a result, some blameless individuals will be spared.

It's the least the courts can do, and it's something the U.S. Supreme Court will get to consider this fall, hearing the first major case on the issue since 1977. Since then, the fallibility of eyewitness evidence has been confirmed by a mounting pile of data.

In one experiment, a "customer" went into a convenience store to buy a soft drink with a traveler's check, which required him to provide an ID and spend a few minutes conversing with the clerk. Later, the clerks were asked to find the person in a group of photos. Forty-one percent made a wrong pick.

Errors don't happen because crime witnesses choose to lie. Most of them sincerely believe what they say. But their memories may be addled by shock, colored by a desire to punish the villain, or led astray by police suggestions.

The palpable certitude of someone who was present during a crime makes for powerful evidence to a jury. But as the New Jersey court opinion noted, "accuracy and confidence may not be related to one another at all."

Jennifer Thompson can vouch for that. In 1984, as she was being raped at knifepoint, she forced herself to study and note "every single detail on the rapist's face" so she would be able to identify him.

At the police station a few days later, Thompson found her attacker in a gallery of photos. She picked him again out of a physical lineup. She took the stand in court to point him out, and he was convicted.
But 11 years later, DNA evidence pointed to someone else. "The man I had identified so emphatically on so many occasions was absolutely innocent," she wrote later.

Thompson had many minutes to get a closeup view. Often, arrests are made on the basis of brief glimpses, sometimes in dim light or at a far remove. But even in these instances, eyewitness testimony can obliterate other evidence, as well as common sense.

In 1990, a jury convicted David Dowaliby of suburban Chicago of killing his 7-year-old daughter, largely on the basis of a witness who, on the night of the murder, saw someone in a parking lot where the body was later found.

He was 75 yards away, the lighting "wasn't that great," and the witness wasn't sure if the person was male or female, or black or white. All he knew was that the "nose structure" matched Dowaliby's. A jury voted to convict. It took an appeals court to throw out the case.

But many times, mistakes go undetected and uncorrected. We all know it's dangerous to believe everything we hear. The criminal justice system ought to acknowledge that the same holds for what we see.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire! When the Police Lie, the System Die

There are many, many examples, in the literature and in published cases and in daily court activity, where the police lie, and a sound criminal justice system would then discredit everything else the officer said [and maybe prosecute that officer for perjury], and a responsible prosecutor would not even try to get the court to rely on it. That's if we had a "sound criminal justice system." We do not.

In a case this past week, the officer testified: "Based on what the victm told me, I approached the defendant, commanded her to raise her arms and to turn around, and I searched her and found [       ]." On cross-examination I inquired "Now, Deputy, Ms [         ] was not free to leave when you approached her and searched her, was she?" "Oh, yes." I exploded: "Are you telling me that when you commanded Ms [       ] to raise her hands, turn around, and you started searching her, she could have told you to 'pound sand' and walked away?" "Yes!" "You know darn well, if a cop commands a person to raise her arms and turn around, and that person were to ignore the order and walk away, especially around here, that person would be shot!" DA: "Objection!"

The DA then went on to argue the substance of the officer's testimony on that and other things, and his "credibility" was the pivot point on a suppression motion and on the substance of the matter. And the judge, a dutiful recent graduate from a DA's office, had no problem with the perfidy and perjury.

When the government credits and relies on and argues lies, the system has died.  For shame, for shame!

Ask not why the Youth of today has diminishing respect for law and for the system; simply visit the criminal courts in any county of this State, and you will be faced with your answer.

DUI Checkpoints - A MADD, MADD, MADD, MADD World - of Oppression

With new block grant money funding the regime from afar, people need to prepare themselves again for those pesky DUI checkpoints, because those liberty infringement devices are increasingly the rage in local law enforcement.  It is ironic that the 4^th of July weekend devoted to “liberty,” or at least to its superficialities and lip service, brought us governmental procedures that are the very antithesis of liberty.  Checkpoints are not popular among police agencies because they are effective, because statistically they are not.  They are popular because they are funded by grant funds from Sacramento, that come from Washington, DC, that had been taken from us back here; it is a big, costly circle that your and my money has traveled with which to then screw over you.  We hear the state and the feds are virtually broke, but they have money to invade your liberties with this repressive regime.

The grant system is one of the greatest evils in public policing, because grants are essentially a political bounty for pressing certain types of cases; the merit of the case does not matter; the filthy lucre funding its processing drives the affair.  And nowhere is the evil more manifest than in drunk driving, DUI, DWI, or whatever label.  One frequently visiting judge is so hysterically opposed to calling the crime “drunk driving” that he commands that the term not be used in his court, even though the courts of appeal and supreme court calls the subject matter “drunk driving,” as does the index labeling in the state published Vehicle Code

MADD, the lineal descendants of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of old, which gave us Prohibition and the 18^th Amendment, are furious that the 21^st Amendment repealed Prohibition, but their neo-Prohibitionism is even more dangerous than its ancestor oppression.  They have, with phony statistics and threats of placard-laced demonstrations, conned or intimidated legislators, judges, DAs, and cops into increasing harshness regarding drunk driving, and so they all lose their soul in the evil bargain, because much of what is pressed is based on fraud and victimization.

Now, we hear, that they have a booth erected at some of the checkpoints to make sure their vision of government oppression to serve their religio/political agenda is carried out faithfully.  I wonder if a booth of Constitution truth-tellers would be welcome at those sites too, or if we would be arrested for “obstructing” what passes for “justice” these days?

Of course, if the Framers’ will be done, civilian jurors would be protecting accusees from this sort of [and other] governmental overreaching, but jurors have increasingly lost their independence and have come to believe that their government is good, reliable, trustworthy, and to be heeded.  Yeah, idiotic as it sounds, people on juries cannot seem to see, or do not want to believe, the corruption in their very presence, and in their collective names.  Perhaps their own sense of security would be lessened if they came to understand how corrupt their government is in these things, but their lack of institutional skepticism has dangerously undermined the very foundation of our jury trial system.  At the same time that we see an emergence of lip service to Framers’ intents, such as with the Tea Party and other superficial “originalism”-advocating groups, we inconsistently see a diminishment in faithful attention to the standards undergirding the Republic.

The truth of the matter is that government makes a bundle from drunk driving, between the block grant moneys from DC, to the penalty assessments on the fines [now about 400% of the base fine, if not more, some of which goes to build and improve courtrooms to house the “neutral” judges handing out the fines!], to the various fees, to the costs of the rehabilitation programs, to the need for more DAs and judges to try the matters.  The fiscal corruption underlying DUI investigation and enforcement would make Bernie Madoff look like Mother Teresa in comparison.

“But what of the dangers of drunk driving?”  Garbage!  The system, at the insistence of the pushy harpies from MADD, have created the category of “alcohol-related [accidents, deaths, incidents, etc.]” in place of drunk-driver-caused [same],” because the incidence of those things being actually “caused” by drunk drivers is miniscule, and that truth would undermine their political agenda.  But something gets entered into the stats as being “alcohol-related” if a sober driver hits a drunk pedestrian; if a sober driver’s drunk uncle in the back seat is thrown out when the car flips over because its tire fell off; if a drunk driver is sitting lawfully at a light and a sober driver negligently or intentionally runs into him; etc.: that category, “alcohol-related,” has nothing to do with who caused what.  Yet those “alcohol-related” stats are the ones that supply the pneumatic numbers that make everyone go nuts about drunk driving.

Drunk driver caused accidents are in single digit %-ages, which would not help the MADD harpies, nor the block grant ghouls, nor the legions of government employees and private service-providers who profit from DUI enforcement and prosecution and conviction.

So, what of checkpoints – they are legal, are they not?  Well, it all depends on what you mean by “legal.”  Do you mean have politician judges said they are okay these days, or would the Framers have tolerated them?  The Framers would not have tolerated such a suspicionless invasion of privacy.  As Justice Clarence Thomas, a student of the Constitution whose scholarship on the subject is almost as faithful and pure as mine, has opined, “I rather doubt that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment would have considered ‘reasonable’ a program of indiscriminate stops of individuals not suspected of wrongdoing.”  But, you see, most judges, even up to the U.S. Supreme Court, are politicians; few are scholars, and even fewer are faithful to the founding principles.

And those politician judges have decreed that a “properly” erected and run[!] checkpoint is “legal,” just as other politicians have found it beneficial to set up the scheme in the first place, just as other judges in earlier times found “separate but equal,” and preemptive imprisonment based on race, and property ownership in human beings legal and constitutional.  But even the checkpoints that have passed constitutional muster have to be properly erected and executed; DUI checkpoints are not per se legal; warrantless liberty infringements are still per se illegal, absent justification being carried by the government.  On my recent, too brief appearance on a television news program, the anchor closed by asserting that the Supreme Court has ruled that checkpoints are lawful.  That is a gross overstatement; so gross in its overstating the issue as to constitute a misstatement.  A specific regime of conduct and standards must faithfully be adhered to, or they are flatly unconstitutional, as we have proven time and time again.

Then too, the fact that judges say something is okay to serve transient political interests is no more a guarantee of correctness than would the reading of the Bible by the late Osama Bin Laden make him a Methodist.  But, again, even in the result-oriented constructs by modern political judges, the checkpoints do have to be properly erected and run, and very few are, and hence the fruits of their operations are suppressible, if attacked by a knowledgeable and experienced attorney, even under the watered down constitutional standards of the neo-Prohibitionist judges.

But beware, if/when you go through them.  First off, watch, look, and listen, and if you see one ahead, turn off; that is legal, provided you don’t make an illegal u-turn or go up over a curb or something of the sort.  Don’t give the constabularial ghouls the opportunity to tell you to stop, tell you to wait, tell you to go, tell you to blow into their hands, command you to answer questions, etc.  And, you see, that is part of what is going on here.  Cops like the checkpoints, whether they get any arrests out of them or not, because they then have the chance to play “we’re the Man; we’re in charge of your freedom” to the citizens thus stopped and inconvenienced and harassed.  This is an exemplar of police statism, not public safety.

The fact of the matter is that communities that do not receive these grant funds do not do checkpoints on their own dime, because across-the-board dragneting of that sort gives miniscule results for the efforts expended.  There might be 500-800 citizens stopped at checkpoints while going about their business, and from that will come only 1-3 DUI arrests, if that many; a recent three checkpoints stopped 2500+ cars and got 6 DUI arrests out of them.  2500 cars could translate to 2500-10,000, or more, citizens arrested in their otherwise free movements to serve this political show.  Every police chief worth his stars [and some wear five, like General of the Army Douglas MacArthur!] will confess that saturation patrols are far, far more effective in apprehending the few true drunk drivers than are checkpoints.

So, first try to avoid it by turning off onto a side street, in a controlled fashion.  If you get stuck in one and get approached by the police, have your license, registration, and proof of insurance information readily available, and hand them over when asked [without fumbling], and say you do not want to talk, period.  You don’t have to talk; you don’t have to say where you are coming from or going to or whether you have had anything to drink, nor should you, ever.  Politely decline to say anything.  You do not have to be given your Miranda rights before you are free not to talk; and you do not need to be given them before what you blab about can be used against you, unless or until you are actually in custody – then they have to advise you of your right to remain silent.  I am advising you now: shut up.  It never, ever helps to talk to the cops.  They make money from arresting you; they make nothing from letting you go, and they will not.

If they then shunt you over to the investigation line, have controlled operation of your vehicle, be polite, but answer no questions, say nothing, and do not perform any objective symptoms [field sobriety] tests – you have a right to refuse, and politely do so, on advice of counsel, this counsel!  Those “objective symptoms” tests are not “objective” anyway; they are subjectively judged by the cop administering them, and once he decides to give them to you, he has decided to arrest you, with the tests merely used to ratify his fixed decision.  If anyone tries to suggest later that you did not perform those tests because you must have felt guilty, your position always must be that you did not do them solely because a knowledgeable attorney told you they are invalid, unreliable, and a trick to make innocent people look guilty; you know they have no validity, which is the only reason why you declined to participate. 

One of the field sobriety tests is the hand-held breath device.  They have to tell you of your right to refuse that test, and you always should refuse it: those junk meters are to blood alcohol percentages what tea leaf reading is to truth, and many of them can be manipulated by the operator to give false high readings.

If you are arrested, of course, you have to submit to a breath or blood test, upon demand of the officer.  Ask for breath, and then a back-up urine test, which is your right.  When they say you cannot have a back-up urine test, politely request that the officer record that you have requested it.  Then say nothing else.  Again, anything you say to the police can and will be used against you, either in the order you said it, or in any order that helps their case.  The cops are not there to help you.  They are there to put DUI cases together and to advance their power-expanding agenda.  They make money by putting cases together; they make no money by being nice to you and letting you go, so they will not.  Ever.

Checkpoints are tyranny, DUI arrests and convictions are the product of evil maneuvers by purposeful people, and all aspects of both the stop and of the prosecution are fightable.  Do not cave in, or else evil people will thereby be emboldened to harass others.

If you get arrested, the cop will give you a pink sheet of paper, which is your temporary license: the arrest has triggered a presumptive suspension, which will activate 30 days after the arrest, if you do not call DMV within 10 days of the arrest and ask for a hearing.  Do NOT wait for the criminal case to be filed; that ten days is a hard and fast rule, so unless you are going to immediately hire counsel, make the call yourself, or a four or twelve months suspension will be triggered automatically, and solely by your failure to call within ten days of your arrest.

If you do get snagged at the checkpoint and arrested, there are things to be done, if you have the right lawyers.  Call us.  Anybody who has passed the Bar exam can represent people accused of drunk driving, which is no guarantee that they are competent, and most charlatans will convince you to plead guilty; few of us are skilled enough and motivated enough and gutsy enough to stand with you against the drunk driving political combine [police, DAs, judges, legislators, rahabilitationists, probation officers].  Getting the right lawyer can be costly, but not as costly, in the long run, as all of the manifold downsides of a drunk driving conviction.

If you need brain surgery, submit not to a mere physical therapist just because the latter is superficially cheaper.  We are the brain surgeons in this [and other criminal] matter.

One troubling side note here is the recent penchant for high-profile people [actors, politicians, sports figures] to plead guilty to drunk driving, even on low BACs, on advice of counsel who have no knowledge of DUI law and facts, because that sends a message to motorists that the allegations cannot be fought and won, and to jurors that anyone with a BAC over .08% in government-created evidence should just fall on their sword and plead guilty.  There are all sorts of fightable issues in drunk driving, not the least of which is that a governmentally maintained and possessed breath device that reads .08% or .19%  does not mean that is an accurate BAC at any time, nor that it reflects what the BAC was at time of driving.

The biggest fight for liberty here is against the politically manufactured prejudice in the public about the subject, not against the highly suspect and manipulated and concocted evidence.

The 4^th of July needed to be about more than parades and flags and fireworks [which were too costly for some communities to fund this year, but there was your money to fund checkpoints!]; it needed to be about liberty, and the current anti-DUI mania and actions of government is quite the opposite of the legacy the Framers thought they were leaving us.

http://www.kennedyroelaw.com

What Happened to Judicial Neutrality?

One of the fundamental propositions of constitutional propriety in this Republic is that the judiciary is supposed to be neutral, which is a different notion from "independence of the judiciary." The doctrine of independence surrounded the founding query of whether the judiciary was to be a part of the legislative branch or of the executive branch, and, as we know, the question was resolved that it would be its own "independent" branch. But that does not, in and of itself, speak to neutrality.
Neutrality implicates the expectation that the judges will start their analysis of matters coming before them without a leaning in any direction - that what comes from the judicial effort is based on the evidence introduced in the respective proceeding. The one caveat of that is the framing notion, most clearly laid out in Federalist 78, that one of the prime functions of the judiciary is to protect individuals from overweening government. So, to the extent there is non-neutrality, it is in favor of the individual and disfavor of the government.

But that founding notion has been shifting over the past decades, maybe since the mid-70's and the appointment of the Nixon supreme court justices [Burger was already there, then Rehnquist, Blackmun, and Powell], in criminal law matters, such that now most judges at all levels are police groupies.  Most judges have never seen a cop they don't like or trust, while simultaneously they aggressively distrust witnesses brought in by the defense.  

Many years ago, one of our courts appeal had the guts to write that there cannot be a presumption of credibility on the part of police witnesses, because policeman have a clear stake in the outcome of the cases they put together and investigate and present.   And that is, of course, self-evident.   And the case that pointed out that credibility undermined stake in the outcome of cases was cited by two supreme court justices, in dissent but without contradiction by even the most pro-cop justice, as evidence of the "prevalence of police perjury" in criminal investigations.   PREVALENCE!

And yet, you will look hard and long before you find a judge these days who will voice skepticism of a police witness.   However, you do not need to look far to find judges who mistrust defense witnesses and exhibit disdain for them.

Just today, the government put on their version of a serious criminal matter at a preliminary hearing, and then one of the defendants' sweet Dad got up and gently and honestly made two critical statements that potentially undermined the government's case, and in argument afterwards the judge opined that he was not sure he believed the sweet old man!   Having faithfully and deeply and earnestly studied the Constitution for decades [some believe for centuries!], I lost it with that aggressive dismantlement of my fundamental charter!!  And that is flatly rude to boot: to tell a man you don't trust him because he is subpoenaed by the defendant's side is disrespectfuly of the dignity of the man.  Ironically, the judge was taken aback because I would suggest he was being prejudiced; he cared not about the human dignity of the man whom he tarred as a liar because he was called by the defense!  The judge's own words defined his leaning; I needed not manufacture it.

I am sick and tired of the judiciary here acting like the investigating magistrates of, say, Italy, where they lead the prosecution in its task.   Judges who do not want to subscribe to and embrace and serve their intended, indeed mandated, role of neutrality need to get the hell off of the bench and go into [or for so many of them BACK into] prosecution or police work. The pro-prosecution bent of the judiciary is patently palpable and it has to stop here and now.

Many of us have sworn to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, but I can assure you there are far, far more domestic enemies of my Constitution than foreign ones.   I have little to fear from distant mullahs; we all have a great deal to fear from pro-prosecution judges who voice distrust against witnesses who undermine government cases, all the while piously pretending neutrality, balance, and presumption of innocence for the defendants.

It is known by professional tiger trainers that no matter how well they have bonded with their charges, when a tiger's eyes turn green, everybody needs to haul out of the cage, because the tiger is set to commence a period of blind rage that cannot be quenched by even all the king's horses and all the king's men. He needs to be let alone, lest limbs be let loose from the most convenient bodies. When it comes to me Constitution, my eyes are always green.

Ruminations On Law: The Anthony Verdict; It is as it Should Be

Ruminations On Law: The Anthony Verdict; It is as it Should Be: "There are many messages communicated by the Casey Anthony trial and its outcome, but the most importent one is that the hue and cry erupting..."

The Anthony Verdict; It is as it Should Be

There are many messages communicated by the Casey Anthony trial and its outcome, but the most important one is that the hue and cry erupting from the acquittals reveals that the Framers’ notion that freedom would lie with civilian juries interposed between government and a person’s liberty is in peril. Convictions were intended to be few and far between and difficult to obtain, as evidenced from the presumption of innocence, with the burden of proof on the government, and with an accused’s entitlement to an acquittal if the government did not carry their burden beyond a reasonable doubt, while never an entitlement of government to receive a conviction even if there was enough evidence, and with a strict rule that none of the burden could be carried by compelling evidence from the lips of the defendant. The final protection of the populace is the power of the jury to disregard everything that the judge says about the law and to deem technically guilty people not guilty, a power that the courts vigorously and jealously refuse to tell the jury about, but one which preceded the very framing of the Constitution and still exists.

Juries were to be skeptical of government [and government includes judges!], and the default was to be with liberty. But in our growing “Sieg Heil!” society, where citizens and judges alike are increasingly groupies of cops and of The Man, we have turned on its head the greatest protection we all had against tyranny, that the default position in the Republic is with the individual and against government, with liberty and against power.

The outcome of this trial is precisely what it should have been, where the government concedes that it does not know the cause of death and that it cannot rule out accident. In retort by the reactionary mob, much is sought to be made of the fact that Anthony is a liar and of a suggestion she is a slut. Interesting thing about lying in the public sphere: cops, DAs, judges, criminalists and other experts, and politicians at all levels from president on down, can lie, and they do, with nary a downside, but if an accused is found to lie about stuff, that signals his or her death warrant. Wow, that’s a curious and dangerous coda. Yeah, yeah, she was a party girl too. Being a party girl and slut and liar does not add up to the requisite proof that she is a murderer, nowhere nearly. It shows she is a liar, and verdicts went against her on that score.

We know that something obviously happened to little Caylee, but what, and by whom, and exactly when we know not. And that is why a highly political DA’s office would try to highlight the claimed lowlifeness of the defendant, as a substitute for evidence. If you can stir up the passions and prejudices of the jury, even though you are ordered not to do so, then maybe they will be hoodwinked and infuriated into voting guilty, which happens more than people would want to know; it happens all the time, across this Fruited Plain.

Thank God! we had a jury that was not of the government groupie outlook on life, but one that instead displayed the “prove it; show me” animus that was intended to be part of the jury’s duty, but which is sorely missing these “law and order” days.

Being an armchair juror is kind of fun, because you see much more than the real jury sees, and you can bloviate and tisk-tisk endlessly, without having to concern yourselves with the downside of poor judgment. The jurors were told they had to have an abiding conviction of the truth of the charge, based on what they saw in the courtroom, or the defendant was entitled to an acquittal. And she got it.

Does this mean Casey is innocent? None of us is innocent. The criminal justice system does not deal with “innocence,” but rather either with the default and baseline of not guilty, or with the heavy-carried guilty. This is a case in which guilt was not sufficiently proven; it is not one in which innocence was at all proven. And that is the rule of the game, that is the law, a more powerful and fundamental rule and law than the definition and punishment for murder, so “law and order” types should celebrate, not berate.

Was Justice done? What is Justice? If its definition as a constitutional construct encompasses the notion that we all remain free unless or until the government proves properly and sufficiently to our peers that our freedom is not deserved, based on found facts, then Justice surely was done. If your definition of Justice is roughly that of the self-righteous inquisitors in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, maybe Justice was not done. Only your soul, or its absence, can define that for you.

http://www.kennedyroelaw.com

"Independence Day" and DUI Checkpoints and DUI

With the 4^th of July close upon us, "Independence Day," they claim, people need to prepare themselves again for those pesky DUI checkpoints, because those liberty infringement devices are increasingly the rage in local law enforcement.  It is ironic that the weekend devoted to “liberty,” or at least to its superficialities, brings us governmental procedures that are the very antithesis of liberty.  Checkpoints are not popular among police agencies because they are effective, because statistically they are not.  They are popular because they are funded by grant funds from Sacramento, that come from Washington, DC, that had been taken from us back here; it is a big, costly circle that your and my money has traveled with which to then screw over you.

The grant system is one of the greatest evils in public policing, because grants are essentially a political bounty for pressing certain types of cases; the merit of the case does not matter; the filthy lucre funding its processing drives the affair.  And nowhere is the evil more manifest than in drunk driving, DUI, DWI, or whatever label.  One frequently visiting judge is so hysterically opposed to calling the crime “drunk driving” that he commands that the term not be used in his court, even though the courts of appeal and supreme court calls the subject matter “drunk driving,” as does the index labeling in the state published Vehicle Code

MADD, the lineal descendants of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of old, which gave us Prohibition and the 18^th Amendment, are furious that the 21^st Amendment repealed Prohibition, but their neo-Prohibitionism is even more dangerous than its ancestor oppression.  They have, with phony statistics and threats of placard-laced demonstrations, conned or intimidated legislators, judges, DAs, and cops into increasing harshness regarding drunk driving, and so they all lose their soul in the evil bargain, because much of what is pressed is based on fraud and victimization.

Of course, if the Framers’ will be done, civilian jurors would be protecting accusees from governmental overreaching, but jurors have increasingly lost their independence and have come to believe that their government is good, reliable, trustworthy, and to be heeded.  Yeah, idiotic as it sounds, people on juries cannot seem to see, or do not want to believe, the corruption in their very presence, and in their collective names.  Perhaps their own sense of security would be lessened if they came to understand how corrupt their government is in these things, but their lack of institutional skepticism has dangerously undermined the very foundation of our jury trial system.  At the same time that we see an emergence of lip service to Framers’ intents, such as with the Tea Party and other superficial “originalism”-advocating groups, we inconsistently see a diminishment in faithful attention to the standards undergirding the Republic.

The truth of the matter is that government makes a bundle from drunk driving, between the block grant moneys from DC, to the penalty assessments on the fines [now about 400% of the base fine, if not more, some of which goes to build and improve courtrooms to house the “neutral” judges handing out the fines!], to the various fees, to the costs of the rehabilitation programs, to the need for more DAs and judges to try the matters.  The fiscal corruption underlying DUI investigation and enforcement would make Bernie Madoff look like Mother Teresa in comparison.

“But what of the dangers of drunk driving?”  Garbage!  The system, at the insistence of the pushy harpies from MADD, have created the category of “alcohol-related [accidents, deaths, incidents, etc.]” in place of drunk-driver-caused [same],” because the incidence of those things being actually “caused” by drunk drivers is miniscule, and that truth would undermine their political agenda.  But something gets entered into the stats as being “alcohol-related” if a sober driver hits a drunk pedestrian; if a sober driver’s drunk uncle in the back seat is thrown out when the car flips over because its tire fell off; if a drunk driver is sitting lawfully at a light and a sober driver negligently or intentionally runs into him; etc.: that category, “alcohol-related,” has nothing to do with who caused what.  Yet those “alcohol-related” stats are the ones that supply the pneumatic numbers that make everyone go nuts about drunk driving.

Drunk driver caused accidents are in single digit %-ages, which would not help the MADD harpies, nor the block grant ghouls, nor the legions of government employees and private service-providers who profit from DUI enforcement and prosecution and conviction.

So, what of checkpoints – they are legal, are they not?  Well, it all depends on what you mean by “legal.”  Do you mean have politician judges said they are okay these days, or would the Framers have tolerated them?  The Framers would not have tolerated such a suspicionless invasion of privacy.  As Justice Clarence Thomas, a student of the Constitution whose scholarship on the subject is almost as faithful and pure as mine, has opined, “I rather doubt that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment would have considered ‘reasonable’ a program of indiscriminate stops of individuals not suspected of wrongdoing.”  But, you see, most judges, even up to the U.S. Supreme Court, are politicians; few are scholars, and even fewer are faithful to the founding principles.

And those politician judges have decreed that a “properly” erected and run[!] checkpoint is “legal,” just as other politicians have found it beneficial to set up the scheme in the first place, just as other judges in earlier times found “separate but equal,” and preemptive imprisonment based on race, and property ownership in human beings legal and constitutional.  But even the ones that have passed constitutional muster have to be properly erected and executed; DUI checkpoints are not per se legal; warrantless liberty infringements are still per se illegal, absent justification being carried by the government.  On a recent brief appearance on a television news program, the anchor closed by asserting that the Supreme Court has ruled that checkpoints are lawful.  That is a gross overstatement; so gross in its overstating the issue as to constitute a misstatement.  A specific regime of conduct and standards must faithfully be adhered to, or they are flatly unconstitutional, as we have proven time and time again.

Then too, the fact that judges say something is okay to serve transient political interests is no more a guarantee of correctness than would the reading of the Bible by the late Osama Bin Laden make him a Methodist.  But, again, even in the result-oriented constructs by modern political judges, the checkpoints do have to be properly erected and run, and very few are, and hence the fruits of their operations are suppressible, if attacked by a knowledgeable and experienced attorney, even under the watered down constitutional standards of the neo-Prohibitionist judges.

But beware, if you go through them.  First off, watch, look, and listen, and if you see one ahead, turn off; that is legal, provided you don’t make an illegal u-turn or go up over a curb or something of the sort.  Don’t give the constabularial ghouls the opportunity to tell you to stop, tell you to wait, tell you to go, tell you to blow into their hands, command you to answer questions, etc.  And, you see, that is part of what is going on here.  Cops like the checkpoints, whether they get any arrests out of them or not, because they then have the chance to play “we’re the Man; we’re in charge of your freedom” to the citizens thus stopped and inconvenienced and harassed.  This is an exemplar of police statism, not public safety.

The fact of the matter is that communities that do not receive these grant funds do not do checkpoints on their own dime, because across-the-board dragneting of that sort gives miniscule results for the efforts expended.  There might be 500-800 citizens stopped at checkpoints while going about their business, and from that will come only 1-3 DUI arrests, if that many; a recent three checkpoints stopped 2500+ cars and got 6 DUI arrests out of them.  2500 cars could translate to 2500-10,000, or more, citizens arrested in their otherwise free movements to serve this political show.  Every police chief worth his stars [and some wear five, like General of the Army Douglas MacArthur!] will confess that saturation patrols are far, far more effective in apprehending the few true drunk drivers than are checkpoints.

So, first try to avoid it by turning off onto a side street, in a controlled fashion.  If you get stuck in one and get approached by the police, have your license, registration, and proof of insurance information readily available, and hand them over when asked [without fumbling], and say you do not want to talk, period.  You don’t have to talk; you don’t have to say where you are coming from or going to or whether you have had anything to drink, nor should you, ever.  Politely decline to say anything.  You do not have to be given your Miranda rights before you are free not to talk; and you do not need to be given them before what you blab about can be used against you, unless or until you are actually in custody – then they have to advise you of your right to remain silent.  I am advising you now: shut up.  It never, ever helps to talk to the cops.  They make money from arresting you; they make nothing from letting you go, and they will not.

If they then shunt you over to the investigation line, have controlled operation of your vehicle, be polite, but answer no questions, say nothing, and do not perform any objective symptoms [field sobriety] tests – you have a right to refuse, and politely do so, on advice of counsel, this counsel!  Those “objective symptoms” tests are not “objective” anyway; they are subjectively judged by the cop administering them, and once he decides to give them to you, he has decided to arrest you, with the tests merely used to ratify his fixed decision.  If anyone tries to suggest later that you did not perform those tests because you must have felt guilty, your position always must be that you did not do them solely because a knowledgeable attorney told you they are invalid, unreliable, and a trick to make innocent people look guilty; you know they have no validity, which is the only reason why you declined to participate. 

One of the field sobriety tests is the hand-held breath device.  They have to tell you of your right to refuse that test, and you always should refuse it: those junk meters are to blood alcohol percentages what tea leaf reading is to truth, and many of them can be manipulated by the operator to give false high readings.

If you are arrested, of course, you have to submit to a breath or blood test, upon demand of the officer.  Ask for breath, and then a back-up urine test, which is your right.  When they say you cannot have a back-up urine test, politely request that the officer record that you have requested it.  Then say nothing else.  Again, anything you say to the police can and will be used against you, either in the order you said it, or in any order that helps their case.  The cops are not there to help you.  They are there to put DUI cases together and to advance their power-expanding agenda.  They make money by putting cases together; they make no money by being nice to you and letting you go, so they will not.  Ever.

Checkpoints are tyranny, DUI arrests and convictions are the product of evil maneuvers by purposeful people, and all aspects of both the stop and of the prosecution are fightable.  Do not cave in, or else evil people will thereby be emboldened to harass others.

If you get arrested, the cop will give you a pink sheet of paper, which is your temporary license: the arrest has triggered a presumptive suspension, which will activate 30 days after the arrest, if you do not call DMV within 10 days of the arrest and ask for a hearing.  Do NOT wait for the criminal case to be filed; that ten days is a hard and fast rule, so unless you are going to immediately hire counsel, make the call yourself, or a four or twelve months suspension will be triggered automatically, and solely by your failure to call within ten days of your arrest.

If you do get snagged at the checkpoint and arrested, there are things to be done, if you have the right lawyers.  Call us.  Anybody who has passed the Bar exam can represent people accused of drunk driving, which is no guarantee that they are competent, and most charlatans will convince you to plead guilty; few of us are skilled enough and motivated enough and gutsy enough to stand with you against the drunk driving political combine [police, DAs, judges, legislators, probation officers].  Getting the right lawyer can be costly, but not as costly, in the long run, as all of the manifold downsides of a drunk driving conviction.

If you need brain surgery, submit not to a physical therapist just because the latter is superficially cheaper.  We are the brain surgeons in this [and other criminal] matter.

One troubling side note here is the recent penchant for high-profile people [actors, politicians, sports figures] to plead guilty to drunk driving, even on low BACs, on advice of counsel who have no knowledge of DUI law and facts, because that sends a message to motorists that the allegations cannot be fought and won, and to jurors that anyone with a BAC over .08% in government-created evidence should just fall on their sword and plead guilty.  There are all sorts of fightable issues in drunk driving, not the least of which is that a governmentally maintained and possessed breath device that reads .08% or .19%  does not mean that is an accurate BAC at any time, nor that it reflects what the BAC was at time of driving.

The biggest fight for liberty here is against the politically manufactured prejudice in the public about the subject, not against the highly suspect and manipulated and concocted evidence.

The 4^th of July needs to be about more than parades and flags and fireworks; it needs to be about liberty, and the current anti-DUI mania and actions of government is quite the opposite of the legacy the Framers thought they were leaving us.

http://www.kennedyroelaw.com/

Michael Kennedy ["Captain Motion"] Holding his "Eddie," the Lifetime Achievement Award for Drunk Drinving and Criminal Defense he received.