DRIVING WHILE DRUGGED
Although Illinois is usually considered more progressive than Missouri, that is not the case when it comes to driving while drugged laws.
Earlier this month, Bruce Rushton wrote about the absurd results from Illinois’ law, which convicts a driver if they have any amount of an illegal drug in their body even if it had absolutely no affect on their ability to drive. He cited the case of a Lake County man whose son was killed when the other driver ran a red light and hit the passenger side of his vehicle at an intersection. Because the grieving dad had trace elements of marijuana in his system from consumption days earlier, he was convicted of aggravated DUI.
Last year I represented a Springfield driver charged with DWI in Missouri, after being admitted to practice in the Missouri Court for that case.
Under Missouri law, to be convicted of driving under the influence of drugs the state has to show the defendant’s ability to drive was impaired by the illegal drug. That made all the difference in my case. The state claimed it had no video. I called the arresting officer’s small town police department numerous times, only getting an answering machine, and never getting a return call. Finally, a couple days before the scheduled trial the officer answered and said “Sure, there’s a video.” I called the prosecutor and he agreed to continue the trial.
When I finally got the video, my client appeared perfectly sober. I called the prosecutor when it got close to the next trial date and asked if he’d looked at the video. He said he had, but it had been a while ago. I asked him to take another look at it because the defendant looked pretty sober on it to me. He called back later that day, and said he was dismissing all charges, even those that weren’t drug related. Under Illinois law that video would have made absolutely no difference because it was undisputed that the defendant had illegal drugs in her body, and that’s all it takes to convict in Illinois.
The Missouri Court of Appeals recently wrote that to establish driving under the influence of drugs “consists of three components: (1) impaired ability, (2) presence of a proscribed substance in the defendant’s body at the time of the offense and (3) a causal connection between the proscribed substance and the defendant’s impaired ability.” State v. Honsinger, 386 S.W.3rd 827 (Mo.App.S.D. 2012)
Makes sense, and it ought to be the law in Illinois, too.
Sam Cahnman
Attorney at Law
Springfield
RICH IN RHETORIC
Wow, Jim Tobin – that’s a whole lot of rhetoric but almost no actual policy points. (Letters to the Editor, “Don’t Increase Taxes,” by Jim Tobin, Nov. 20.)
OK, fine. You want to rollback the income tax increase. Where should we make the cuts to afford that? Illinois already has one of the lowest state worker per-capita ratio in the country. 50 facilities have been closed in the last 5 years. Services have been slashed. So, instead of more platitudes about “belt-tightening,” tell us, Mr. Tobin: where exactly should we cut?
You say pensions are the problem? Fine, that’s a longer discussion but let’s focus on one of your points: new hires. Illinois already has a two-tier pension system and every new hire is placed into a pension plan that will result in that employee, on average, putting more into the plan then they collect during retirement. New hires therefore are a boon to the current pension system.
You blame government unions for the pension mess? How absurd. It is well documented how politicians routinely made a practice out of under-funding the pension system. When the unions attempted to force them to fund the systems properly the courts said the unions had no standing to do so.
The biggest irony? The reason politicians underfunded pensions was to appease people like YOU, Mr. Tobin – people that wanted all the benefits of a modern service/infrastructure state, but didn’t want to pay for it with taxes.
Donny Phillips
This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2014.
