This post’s bound to be a little more personal than some on the blog, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about pretty much since I started working at Sumpter & Gonzalez.

I’m not a lawyer. As such, I haven’t got a background with thorny constitutional issues, and arguments that are at the core of the criminal defense practice – about everyone having a right to the best possible counsel, about process and procedure needing to be strictly followed – are things that I’ve never had to consider besides in very abstractly until I came onboard here about a year ago.

It seems like most private defense firms, S&G included, are heavy on DWI cases, since it’s certainly the most common arrest in Travis County. I’m guessing that extends to other places, as well. A big part of my job involves keeping up with the dialogue among defense attorneys on blogs, in the news, and elsewhere, and the reaction to DWI is something that I’ve thought a lot about since I started here.

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Two things come to mind, before I go into greater detail:

1. I’ve always been a little bit uncomfortable with the way that DWI attorneys can sometimes talk about the charge like it’s not a significant charge. You’ll see it even from really thoughtful people, like the California lawyer who maintains the DUI Blog, who spends a lot of time talking about the relative safety of driving after drinking compared to driving while texting – and not, presumably, because he wants to see an uptick in DWT arrests and legislation, but because it’s a strong rhetorical way to diminish the dangers of DWI.

2. My first few months here, my main job was to watch and take notes on DWI arrest videos, and I’ve seen a ton of tapes – both of people who I’m convinced are totally innocent and stone-cold sober being arrested, as well as of people I’ve been really grateful to know were scooped up and arrested that night so they didn’t hurt anyone.

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Driving while intoxicated is a very serious thing. It’s dangerous, and it turns people who are otherwise just like you and me into potential killers. It could have been you or me, maybe, on the wrong night. People respond very viscerally to it because a lot of them know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who was hurt by a drunk driver, or they’ve heard powerful stories from people who have been there.

All criminal charges are pretty unpopular, but DWI is especially so, probably because it’s something that many of us have kinda-sorta maybe committed once or twice at some point in our lives, possibly. You think you’re okay to drive, but it’s possible a cop might not agree. And so I think that we respond to crimes that we’re aware we might have once been guilty of in a more visceral way, because demonizing those who are accused of it gives us some distance from our own poor judgment. If we call it out as abhorrent, and are vocal in doing so, then it feels less like something that we’ve done.

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I used the word “we” up there, but I don’t drink. No reason for it, I just don’t. That doesn’t give me a special level of purity – I’ve driven a car under circumstances that were less than ideal, like bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived, and I’ve been guilty of checking a text or two in the past while behind the wheel. But I’ve long been uncomfortable with DWI, and I really wondered when I started working at the firm if that would be something that would pose a problem down the line.

It hasn’t, and I’ve wondered what that means. Because I haven’t got the background in law, I haven’t spent a lot of time making or hearing the arguments about the constitutional right to an attorney. And I read the discussion online, or I listen to the attorneys here talk, and I’m on the side of the accused, almost every time. More to the point, I’m against the police, when it comes to forced blood draws, or sting operations, or sobriety checkpoints, or other dubious things that get announced to popular acclaim in relation to DWI.

And I’ve been trying to figure it out. What’s significant about DWI?

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I read a few articles recently that helped solidify what it is.

There was the forced catheterization of a DWI suspect (innocent, incidentally, not that it matters much) in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.

There was the story of the man charged with DWI for sleeping outside of his car while drunk.

And there’s the “no refusal weekend” thing that happens in Travis County whenever there’s a holiday or an event in town.

And here’s what occurs to me is that DWI: Being that it’s something so many people speak so vehemently about as a great societal ill, and so many people are reluctant to encourage a calmer policy on it, lest they feel guilty for their own likely transgressions, it’s a scenario in which the police and the state are able to abuse their authority, not just with impunity, but while feeling righteous for it.

Add to that the fact that we don’t see people charged with DWI as victims the way that we might see others – they’re not abused or attacked or scapegoated, they made their own choices – and there’s no real impulse to defend them. There’s no outporing of compassion, and so things like the forced catheterization get done by someone who can make a compelling argument that few people will want to contest that they’re keeping us all safer.

DWI is unique in this, I think. We, as a society, disdain people accused of all sorts of crimes, but this one provides some of the easiest targets for casual scorn. It doesn’t take away anything from the seriousness of the charge to note that the response to it, where a scary number of our rights are coughed up, surrounds the political issue of drunk driving, not the actual one.

And the attorneys here and elsewhere, including on all of the blogs I read every day, probably already knew this. But if you’re a non-attorney and you’re wondering, like I’ve been, why there’s an urge to downplay the seriousness of DWI, it’s because the ramifications of the accusation continue to grow in ways that have nothing to do with the charge itself.

Labels: abuse of power, dwi, public perception

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments