DUI
Utah Justice Courts
I found this article in the Ogden Standard Examiner. The opinion of the writer is one that I have heard many times. I see what the writer is talking about quite often in reference to "overly aggressive" prosecutions. We don’t seem to care what happens to people incarcerated, at least, until one of our loved ones ends up there.
Publication:Standard Examiner; Date:Jan 11, 2008; Section:Opinion; Page Number:4A
Utah’s justice system needs repair
What’s wrong with the justice system?
Prosecutors are overly aggressive and seek convictions at any cost to further their careers, and different levels of law enforcement are abusive to inmates. The system has corrupt officers who hide behind their badges while breaking the law, and a judge who failed to recuse himself from a trial due to friendship with the victim’s family.
There are people who are innocent and are sent to prison, and people who have mental disabilities and need help but are sent to jail or prison without getting the help they need.
The state then asks for more federal funding, and our taxes are raised because a new prison needs to be built.
The problem is there is not one elected official who is willing to step up to the plate and recognize that there is a problem, nor do they use their position to promote a healthy, safe rehabilitation program within the prison or jail. They have the feeling that prison is a problem with no solution.
The temptation is always to look away, hoping the troubles inside the walls will not affect us.
Every day people go to prison, but the public knows very little about their conditions of confinement (rape, abuse by officers, infectious diseases, etc.) and whether they are being punished in ways that no jury ever intended. Unless the experience of incarceration becomes real through the confinement of a loved one, the people inside the confined walls are far removed from daily concerns.
Bonnie Terry
West Haven
follow up on the story from yesterday. The interesting thing about this case is that the officer was never found guilty of DUI. However, his department presumed him guilty and fired him anyway. It’s interesting that the police don’t even respect the sacred presumption of innocence even when dealing with their own. The story reads that the office was fired for DUI, yet no DUI was ever prosecuted. Got to love that.
U officer fired for DUI
By: Ana Breton
Posted: 3/26/08
A former officer at the U Police Department had his peace officer certification suspended for the next three years after he was arrested for drunken driving.
Officer Tory Park’s certification was suspended by the Utah Peace Officer Standards and Training Council, which establishes and upholds rules of conduct for the state’s certified peace officers. Officers are given the certification after they graduate from a police academy and keep their accreditation by completing 40 hours of training in their department and follow POST council standards.
The council suspended Park’s certification during its quarterly conference during the weekend. There, the council suspended the certifications of 29 other officers in Utah. Park was the only officer punished from a university police department in the state.
Lt. Steve Winward, POST bureau chief of investigations said Park’s certification was suspended after the council found that he had been arrested for driving under the influence last year. Winward said Park was arrested on May 26 after he crashed his personal vehicle into a road sign when he was off duty. Winward said there was not enough evidence to convict him in court for DUI, but that Park plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and reckless driving.
"They took the alcohol charges out, because it would have been hard to prove the case to determine if he drank before or during the accident," Winward said.
Capt. Lynn Mitchell at the U Police Department said that Park was terminated and quickly replaced after he was arrested.
"It’s disheartening. We arrest people who violate laws, so we don’t want our people to be doing those kinds of things, for crying out loud," Mitchell said. "We arrest people for DUI, but that doesn’t give us permission to do it ourselves."
Although Mitchell declined to comment about the specific POST case because it involved disciplinary action, he said that Park is not the first officer to have a peace officer certification suspended at the police department.
"It’s not a first," Mitchell said. "But then again we’ve been here since 1958, so we’ve gone through a lot of officers."
Mitchell said the last time a U officer’s certification was suspended was about four years ago. Park’s termination "almost went unnoticed," Mitchell said.
Without certification, an officer is unable to take a position at a police department in the state of Utah. Additionally, Mitchell said that Park will not have a chance to train every year, so if he wants to come back into the field, he will have to pass the entire certification process again.
"Tory was a nice guy. I feel bad for him," Mitchell said. "But I can’t respect that."
The 30 Utah officers who were accused of breaking POST ethical rules might be the highest number of officers disciplined in recent history.
Winward said the POST council has been understaffed because several officers have been absent because of personal reasons, such as surgery, and that "cases kept getting backlogged." The council’s next meeting is in June.
MADD has focused much of its considerable manpower (over 600 chapters), resources (revenues of over $51 million a year) and political influence on the proliferation of DUI roadblocks (or, to use the politically correct phrase, “sobriety checkpoints”). To justify this invasion of our privacy, we have been repeatedly assured that “checkpoints” are extremely effective in reducing alcohol-related traffic fatalities — and these assurances have been accompanied by statistics. Let’s take a closer look at these “statistics”….
According to MADD’s own website, 40 states have checkpoints and 10 do not. Well, it would be interesting to compare the states with the highest percentage of alcohol-related fatalities with the list of states not using checkpoints: If MADD is correct, the states with the highest fatality rates will be the no-roadblock states. Fortunately, another section of MADD’s website provides such statistics for each of the states. The 5 states with the highest alcohol-related fatality rates:
Hawaii
Nevada
North Dakota
Rhode Island
South Carolina
According to MADD, all 5 states should be non-checkpoint states. In fact, however, 4 of these states use checkpoints; only Rhode Island does not. Well, what about the 5 states with the lowest fatality percentages? They are:
Georgia
Kentucky
Indiana
Iowa
New York
If MADD is correct about the effectiveness of checkpoints, these should all be checkpoint states. But as with the previous list, only 4 of the states permit the use of sobriety checkpoints; Iowa does not. As with the previous list, the percentage is what one would expect from pure random incidence: 20% of the states (10 of 50) do not have checkpoints — and 20% of the states on each list (1 of 5) do not use checkpoints. There appears to be no correlation between fatality rates and the use of checkpoints.
Let’s take a look at another set of statistics: the effect of the proliferation of checkpoints on the national rate of alcohol-related fatalities. If checkpoints are effective, we would expect to find that alcohol-related fatalities will have declined since their widespread acceptance in recent years .
Again, the statistics do not support this. To use MADD’s own numbers: Since 1982, the number of fatalities nationwide from alcohol-related crashes has declined every year — until about 1993, when it dropped to 17,908. Perhaps coincidentally, this was the year after the United States Supreme Court ruled that sobriety checkpoints were not unconstitutional. In the 10 years since then, sobriety checkpoints have gained widespead acceptance — but the number of fatalities have levelled off, vacilating between 17,908 and 17,013. Far from supporting MADD’s position, one could even argue that this proves sobriety checkpoints have actually halted the steady decline in alcohol-related deaths. This would probably be incorrect — but indicative of how statistics can be used to serve a desired objective.
Source: www.duiblog.com
Arizona DMV is actually “Arizona MVD”
It takes some getting used to, but what most people refer to as the Arizona DMV (department of motor vehicles) is actually the Arizona MVD (motor vehicle division of the department of transportation). (…)
It takes some getting used to, but what most people refer to as the Arizona DMV (department of motor vehicles) is actually the Arizona MVD (motor vehicle division of the department of transportation). They have a great website at servicearizona.com where people can get license statuts information and even renew their license after a DUI suspension.
Source: feeds.feedburner.com
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