DUI - Utah DUI Attorney Perspective on Friends letting Friends Drive Drunk
Utah DUI Attorney Perspective on Friends letting Friends Drive Drunk
An article written in the Daily Utah Chronicle surfaced today regarding friends letting friends drive Drunk. The writer brings out some good points that I would like to highlight.
- Being convicted of a DUI in Utah carries steep criminal penalties, including revocation of your driver’s license, jail time, fines and community service. These penalties increase and are compounded with every repeated DUI offense.
- This New Year’s holiday weekend, the Utah Highway Patrol said it made just six arrests in Salt Lake and Utah counties for driving under the influence, and there were no DUI-related crashes.
- under Utah’s laws, even if your BAC is less than .08 percent, you can be arrested and charged with a DUI if you are still driving impaired by drugs or alcohol.
The thing that is interesting about this article is all the doom and gloom statistics. This thinking leads to punish the innocent for the sake of punishing the guilty. What I mean by that is it is dangerous to assume that "most drunk drivers don’t get caught the first time they drive drunk. " I had a judge mention this statistic once. He then punished the guy for all the times "he did not get caught." People should be judge by the crime at hand, not by the crimes they could have or even probably have committed. We still believe in the presumption of innocence, don’t we? Here’s the remainder of the article below.
Niedrich: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk
By: Anastasia Niedrich
Posted: 1/7/08
Every year, people celebrate the coming of the new year in different ways. Some people play board games and watch movies with their family, as I do. Others go out to eat and go dancing. Others drink alcohol and party, and some of them choose to drink and drive.
Those who drink or do drugs and drive in Utah risk being charged with two crimes: driving while under the influence and driving while over the limit — with a blood alcohol content of more than 0.08 percent. For a 170-lb. male, it takes only three to four drinks to get to the legal limit. For a 135-pound female drinker, it takes only two to three drinks. This means that under Utah’s laws, even if your BAC is less than .08 percent, you can be arrested and charged with a DUI if you are still driving impaired by drugs or alcohol.
Being convicted of a DUI in Utah carries steep criminal penalties, including revocation of your driver’s license, jail time, fines and community service. These penalties increase and are compounded with every repeated DUI offense.
Why should college students like you care about this? Because national statistics show motorists between the ages of 21 and 34 are continuing to drink and drive more than those in any other age group. Last year, almost half the country’s motorists found to have a blood alcohol content of .08 or higher were in this age group.
Worse yet, most drunk drivers don’t get caught the first time they drive drunk. K. Craig Allred, director of the Utah Department of Public Safety’s Highway Safety Office, said according to statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a person who chronically drinks and drives will drive impaired on average between 200 to 2,000 times before he or she is caught.
With statistics like these, we should consider ourselves to be very lucky there aren’t more deaths due to drunk driving. But this is not to say there aren’t enough deaths already.
During 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, 16,885 people in the United States died in alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes, representing 39 percent of all traffic-related deaths. This means if we could put a stop to drunk driving, we could reduce auto fatalities by about 40 percent.
So how does Utah compare to the nation for DUI offenses and fatalities? One might think that Utah would not have much of a DUI problem. However, just a few years ago, Utah was climbing up the ranks and was near the top nationally for its high rate of DUI crashes and fatalities. Thankfully, due to an aggressive statewide media and law enforcement campaign in the past few years, Utah has decreased its DUI rate by about 50 percent. This New Year’s holiday weekend, the Utah Highway Patrol said it made just six arrests in Salt Lake and Utah counties for driving under the influence, and there were no DUI-related crashes.
While these statistics are promising, thousands of lives are still lost every year, and the Highway Patrol alone can’t stop drunk driving.
Some states and municipalities have implemented laws that require repeated DUI offenders to install Breathalyzer ignition locks in their cars. If the driver’s BAC is too high, the car ignition will lock. The driver can try to pass the test again once each hour until he or she is sober enough to pass the test and drive.
One thousand dollars per device sounds expensive until you consider the high number of DUI-related crashes, injuries and deaths each year and the resulting costs. Such incidents kill someone every 31 minutes and injure someone else every two minutes. Additionally, each year, alcohol-related crashes in the United States cost about $51 billion. For these reasons, I think it would be worth our government’s while to require these devices to be retrofitted in all cars on the road. Even with almost 250,000,000 cars on U.S. roads today, a program mandating the installation of a Breathalyzer ignition lock in every car would pay for itself in just four years, and save lives.
So what can you do to help for now? One of the best things you can do is to educate yourself about drunk driving so you can spread the word to others. Another thing you can do is take your friends’ or family members’ keys and prevent them from driving after they’ve been drinking. This may sound hard to do, but it’s not. Most people, when approached and advised not to drive because they seem too impaired, will hand you their keys willingly. For others, a good trick is to put their keys in a safe hiding place, like their freezer. When your friend wakes up in the morning or after he or she sobers up, you can tell him or her where the keys are hidden.
Working together, knowing our limits — and not testing them when we’re unsure — and preventing others from acting foolishly by driving under the influence, we can save many lives each year. As the slogan says and as we should do, "Friends don’t let friends drive drunk."
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.
This web site is great to find classes all around the country and in a person’s own city. I suggest you call them directly and verify that they are state certified and teach a class that is recognized by the Courts. Hitting the continue reading button will give you a list of providers in the Ogden area.
Facility No. Name Address Phone Distance Maps
1 Weber Human Services
237 26th Street
Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 625-3700 2.09 miles
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Primary Focus: Mix of mental health and substance abuse services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment, Detoxification
Type of Care: Residential short-term treatment (30 days or less), Outpatient
Special Programs/Groups: Adolescents, Persons with co-occurring mental and substance abuse disorders, Women, Men, DUI/DWI offenders, Criminal justice clients
Forms of Payment Accepted: Self payment, Medicaid, Medicare, State financed insurance (other than Medicaid), Private health insurance, Military insurance (e.g., VA,TRICARE)
Payment Assistance: Sliding fee scale (fee is based on income and other factors)
Special Language Services: ASL or other assistance for hearing impaired
Hotline: (801) 625-3700
Website: http://www.weberhs.org
2 Salvation Army
2615 Grant Avenue
Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 621-3580×22 2.18 miles
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Primary Focus: Substance abuse treatment services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment, Halfway house
Type of Care: Residential long-term treatment (more than 30 days)
Forms of Payment Accepted: Medicare, Private health insurance
3 Clinical Consultants
2351 Grants Avenue, Suite 100
Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 621-8670 2.18 miles
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Primary Focus: Mix of mental health and substance abuse services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment
Type of Care: Outpatient
Special Programs/Groups: Persons with co-occurring mental and substance abuse disorders, Women, Men, DUI/DWI offenders
Forms of Payment Accepted: Medicare, Private health insurance, Military insurance (e.g., VA,TRICARE)
Special Language Services: Spanish
Website: http://www.clinicalconsultants.org
4 New Horizons Education and Treatment
3003 Grant Avenue
Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 392-6958 2.30 miles
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Primary Focus: Mix of mental health and substance abuse services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment
Type of Care: Outpatient
Special Programs/Groups: DUI/DWI offenders
Forms of Payment Accepted: Medicare, Private health insurance
Special Language Services: Spanish
Intake: (801) 593-0008
Website: http://www.horizons4u.com
5 Metamorphosis Ogden Inc
2144 Washington Boulevard
Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 622-5272 2.38 miles
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Primary Focus: Substance abuse treatment services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment, Detoxification, Methadone Maintenance, Methadone Detoxification, Buprenorphine Services
Type of Care: Outpatient
Forms of Payment Accepted: Medicare, State financed insurance (other than Medicaid)
Special Language Services: ASL or other assistance for hearing impaired
Website: http://www.breakaddiction.org
6 Professional Services Corporation
533 26th Street, Suite 102
Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 621-3624 2.52 miles
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Primary Focus: Mix of mental health and substance abuse services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment, Detoxification
Type of Care: Outpatient
Special Programs/Groups: Adolescents, Persons with co-occurring mental and substance abuse disorders, Gays and Lesbians, Seniors/older adults, Pregnant/postpartum women, Women, Men, DUI/DWI offenders, Criminal justice clients
Forms of Payment Accepted: Medicaid, Medicare, Private health insurance, Military insurance (e.g., VA,TRICARE)
Payment Assistance: Sliding fee scale (fee is based on income and other factors)
Special Language Services: Spanish
Intake: (801) 621-3640
7 Utah Alcoholism Foundation
Serenity House
529 25th Street
Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 392-5971 2.53 miles
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Primary Focus: Substance abuse treatment services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment
Type of Care: Residential short-term treatment (30 days or less), Residential long-term treatment (more than 30 days), Outpatient, Partial hospitalization/day treatment
Special Programs/Groups: Pregnant/postpartum women, Women, Men
Forms of Payment Accepted: Self payment, Private health insurance
Website: http://www.uafut.org
8 Blue Skies Recovery Center
727 24th Street
Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 392-8900 2.82 miles
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Primary Focus: Substance abuse treatment services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment
Type of Care: Outpatient, Partial hospitalization/day treatment
Special Programs/Groups: Adolescents, Persons with co-occurring mental and substance abuse disorders, Persons with HIV/AIDS, Gays and Lesbians, Seniors/older adults, Pregnant/postpartum women, Women, Men, DUI/DWI offenders, Criminal justice clients
Forms of Payment Accepted: Self payment, Medicaid, Medicare, Private health insurance
Payment Assistance: Sliding fee scale (fee is based on income and other factors)
Intake: (801) 394-1212 Hotlines: (801) 392-8900 (801) 394-1212
9 Ogden Regional Medical Center ACT
5475 South 500 East Street
Ogden, UT 84405 (801) 479-2250 4.62 miles
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Primary Focus: Substance abuse treatment services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment, Detoxification, Buprenorphine Services
Type of Care: Hospital inpatient, Outpatient, Partial hospitalization/day treatment
Special Programs/Groups: Persons with co-occurring mental and substance abuse disorders, Persons with HIV/AIDS, Women, Residential beds for clients’ children, Men
Forms of Payment Accepted: Medicaid, Medicare, State financed insurance (other than Medicaid), Private health insurance, Military insurance (e.g., VA,TRICARE)
Special Language Services: ASL or other assistance for hearing impaired
Intakes: (800) 215-2250 (800) 237-9194
Website: http://www.ogdenregional.com
10 Positive Adjustments Corporation
466 North Main Street, Suite 207
Clearfield, UT 84015 (801) 776-4628 7.00 miles
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Primary Focus: Substance abuse treatment services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment
Type of Care: Outpatient
Special Programs/Groups: DUI/DWI offenders
Forms of Payment Accepted: Medicare
Website: http://www.positiveadjustments.com