Posted on 12/28/2007 7:07:11 PM PST by elkfersupper
More Texas jurisdictions are turning to forced blood draws to convict those suspected of DUI.
Jurisdictions within Texas are expanding programs where police use force to draw blood from motorists accused of driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI). Last week, El Paso announced it had joined Harris and Wilson Counties in a "no refusal" program specifically designed to streamline the blood drawing process.
It works as follows. An accused motorist is arrested and taken downtown. While being videotaped, he will be asked to submit to a breathalyzer test with officers specifically avoiding any mention that blood will be taken by force if the often inaccurate breathalyzer test is refused.
During key holiday weekends, a pre-assigned judge who agreed to wait by the phone will approve search warrants created from pre-written templates -- often within just thirty minutes. With warrant in hand, a nurse whose salary is often paid by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) will draw blood while police officers exert the required level of force. In some cases, this use of force can cause permanent damage. Montague, Archer and Clay counties have similar programs except that these departments do away with the nurse and have police officers perform the blood draw themselves, despite a state law banning the practice (view law).
Two of the twelve motorists subjected to the first blood draws in Harris County on Memorial Day weekend this year were later found to have blood alcohol levels below the .08 limit. The program will return on New Year's Eve.
The second a cop pulls blood from a person that is not intoxicated, that solution all of a sudden isn’t very simple.
Wow, thanks!
Shame on you.
I don’t follow you...
Yes, and this sort of thing will kill people as well. I for one, would resist having a needle stuck in me which would likely result in grave harm being caused me by supercop. I don’t drink BTW, so I would be innocent, but I will NOT allow some hack to assault me with a needle. I will fight back.
No. What it means is the driver had some alcohol and the total that died in the crash, regardless of alcohol are counted. There are 2 columns, one with the driver having 0.08+ and the other with less than that, but more than 0.
Good way to pass the buck on kids who don’t give a damn what their parents think.
Shame on me?
Really?
And no shame for the pro-drunk driving FReeper who won’t deny it?
How about you? Do you agree with elk? That more people die in America due to unattended mop buckets than do DWI?
Yes or no.
Shame on me indeed!
Read the data before you make dumb@$$ statements like the above: A Review of the Literature on the Effects of Low Doses of Alcohol on Driving-Related Skills
From this link:
http://www.desertexposure.com/200502/200502_dwi.html
“Surprisingly, however, the 11 states that do not employ checkpoints collectively rank better in NHTSA comparisons of DWI-related crash death rates than the states that do. Although worst-ranked (in 2002) Wyoming doesn’t use checkpoints, all the other states among the worst 10 are checkpoint states. Obviously, there are many cultural and demographic variables complicating these rankings. Still, it’s puzzling that no-checkpoints Texas ranked 14th worst while neighboring New Mexico ranked 5th worst. It’s also hard to see a checkpoints effect in the nationwide trends: DWI fatalities declined at a 43 percent faster average annual pace from 1982 to 1990, the year the US Supreme Court unleashed checkpoints as constitutional, than from 1990-2003.”
“Brennan was correct in describing the punishment effect of checkpoints as “illusory.” The Michigan checkpoints that provided the Supreme Court test resulted in only two arrests for DWI. The “Checkpoint Tennessee” program that’s frequently pointed to as proof of roadblocks’ effectiveness actually resulted in 11 other arrests or citations for every DWI arrest; in nearly 900 checkpoints, the program netted only 773 DWI arrests. Although the public may perceive the goal of checkpoints as arresting drunk drivers, even the most ardent checkpoint advocates concede that officers don’t make many arrests at roadblocks. “A successful checkpoint would be zero arrests, zero crashes,” says Atkinson.
Typical was a July roadblock staffed by nine officers from the Silver City Police Department that stopped 323 vehicles, issued 15 various citations and made one arrest for an outstanding warrant. Zero DWI arrests were made. In August, state police officer Greg Smith told the Sun-News, “We’ll have random checkpoints and we’re checking for insurance registration and licenses on drivers. And a lot of times other violations can pop up. So we just set up random checkpoints to check everybody out.”’
Ferrary says MADD locally has worked to better explain checkpoints to frustrated law-enforcement officials. “If you want to catch people, they figure a patrol is the way to do it. With a checkpoint, you advertise it. You don’t tell an armed robber you’re going to be at the bank! But checkpoints were never designed to be places where you arrest a whole bunch of people,” he emphasizes. “It’s the deterrent effect. We really work at telling officers the measure of success isn’t how many people you arrest.”
‘”Arrests don’t touch that many people,” is how Peter Roeper of the Prevention Research Center in California recently put it, “but at a sobriety checkpoint, you’ve communicated to 1,000 people.”’
‘’Justice Stevens was again prescient when he wrote in 1990 that the real aim of roadblocks is to deter drinking by people who will never be stopped by them. He described sobriety checkpoints as “elaborate, and disquieting, publicity stunts. The possibility that anybody, no matter how innocent, may be stopped for police inspection is nothing if not attention getting.”
Fifteen years later, these “publicity stunts” have become the centerpiece of our effort to reduce the toll of drunken driving—an effort that even the most ardent crusaders admit has stalled.”
“Like current counts, that figure included any automotive fatality in which alcohol was “involved” in any manner. If a sober motorist kills a drunken pedestrian who stepped out in front of the car, that would count. The statistic can even include fatalities where there’s no evidence of alcohol but the circumstances resemble those of drunk-driving crashes, such as a lone motorist running off the road in the wee hours of the morning.
The real number of innocent victims of drink drivers nationwide, while still too high, is apparently far fewer than the statistics cited by MADD or the NHTSA. According to a 2002 Los Angeles Times analysis, of the then-17,448 “alcohol-related” traffic fatalities for the previous year, about 5,000 actually involved a drunk driver taking the life of a sober driver, pedestrian or passenger.”
I don’t need my constitutional rights violated (and it is a violation, I don’t CARE what the USCS ruled) to be “communicated” with.
Did not mean it that way, was just shifting gears.
I have a problem with MADD.
The roadside sobriety test with probable cause that leads to a breathalyzer, then arrest is fine. Refusal to take the test after probable cause is provided causes a 3year min. suspension, as per above on the thread. There's no reason whatsoever to draw blood, unless the evidence otherwise is overwhelming.
generally these tactics are the result of too many DUI cases failing in court.
A refusal has consequences but this is just plain wrong on so many levels. The notion of police being allowed to lie by ommission truly shocks the conscience.
Nobody is Pro-Drunk driving. It is an assault on our rights with individual property on tax-payer roads. You do not realize your heritage and for that I am sorry.
-- C.S. Lewis
Bears repeating, excellent quote.
Amazing to me that so many folks on this site of all places do not recognize themselves in these words.
Don't eat leavened bread, the yeast that made it rise left a small amount of alcohol. Eat a sandwich and drive, go to jail.
I’ve been reading the data since I took part in such a study early in the 70s, and I’m nowhere near dumb enough to believe those cooked statistics.
The dirty little secret is that healthy people actually drive better at .1 by every measure, and the studies that show otherwise are corrupt, just like the rest of academia.
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