Wouldn’t we be right back here, with people looking for reasons not to lock up an old man?
He’s violated having his license pulled. He’s violated requirements for an interlock device. What makes you put an “if” in that sentence?
He could be out the door drunk and kill somebody with a car in 10 or 15 minutes, well before the police could intercept him.
A minimum security facility, without the possibility of work release, would be adequate.
Do the police (or other authorities) really respond to people breaking tether in minutes or even hours?
This guy is the opposite of cooperative. Nothing else has kept him off the road. Nope, I don’t think anything short of actual physical confinement will stop him.
No. Not around here, anyway.
And it varies who goes looking depending on what the convict was sentenced to. If it was from a county circuit court it would be the Sheriffs Office. State court it would be state officials. A warrant would be put out but generally muni police would not actively be out looking.
So if we just ignored home confinement the next time he’d be picked up would likely be at his next DUI?
I don’t see that anyone said minutes or hours, but they don’t ignore broken tethers either. It also will depend on the nature of the tether break. If he just broke the tether briefly then came back, likely he gets a phone call and has to explain himself. If he’s gone for hours it is more likely that he has to explain it to someone in person, and depending on the nature and specifics of his situation they could chose to handle his behavior more seriously than normal.
I’ve known a couple of people who have had to do home confinement, they get some form of contact from authorities from every single tether break, including ones where they went too far to the end of their driveway (which they had been told would break tether), in those cases it was generally a phone call situation.
People on the bracelet have been missing for weeks.
However what usually is the case is the person left home to get drunk/high/laid and they return home. Because of backlog it can be days before a Deputy or probation officer shows up. The OP’s guy could kill a lot of people driving drunk in that amount of time.
Well, except for that ‘cruel and unusual’ thing, you could offer him a choice: prison or blindness. That would curtail his driving, surely.
Blind guys have been arrested for drunk driving before.
He could kill somebody pulling out of wherever the car was parked - and the police couldn’t prevent that unless they were in front of his house 24/7.
He’s never killed anyone in many decades of driving drunk, so there are a lot of things he could do, including detonate a bomb in the middle of a crowded city street after converting to Islamic extremism. But it doesn’t seem very likely. In Washington the basis for granting home confinement is up to the judicial system, but the State legislature has specified a number of crimes which it deems to be grave enough that home confinement is disallowed as an option–the offense this guy has been convicted of is not one of those crimes, so it is properly up to judicial discretion as to whether the King County home confinement program is suitable for his incarceration.
In addition to violations of his tether being investigated he would also be subject to regular unannounced home visits, and as per the King County information packet on home confinement, failure to participate in even one of those visits can result in you being transferred to a jail or prison. He also wouldn’t be allowed to drink and would be subject to testing for alcohol consumption during those home visits, as well as searches of his home looking for any hidden/stashed alcohol. Any violations there could also result in him being directly incarcerated.
Home confinement exists for a reason and someone pushing 80 years old convicted of a non-violent crime is an obvious candidate for it. A lot of the people who immediately weighed in to say “lock him up” are fairly ignorant of the sort of crimes people get home confinement for–which include crimes a lot worse than DUI.
Criminals who can’t abide by the terms of home confinement, or who have certain serious crimes, should not be allowed to participate in the home confinement program. But criminals who fall outside of those criteria, should. If it doesn’t work out, he can be moved to a prison.
He’s already proven to be non-compliant 17 times. And you want to give him one more chance.
I have no idea if he’s ever been sentenced to home confinement. When I looked over the list of his 17 previous charges, all but 1 of them were misdemeanors, and most were not actually DUI (they were all lesser crimes like negligent driving–it is entirely possible he was actually driving drunk those times and plead down, but I’m talking strictly about what was on his record), so I have no idea how much previous time he has spent incarcerated and what has been tried in terms of various forms of incarceration.
My god. I hope they found something suitable to punish his enablers, too.
Has a sentence been declared yet? I did a Google search and found the 2011 article already mentioned above. The article in the first post said sentencing would be decided upon in a week.
IMO a home sentencing is not adequate, since he could drive when there isn’t an unannounced visit going on, and he has already repeatedly demonstrated reckless indifference to other people on the road and not following previous orders. He doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore. However the judge knows more about law than either of us.
A DUI is a very serious crime. I don’t know why people downplay it. Here’s an example of why:
He got ten years, but of course was released on day parole in February of 2021 (so about half the sentence). Driving drunk is dangerous, much like firing a loaded weapon randomly. Just because the shooter isn’t deliberately trying to shoot someone doesn’t mean people can’t die.
Exactly. No one has died (or, apparently, been seriously injured) in any of the numerous incidents involving this man, but there’s always that potential for it when one gets behind the wheel while impaired. Essentially, he (and those around him) have just been lucky up until now.
And, as already noted, most of these convictions have also occurred while the man no longer had a driver’s license, which, again, demonstrates that he really doesn’t care to follow the restrictions that the legal system has previously attempted to place on him. He has no business ever being behind the wheel of a vehicle again, but the authorities have clearly been unable to prevent him from doing so; I am not convinced that any measure short of actual incarceration will work at this point.
This is the very opposite of “reassuring”. What the hell does it take for someone with authority to actively respond to a tether break, to get off their ass and try to find out what happened?
In a large metro area on any given day there can literally be dozens violating the terms of electronic monitoring. Not all bracelets use GPS so it’s not so simple to track them down. Plus there are a zillion other crimes and 911 calls. There is only so much staff and calls are prioritized. It’s not a case of someone being lazy.