At least in CA, there are different consequences for the same event, depending on your age.
A 21 year old is not legally impaired at .01, but a 16-17 year old is. A 21 year old is not legally impaired at .05, but an 18-20 year old is. This is all CA law, YMMV.
This law is hammered into the kids during drivers education, so I have no sympathy if they do it anyway and then get caught.
Given the description of the driver in the OP, I am pretty confident that getting him off the road for a while was a good thing.
If you drink anything, don’t drive. How fucking hard is that to understand?
Point the 1st: There was alcohol in his bloodstream (nobody denies that), when there abso-fucking-lutely should not have been.
Point the 2nd: The car smelled of marijuana, indicating that the drug had been used in there either A: excessively, or B: recently, or C: both.
Point the 3rd: He was speeding, indicating that his judgement wasn’t up to par.
Given all of this, I think the cop was perfectly within his rights to charge the kid with a DUI. What this DOESN’T mean, however, is that the DUI will stay on his record. That’s why we have “Court”. If he doesn’t want a DUI on the record, GO TO COURT. Present your case. If the Court agrees with you, the DUI will be off the record.
That’s the way things work. You don’t argue with the cops after they charge you. You don’t argue down at the station. You argue in Court.
Um, Chris, I know it’s hard to keep up with current events, but we tried that already. 70 years ago, in fact.
If it makes you feel any better, you’re right about its effectiveness.
Seriously though, what does a law dealing with underage drinkers driving have to do with banning alcohol outright?
Point 1) We do not allow any one under the age of 21 to drink because they are not responsible enough to make the right decisions. Although I know 60 year olds who are not responsible enough to make the right decisions.
Point 2) When those under the age of 21 do not make the right decisions, we punish them more harshly (or set a higher standard) for the so called adult who does the exact same thing.
It is a Catch-22 if I’ve ever seen one…
I’m not for drunk driving, but given the current administration it’s time to set some examples, if you want to cut down on substance abuse (of all types).
It is NOT UNREASONABLE for an officer to assume, given the presence of a strong smell of pot, and given the absence of anyone else in the vehicle, that the driver had been using elicit substances.
Cop: “Why does your car smell like marijuana?”
Driver: “I wasn’t smoking it, honest!”
Cop: “Then who was?”
Driver: “Uh… some random guy jumped in my window, smoked a bowl, then jumped out again before I could do anything!”
But it’s NOT UNREASONABLE… oh, you get the idea.
Look, the point is that cops aren’t supposed to be psychic. They call it as they see it, and when you’ve got someone under 21, who’s been drinking, who was just speeding, who has the smell of pot in their car, and has a six-pack in the trunk… THAT IS HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS. Do the cops know if he was completely under the influence? Or just slightly under the influence? How about only sorta kinda maybe under the influence? Or a little bit under the influence but not so much as if he’d been dumping tequila shots down his throat just five minutes before under the influence?
They have simple, clear-cut standards to follow simply so they don’t have to make those kind of gray-area judgement calls in the field. The standard? If you’re under 21 and there’s alcohol in your bloodstream, that’s a DUI. Simple. Clear-cut.
If someone takes exception to the DUI charge… oh, hell, I’ve already brought this up a billion times… why bother again?
What the cop did know was that he had a BAC of .01. That’s about equivalent to having around five ounces of beer. In the grand scheme of life, that does not significantly impair driving ability. You can get the same effect by being a little bit tired, stressed out, having screaming kids in the back seat, etc.
That he was speeding is irrelevant to his thinking ability. Sober people speed. People completely competent to make very important decisions speed. Police officers speed when they’re not on duty. Nine miles an hour over the speed limit is not an indication that someone’s thinking has been clouded.
Likewise, the smell of marijuana is no indication of anything relevant. There are many reasons that a car could smell like marijuana, some of which are perfectly innocent. If there was no evidence that the driver was using marijuana himself, then you can’t just assume that he was. It’s bad enough that the cop’s sense of smell is enough to warrant a search of the car, let’s not use it for the conviction as well.
And I believe that it was the DUI standard that was being objected to originally. The cop followed the laws as written. The driver was an idiot, and obviously in violation of the law. He was not, however, by any reasonable standard, driving under the influence. If the people want a zero tolerance law for those under 21, they should make one, rather than weasel it in as DUI. Still, I ain’t exactly gonna cry for the guy.
.01 is far less than 5 oz. of beer for most people. If the guy really drank 3 beers over a few hours and only got a .01, either the breathalyzer was off or the guy weighed about 600 lbs. I’d bet it was higher, and he is trying to downplay his level of intoxication.
I don’t like the current state of DUI laws either, have been busted myself for Minor in Possession when I was 20 and was arrested (but not convicted) on fabricated evidence for DUI before…but it’s your cousin’s own fault. He chose to drink (illegal), chose to smoke pot (also illegal), and then was dumb enough to speed (illegal). All three of those choices were his. At least he got off fairly easy (unless he did some jail time you didn’t mention). My DUI arrest cost me a job and well over $2000 total, lawyers fees, impound fees, etc. and I wasn’t even found guilty.
Back in my teen years, getting rousted by the cops was badge of honor! A rite of passage, if you will. You weren’t a man until you spent at least one night in jail. Now…whine, whine, whine.
Whippersnappers!:rolleyes:
Guys, the pot, the six-pack, the under-age drinking, the fact that this kid was probably an asshole are all red herrings here, because he wasn’t charged with any of those things. Had he been, I son’t think anyone would be shedding a tear. What he was charged with was driving while under the influence of alcohol.
The problems are
a) It just dosen’t seem possible that a BA of .01 could possibly influence one’s driving.
b) If a BA of .01 can impair your driving, why dosen’t a BA of .07 impair a 21 year old?
Furthermore, the fact that the kid was an idiot does not make the law just. As I said above, had the kid had a glass of wine at dinner, waited a couple hours, and then driven somewhere, he could have been charged with the exact same crime. Does that really seem reasonable to all of you?
Actually Monty I’m pretty sure that speeding ranks right up there on the list of crimes that people get away with most frequently. Most people that speed don’t get caught…right? …and I’m pretty sure that a very very high percentage of drivers have broken speed limit laws.
In California, the provenance of the intoxication is no defense. If legal drugs, whether prescription or over-the-counter, impair your driving, you’ve violated the DUI statute. Though I’m not sure what the evidence rules are in such cases. I assume a breathylizer wouldn’t work for Benedryl, so maybe you’d be better off saying you had a couple of drinks, even though you hadn’t, and submitting to the breathylizer.
WRT to the original quote, I think your cousin should have been charged with underage possession, and speeding, but not with DUI unless he was really impaired. I can’t believe that he was noticeably impaired if he drank three beers and then waited a couple more hours before driving. Maybe he was just tired, in which case it merely emphasizes the the risk of smoking pot in a car (I’m assuming that’s how the smell got there). If I read the OP correctly, the cop wouldn’t have found the beer if he hadn’t smelled the pot.
I once got stopped after a couple of beers and the officer said I was weaving; I wasn’t sure where to turn in for the place I was trying to get to, so it might have seemed that I was driving erratically. I had to submit to a field sobriety test, after which I was released. Obviously, if the car had smelled like pot on that occasion it would have been searched, and it could well have contained some illegal beer, because the retailers were a lot less careful in those days, especially near college campuses.
First of all the sense of smell is kind of subjective…don’t you think?
Anyway, what if at a party, a friend used your car to get it on with his girlfriend, then afterward they smoked…of course an hour later you left the party, got pulled over, and the car smelled like weed.
Both of these questions are not as relevant as people would like them to be. DUI citations are not given based on degree of impairment; they are given when the legal BAC is exceeded, said BAC being based on lawmakers’ opinion as to when an average driver may experience impairment. There has to be some standard (equal protection and all), and for now, BAC is it.
Given that, and given the fact that it is against the law for persons under 21 to possess or consume alcohol, the triggering BAC for a DUI charge for someone under 21 must logically be anything exceeding 0.00%.
In short, we, via the lawmakers, have decided that the triggering BAC for persons over 21 is 0.08; the triggering BAC for persons under 21 is 0. Anything else would imply that it is legally permissible, under the age of 21, to operate a motor vehicle after having consumed something that it is illegal for you to consume.
Well, I don’t know, I don’t have a problem differentiating the smell of pot from, say, incense or clove cigarettes or something, but I was a smoker so maybe that’s just me.
How is this a “perfectly innocent” reason? I hate to sound like an old fart or something, but legally I am responsible for whatever happens in my car. Isn’t that why I’ll also get a ticket if you are holding the open container in my car when we’re pulled over? “Gee officer, but it wasn’t MY weed…” is really not the best defense.
When I asked the question, I thought there might somehow be some non-pot reason why my car would smell like that.
Well, there are substances that smell like pot but aren’t pot, and do nothing else except smell like pot.
“Why does your car smell of marijuana?”
“Well, officer, I was burning this substance that smells just like pot, just so I could fool you! April Fools! Funny, huh? Hey, what are you doing with those handcuffs? Hey…!”
