Bingo. Save the DUI arrests for someone who is actually driving. I don’t care if you’re found in a parkway rest stop, buckled in at the drivers seat of a vehicle with the engine running looking to sleep it off – if you’re not actively driving at that moment, then there is no way you should be booked on this.
Unfortunately this had become too much of a cash cow for states to tone back the laws to a reasonable level.
I’m also a rabidly Anti Drunk Driver. Thanks largely to the SDMB I’ve found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable with both the expanded definitions of drunk “driving” as well as the ever expanding scope of what’s permissible when setting up DWI checkpoints. I’m going to lose sleep over it any day now, I’m sure. Snark aside; I don’t know where to draw the line but I do believe we’ve crossed it somewhere back aways.
It was years ago, so I really can’t remember the follow up details. I’m pretty sure that nothing ever came of it though, although the story lives on in legend in our family.
I have a real problem with punishing people who are trying to do the right thing, which is what this current trend is doing.
I have heard of a case where a guy was put out of a bar when it closed, realized he was too drunk to drive, didn’t have a phone and/or couldn’t find someone to pick him up, so he decided to sleep it off in his car, rather than lie on the sidewalk in the middle of winter. So as not to be accused of DUI, he threw his keys as far as he could into an adjacent field and went to sleep.
A few hours later, a cop tapped on his window and arrested him for DUI.
Having failed to get a cab, he would have been better off to just drive home and take his chances, thereby endangering others. By sleeping it off, he got just as severe a penalty, and by spending hours in car as opposed to the minutes it would have taken him to drive home, he made it almost certain that he’d be caught for his “crime” of sleeping it off.
The courts are, IMHO, making bad public policy and encouraging drunk people to just drive home instead of waiting until they are sober enough to drive.
Meh…for all of the drunks I know, I’d choose a different option: He was completely futzed and had no idea where his apartment might be but hey imma gon get in my car now an…zzzzzz…
Maybe he was going to drive or maybe he drove there drunk, but I am not convinced those are the only two possibilities.
I can’t believe I am standing up for a serial drinker, either. Eep!
A friend of mine had something similar happen to him.
He was in college in Fargo and living in a dorm. There was drinking, in which he participated, going on in his dorm room. There was a conflict/fight of some kind and he wanted to get out of the room and end his night. So, he went to the parking lot and got in the BACK seat of his car to sleep.
He was woken up by a police officer knocking on the window. He was arrested for DWI and convicted. He had no priors.
This pretty much sums things up from my point of view. These stories of people being arrested for sleeping in or near cars really contributes to more drinking and driving. It’s aggressively stupid policy. One can be sure that the proportion of people arrested for sleeping drunk in cars far outweighs the proportion of people arrested driving drunk. This essentially tells drunks to hurry up and drive home because you’re getting a DUI if you don’t.
Additionally, the laws crafted in order to allow great latitude and discretion to police officers are particularly upsetting because the police have shown repeatedly that they are not capable of handling said responsibility rationally and judiciously.
I have to ask: Why was the cop in the apartment buildings parking lot? Is patrolling parking lots on private land something that is part of his job? Did someone call and request his presence there? Perhaps if the police have time to spend patrolling parking lots on a weeknight they simply have too much staff and too large a budget.
I suppose the innocent until proven guilty doctrine is dead and buried. It’s Minority Report in action, without less confidence in the courts ability to read peoples minds.
Bingo. The laws are intended to prevent people nitpicking about whether they were actually driving; to arrest people for OUI when they’re purely sitting in a car – and more importantly, haven’t demonstrated any intention to drive, or of HAVING driven – is punishing people severely for doign nothing wrong.
I’d rather have the people nitpicking their way out of tickets than the police nitpicking their way into them.
Driving under the influence is a clearly defined act. Thinking about driving under the influence is not. The precedent that this sets is enormous.
The court system is drunk on power.
Yeah, I was thinking more about what Mr. Excellent said about drunks being in close proximity to cars, and I have decided that is just ridiculous. At any given time, a drunk can go from standing around innocently to hopping in a car and driving away, in about a 6 second time span. But we don’t arrest drunk people for simply standing near a car. Yet.
And let’s really focus in on the details of the case. The keys weren’t even in the ignition. There is no indication that the man intended to actually drive.
The law is about driving while intoxicated…or is it not? Where is Bricker to break down the 411 on this.
It seems that the weak point in this conviction is the conclusion that he was in control of the car. The car could not be driven; in what meaningful sense was he “controlling” it?
Yes, it’s possible that he could have awakened, put the car in neutral, and pushed it out into the road. But this same potentiality exists if he’d been sleeping in his bed upstairs – it’s possible that he could have walked downstairs and pushed the car.
If he’d taken a cab, it would have been possible for him to overpower the driver and take control of the vehicle. How is sitting in the back of a drivable car less dangerous than sitting in the front of one that can’t move?
Who are you? Cosmo Kramer? Statute! It’s not a sculpture of intoxication.
That’s true, he wasn’t stoned. 
Sending someone to prison for four years is hardly a way for the state to make money.
As I understand it, the local municipalities get the fine money. The state gets (and pays for) the prisoners.
I read the opinion from the supreme court. In it there is a case where a passenger was arrested and convicted, and the conviction upheld, because the passenger was drunk and alone. The car was driven by her son, who was giving her a ride home, skidded and ended up in a ditch. The car was inoperable without the use of a tow truck which the son had gone to call. The court held that since the drunk women was in the car with keys in her pocket and all it would take was a tow truck to make the car operable, she was guilty of drunk driving. The appeals court overturned her conviction, but the state supreme court reversed.
I honestly don’t know what could have happened to avoid conviction. If she had stood outside in the snow, she still would have been in control of the car. What is even stranger, is that the law had been specifically amended to make it more expansive and more applicable to situations such as this. And efforts to tighten the law to make such things less likely had been defeated.
Being a drunk passenger is apparently a specific exemption-but there had better be a sober driver in the car. Talk about a dirty trick-offer to drive someone who has been drinking home, get halfway there and get out of the car and call the cops. Doesn’t have to be their car and the car doesn’t have to be operable, just leave a set of keys in the glove box. Great way to get back at someone…
So now we have multiple layers of stupid. Not only did the arresting officer exercise poor judgment but the Judge certified it.
Karma, you know what to do. Pee on his bowl of cheerios and make it public.
How about not getting so drunk that she has to call her son to come pick her up and drive her home?
So you would not charge all the drunks found in their cars that have run off the road into a ditch, or run into a railing, or went off the road and crashed into a tree in somebody’s yard?