I accept that breathalyser tests can be manipulated (deliberately or otherwise) to lower the reading. But looking at the numbers in your cite, it appears that in no circumstances could someone produce a ‘zero’ result if their actual alcohol level was anywhere near the (US) legal limit. Thus, my point (that if someone blows a zero, then alcohol can be eliminated as a possible cause of the accident) still stands. I see that I didn’t express that clearly before (by ‘negative’ I meant ‘zero’, but it could reasonably be read as ‘negative’ meaning ‘below the legal limit’). If someone blows above zero but below the limit, ideally further tests would be conducted. I agree with you that urgent medical care should always be prioritised in any case.
Actually, in a neat bit of symmetry, even with wooden clubs I suspect the fastest and most dangerous thing you could drive in 1789 was a golf ball . Admittedly it would be a big stretch to call that a ‘vehicle’ though.
The rest of your post that followed the above sentence may be well-founded, but what does the colour of his skin have to do with it? It seems to me that athletes (well actually, rich/powerful people in general) of all colours often benefit from privileges that the rest of us are denied.
Exigent circumstances where the officer has probable cause but getting a warrant is impractical (such as while in hot pursuit, or evidence is in immediate danger of destruction);
Evidence in plain view;
Search incident to arrest;
Consensual searches;
Searches at international border;
Motor vehicle exception, when officer has probable cause to believe evidence or contraband is in vehicle; and
None of those cover “conduct while driving,” and it has been quite some time since SCOTUS added to the list (1968, Terry v. Ohio, is probably the most recent addition to this list, and it’s pretty much limited to a pat-down search for weapons.)
Also, do you have any reason to believe that “You are carrying a gun, which poses potential for substantial injury and damage, so that means you have given up some other constitutional rights” has any chance whatsoever of being politically viable in the US?
The folks who have such an absolutist view of Constitutional rights are sitting on the Supreme Court and other judicial benches across America. Most recently, SCOTUS explicitly stated that officers can do a warrantless breath test in exigent circumstances if they have probable cause to believe a driver committed a drunk driving offense in 2019, in Mitchell v Wisconsin, with the majority opinion written by Justice Alito. You may want to argue that isn’t the way it should be, but that’s the way it IS, and the officers investigating Tiger Woods’s crash have no grounds to believe SCOTUS is suddenly going to overturn a couple of centuries of case law.
MY point, however, is twofold.
If somebody blows above zero but below the limit, are you going to have probable cause to conduct those further tests? If somebody blows .08, even if an accurate reading was .09 or .12, that’s probable cause. If somebody blows .02 or .03, though, that by itself is NOT likely to be legally sufficient in most states. If you can point to the smell of booze or open containers, or video evidence of swerving all over the road, you don’t need the roadside breath test to establish probable cause, and if you don’t have any other evidence, a low reading may not help you get there.
If you give a roadside breath test and obtain a non-zero but low reading, that fact must be disclosed to the defense, who are likely to be make sure it gets disclosed at trial. “My client will testify he used some mouthwash which gave him a very low breath test result, the police affirmed that he only blew .02 at the scene, they have no other evidence that he was driving drunk, and he will testify the accident was caused when a small animal ran into the roadway and he swerved to avoid running it over.” How does a prosecutor then prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was really driving drunk at the time?
That’s all fine, but not relevant to my original point, which is that in a civilised society, anyone involved in a road accident should expect to be breathalysed as a matter of course, unless this is medically unwise. I’m not overly concerned if someone blows positive but below the limit and it is later impossible to prove that they were driving while impaired, because in most of those cases they will not in fact have been impaired. Some offenders will always slip through the net whatever you do - such is life, no system is going to be perfect. What I object to is the notion that it is unreasonable to breathalyse someone involved in an accident unless the officer on the scene notices they are slurring/smells of alcohol etc, because it seems to me that offers a huge loophole to drunk drivers and has no downside for non-impaired drivers other than a few seconds of minor inconvenience.
Assuming the test is accurate. It is a major problem in this country that you are allowed to drink and drive. You are just not allowed to drink too much and drive, and there is not a reliable method to determine how much is too much. I agree with the principle you state, but our laws are not well built for being reasonable about the borderline between public and private concerns.
Warm summer night, 60 mph speed limit, I was doing 80+, coming around a curve I’d taken hundreds of times, no impairment, no other cars (it was the middle of the night, and no, I wasn’t tired).
Dog in the middle of the road as I came out of the turn. I didn’t hit the dog. Managed to w]swerve around it.
I should have hit the dog. The next thing I know I’m rotating down the road at a high rate of speed, across two lanes and into an orchard. Landed between two big walnut trees about 30-40 feet apart.
It is frightening how quickly you can go from complete control of the vehicle to absolutely no control. I was lucky enough to walk away (didn’t flip over and didn’t hit any trees). But it wasn’t through masterful control of my vehicle.
If the speed limit along that stretch where Tiger lost control was 45, most of the traffic was probably going 55-60 with a few cars going faster. Typical SoCal traffic. It only takes a small problem or mistake for things to go sideways, especially in an SUV.
Actually I’d argue this leads to the opposite conclusion - the fact that there is some leeway on the BAC limit means it should be more acceptable to breathalyse everyone. If you’ve actually, genuinely just had one beer, you’re not going to get in trouble for it. It would potentially be more problematic in countries with zero tolerance.
Tangent: I myself have recently resolved to be stricter about whether I drink, or whether I drive - before then I was OK with having 1 pint of beer (2 units of alcohol) and then driving, or possibly 2 pints with a large meal and then driving 2 hours later (which should work our roughly the same as the first case in terms of BAC). But for me, in either case I could feel the effect of the alcohol, even if I was not legally ‘impaired’. So I’ve put my big boy pants on and decided the small amount of pleasure from the beer is not worth the small amount of risk that it could affect my reaction times enough to cause or worsen an accident. I’m not militant about it though - I wouldn’t look unfavourably on someone who does decide to drive after consuming a small amount of alcohol. It can be a very slippery slope though, on both a personal and societal level.
Happened to my mother, and I’m sure she wasn’t going more than 60, and even more sure she wasn’t drunk. An evening dew made the road slick and she slid off at the end of a curve right past the end of a guard rail. Slid down a hill, rolled over, and had to wait hanging upside down until the EMTs got there. In the end some fairly serious bruising and abrasions, but otherwise she was intact and very lucky.
It can happen, and when excessive speed is involved it is more likely to happen, and it doesn’t have to be due to substance impairment.
As a physician, I know injuries are often described badly in the media. Sometimes serious things are minimized; sometimes injuries are not that bad. One sees the same thing in court decisions (gynecomastia is not asbestosis). It is possible to describe any injury in a way that makes it sound serious.
This morning, the patient induced a centimetre laceration and subsequent excision of his distal third corpus unguis using mechanical means. Bleeding and pain were controlled. He often trims his fingernails.
Woods required surgery almost by definition since broken skin increases the chance of infection. Likely there was some displacement and the bones were in a few fragments. Nothing in the description makes me think the injury was limb threatening, extremely serious or damaged major structures. Of course, I have not and should not see any medical information. Working at an ER near a ski hill, one might see ten similar injuries on a bad weekend.
With surgery and because of the injuries, they would have definitely taken blood and likely tested for various substances among the usual pre-surgery panels. If they did not, which would be unusual, and the police wanted information - they could go through official channels and order a test the blood. So, if they say no evidence of substances - this is almost certainly true.
I wasn’t driving recklessly. I had probably taken that turn at 80 at least twenty times ) it was a couple miles from my home). The do was standing right in the middle of the lane I was in. I had no problem easing into the lane next me, avoiding the dog.
The mistake the dog made was trotting into the lane I shifted into. The mistake I made was trying to swerve around the dog at that point, with not much distance left, leading to a spinning sensation…
No traffic, no weather related dangers, driving at a speed at which I could easily cope with obstacles in the road ahead. Real reckless.
You aver that you were driving at a speed at which you could easily cope with obstacles in the road ahead yet you were, by your own admission, unable to easily cope with the obstacle in the road ahead without crashing?
Obviously, I agree with the sentiment in that article.
And it doesn’t even mention his generally surly attitude towards fans and the media - at least before he had to adopt a approach marketed as a sympathetic comeback…
I can’t believe why folk idolize him so. But - like I said, I’m in the minority.
Except if the inaccurate test comes back with a result indicative of multiple beers, you could end up with a heavy fine, a spell in jail, massively higher insurance rates for years, loss of your job and the follow-on economic effects, etc., etc., all of which add up to trouble to me. YMMV.
How would this apply in the accident at hand? The cop had to administer first aid; should he stop that to do the breathalyzer? How about waiting to extract him from the car in order to do the test first, or stopping the ambulance attendants to get one in by the side of the road? Do the possibilities of additional pain, injuries, or medical complications count as “downsides”?
Even for somebody who wasn’t injured, you are simply not going to be able to get accurate readings on a roadside test on somebody who is not breathing relatively normally, so somebody stressed, agitated,
etc., as a result of an accident probably needs to be brought to the station or the hospital for more sophisticated testing. “Here, let’s stick you in the back of the police car and haul you somewhere, then stick a needle in your arm”–that can be an hour or more, which is somewhat longer than “a few seconds.”
If we’re going to recount war stories, I have a similar one. I was keeping up with traffic on the interstate when the jerk merging onto the highway decided he wanted to be in my lane (the middle of three) and came over without looking. I had to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting him (I think he actually grazed my bumper), and the brakes locked up. I spun out into the Jersey barrier on one side of the road and then ricocheted back into the guardrail on the other side, ending up facing the wrong way on the shoulder. No hillside was involved, and neither were alcohol/drugs (at least on my part; the jerk didn’t stop so God alone knows what his condition might have been). Since no other vehicle admitted to being involved, it was on the paperwork a single-car accident. Straight stretch of road, decent enough weather, I wasn’t speeding or following too closely or otherwise reckless, and even the cop who wrote it up thought there wasn’t much I could have done differently under the circumstances, but sh-t happens.
Avoiding an object that’s moving randomly to avoid you is a classic set-up for a crash. At any speed above or below the posted limit.
My attitude to animals and other obstacles in the road is simple. Try to avoid; never swerve. Swerving, by definition, is an uncontrolled input with an unknown / unknowable output.
In @peccavi’s shoes I’d have made the initial avoidance, but when it moved into my new path I’d have squared up for impact, struck the animal, and chalked the result up to bad luck and Darwin on its part. Never choose to crash to “save” an animal. You and your passenger(s) bodily health are worth more than any herd of animals.
Except that Mitchell v Wisconsin – while it may not be directly applicable to this situation – represents exactly the kind of reasonable interpretation of Fourth Amendment rights that I’ve been suggesting, and for precisely the same reason. Bolding mine in this quote:
Under the exigent circumstances exception, a warrantless search is allowed when “there is compelling need for official action and no time to secure a warrant.” The plurality pointed to three reasons such a “compelling need” exists: highway safety is a “vital public interest,” legal limits on BAC serve that interest, and enforcement of BAC limits requires a test accurate enough to stand up in court. Cite.
So this hardly shows that “The folks who have such an absolutist view of Constitutional rights are sitting on the Supreme Court and other judicial benches across America”. In fact it shows the exact opposite. Indeed, the Mitchell ruling has been criticized for allegedly undermining Fourth Amendment rights. I don’t agree, of course, and feel that it should have gone farther.
Again, my position is that anyone who chooses to exercise the privilege of being in control of a motor vehicle automatically forfeits certain basic privacy protections, as a reasonable matter of public safety. It’s not overturning “a couple of centuries of case law”. The kinds of vehicles that imperil public safety in the hands of drunken and otherwise impaired idiots did not exist a couple of centuries ago.
Are you saying Ben Franklin did NOT drive a Lamborghini nor invent power steering? What about creating the first rear view mirror air fresheners? I thought that was him too.
. Admittedly it would be a big stretch to call that a ‘vehicle’ though.