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* HOORAY! Washington, D.C., Has Fewest Drunkards Of Any Major City! - 2
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http://groups.google.com/group/alt.autos/t/ba518a01faccf2f6?hl=en
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TOPIC: HOORAY! Washington, D.C., Has Fewest Drunkards Of Any Major City!
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.autos/t/ba518a01faccf2f6?hl=en
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== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 11 2011 12:06 pm
From: Henry Hager
"What role the D.C. medical examiner will play is not clear. However,
in recent testimony, the medical examiner, Marie-Lydie Pierre-Louis,
said her office had not been set up to run breath alcohol testing and
did not have the money or expertise to take over that job."
Marion Barry said he's relieved.
Possibly referring to his oft-noted penchant for over-imbibing, the ex-
mayor and always-ready woman-sniffer, told us, "It's what politicians
do."
--------------------------------
"Year after pledge, D.C. police still don't have new breath-alcohol
test program"
By Mary Pat Flaherty
The Washington Post
April 10, 2011
D.C. POLICE OFFICERS still do not have one of the most basic tools for
catching drunk drivers, even though more than a year has passed since
city officials promised to develop a new breath test program after
errors and tainted court cases doomed the old one.
D.C. officials spent more than $90,000 last year on equipment for a
quick fix after the scandal. But the machines are idle because the
city cannot decide who should run a new drunken-driving program.
Without proper oversight, neither the police department nor the
attorney general's office has confidence in the reliability of breath
tests.
That has prompted D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier to order officers
to take urine samples from suspected drunk drivers. That is a more
cumbersome and expensive way to handle the 120 tests a month the
District runs. Urine tests cost police $75 apiece, compared with less
than $10 for each breath test.
Drunken-driving arrests for the first quarter of 2011 were down by
about 40 percent from the same period last year, according to the
police union. Lanier and the attorney general's office have not
attributed that decline to the lack of breath tests. But some
frontline officers, who have been responsible for hundreds of arrests
in previous years, said the confusion in the system leaves officers
hesitant to make arrests.
The District's breath testing program unraveled in February 2010, when
city officials acknowledged that errors in the old analyzers had
overstated drivers' scores in about 400 convictions.
D.C. officials have known since October that the battered breath test
operation needed an overhaul, not incremental fixes. That conclusion
came from a team of national experts who volunteered to help the city
and contacted the attorney general's office last fall, interviews
show.
But questions of how to pay for the rebuilding and who will supervise
it have remained unresolved.
A lack of accuracy was not the only weakness exposed by the testing
debacle. In regard to manuals, training systems, scientific rigor and
quality control, the program came up short of those of other states,
the experts said.
In Maryland, Virginia and other states, breath alcohol testing is the
responsibility of a centralized forensic science unit. Lanier and the
attorney general's office have asked the D.C. medical examiner's
office — the city's forensic arm — to run the bulk of the program.
But without more money, more staff and more expertise, the medical
examiner has said she is reluctant to take over a broken system.
Caseloads, arrests
Neither the attorney general's office nor the police department could
say with precision how the shift away from breath tests has affected
enforcement or court outcomes.
Drunken-driving caseloads had been steadily increasing, according to
records in D.C. Superior Court. There were 1,391 drunken-driving cases
in 2008, compared with 1,707 last year.
But caseloads slowed this year, with 174 drunken-driving cases in
January and 135 in February.
Arrests also appear to have slowed in the District, with 155 as of
early March, compared with 271 for the same period last year,
according to the police union. The police department could not provide
comparable statistics.
Without breath scores, prosecutors have used other evidence to obtain
convictions, including field sobriety tests and drivers' admissions
they had been drinking, the attorney general's office said in written
responses to questions from The Washington Post.
Prosecutors also said the testing errors have caused few cases to be
overturned because other evidence preserved them.
But several defense lawyers said that looking at case dispositions
isn't a way to fully measure the turmoil in the system.
After the high test scores were revealed, it was left to defendants,
including about 200 who had served jail terms, to go back to court if
they wanted to make challenges. Many people don't have the money or
time to try to get convictions overturned, even after they learned
last year that their cases involved incorrect scores, several defense
lawyers said.
Under D.C. law, a driver can be convicted of driving while intoxicated
based solely on breath alcohol test results of at least .08, which
makes the scores critical.
Of the roughly 400 convictions flagged last year, only about 40 DWI
sentences were challenged, according to a case-by-case review by The
Post. Nearly all of those resulted in a subsequent plea to driving
under the influence — a charge that does not rely on having a test
score in evidence.
About 30 civil cases challenging the breath testing program also have
been filed.
Creating a national model
The team of experts focused on the breath test program has been
volunteering time to the District and had expected that the process
would have moved further along, Stephen Talpins said.
Talpins is a lawyer and former Miami prosecutor who reviewed the
District's procedures with the heads of the breath alcohol testing
programs for Virginia, Florida and Wisconsin.
"We're trying to get several things done," including finding the money
and setting a schedule for experts to build a D.C. program that is not
only better but also could be a national model, Talpins said. "We
don't want to convict people of a crime we aren't sure they
committed."
Unlike Maryland and Virginia, the District does not have a law that
builds in layers of supervision and safeguards for a breath test
program.
D.C. law says that breath test machines have to be checked every three
months for accuracy without saying by whom or under what standards.
The job fell to the police department. And within the department,
control fell to one officer who managed the program for 14 years — and
did not detect testing errors that occurred after he made adjustments
to the machines' motors starting in 2008.
A contractor hired Feb. 1, 2010, to help with the breath testing
program ran accuracy checks and discovered the inflated tests scores
on his second day on the job.
"It was a mess," said Ilmar Paegle, the consultant.
Some scores were inflated by 40 percent, Paegle told prosecutors last
April in a memo — which is above the 20 to 30 percent error rate
regularly cited later in public statements by police and prosecutors.
Paegle is a retired U.S. Park Police officer who had worked in that
department's breath testing program. The District hired him for a year
under a federal grant to be the temporary manager of the breath test
program after the officer who had run it shifted in 2009 to an
assignment he had requested.
When he took over the job, Paegle tested the equipment to see whether
the machines correctly recognized the alcohol concentration in
solutions in which the strength was known.
The machines didn't.
"That was my 'oh crap' moment," Paegle said.
The machines were pulled out of police districts Feb. 4, 2010,
although officers on the street were not told what the problem was.
Prosecutors began offering pleas in court without explicitly telling
defense lawyers that there was an accuracy problem with the machines.
By June, the attorney general's office had assembled a list of cases
that included results from machines that were wrong.
"Anyone can punch in the wrong numbers at times, but you check your
work for accuracy and that shows you your mistake," Paegle said. "That
didn't happen, and [breathalyzer] instruments that never should have
left the shop went out to officers to use in arrests."
The attorney general's office said it had been told that no
disciplinary actions over the testing failures had been taken by the
police department as of late February. But citing D.C. personnel
rules, the chief's office declined to say anything more about the
investigation.
The machines gave accurate readings once the mistaken calibration was
detected and corrected, Paegle said, but by then, they bore such a
taint that the department replaced them in March 2010, and Paegle
began retraining officers on new equipment.
But the program still lacked rigorous outside supervision.
In a joint appearance in July after the testing error blowup, Lanier
and former attorney general Peter Nickles announced that the medical
examiner's office would "take a more active role in overseeing
maintenance and operation" of the program.
That language was more expansive than the terms that appear in the
written agreement signed a month before, a review of the formal
memorandum shows.
The medical examiner's office agreed in June to provide "scientific
and limited administrative oversight of MPD's breath alcohol testing
program" until 2015. It would review, but not design, procedures,
according to the agreement, which also said that the medical
examiner's office would not oversee training on testing procedures or
directly work with the machines.
Beverly Fields, a spokeswoman for the D.C. medical examiner, said the
medical examiner would not comment about breath test issues past or
present "due to pending litigation."
Lanier announced the shift to urine testing Feb. 4, a year to the day
after the widespread mistakes were confirmed and four days after
Paegle's contract with the city ended.
Establishing protocols
Lanier said she and the attorney general's office have turned to the
expert panel to design procedures, supervise a breath test program and
perhaps have an interim plan in place that could shift to the
District's centralized forensic laboratory, which is set to open in
fall 2012.
"It was our hope that we would have protocols established in a shorter
period of time," Lanier said in an e-mail reply to questions about the
continuing lag.
Acting Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan said, "We intend to create a
program of which the District can be proud and that can be used as a
model."
What role the medical examiner will play is not clear.
In recent testimony, the medical examiner, Marie-Lydie Pierre-Louis,
said her office had not been set up to run breath alcohol testing and
did not have the money or expertise to take over that job.
She appeared before one of the several hearings held by D.C. Council
member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who has continued to press police
and prosecutors for an "unambiguous explanation of the state of drunk-
driving prosecutions in the District."
"This is just bad for the District's reputation," Mendelson said. "We
don't need this tarnish."
== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Thurs, Apr 14 2011 1:16 pm
From: Cunter Trey
Most D.C. 'fricans are on CRACK. Alcohol is a secondary stupor-
producer.
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