Posted 5/05/2005 05:41:00 PM by Douglas

More asinine DWI enforcement is headed its way to the Texas Panhandle, so look out, Moore County; If you take a whiff of a beer and get behind the wheel of an automobile, they're gonna get ya.

Drunken drivers will have a much harder time ducking charges in the northwest Texas Panhandle thanks to a new plan being rolled out by prosecutors and police.

For some reason, this has pissed me off, right off the bat. "Drunken Drivers?" For an 150 pound man (and I don't know any 150 pound men), it would take just four beers to put them over the limit of legal intoxication. Impaired? Maybe. Diminished capacity when it comes to driving, almost certainly. But "Drunken Driving?" I don't think that most people have any idea how ridiculously low the limit is.

David Green, 69th district attorney, hosted a class Wednesday for 60 law enforcement officers and prosecutors as part of a new program to force suspected drunken drivers to take blood-alcohol tests to determine their guilt or innocence.

Green, whose district covers Dallam, Hartley, Moore and Sherman counties, said he is backing the program because juries are looking for more solid evidence before they convict.

"Juries throughout the district were telling myself and the county attorney that they really wanted to see some scientific evidence of intoxication," Green said during a break in the day-long class. "I think juries like to see blood evidence because they maybe feel it is more reliable."

Abbott said DWI convictions are getting more and more difficult because juries are getting more and more sophisticated.

"There is definitely a CSI factor," Abbott said, referring to the television crime show. "Juries are expecting you to come out with this big batch of scientific evidence, just like they do on television, but we don't always have that."

Well isn't that special. Using a CBS drama to justify sticking a needle in people's arm so the State can have an airtight case when it comes time to throwing them in jail.

The new program would allow officers to use a standardized probable cause affidavit that they can submit to a judge, who can then issue a search warrant allowing officers to secure a blood sample without the suspect's consent.

So they're going to wake up a judge in the middle of the night so they can sign a search warrant that compels the DWI suspect the give a sample of blood? Gee, what could go wrong here? Considering that a typical DWI conviction makes about $2,000 in fines for the county, I'd imagine that the judge is going to be sitting pretty close to the phone on a Saturday night.

But to keep from sounding like a total jack-ass, Abbott gets down to what this is really about:

"Refusing a breath test might be good advice from a defense attorney to a drunken client, but it's damn bad advice for someone just below the legal limit," Abbott said.

"If you're not above the legal limit, this test can hold the keys to the jail cell for a lot of people."

What the fuck?!?

Ok, first I started laughing, then I had to find a way to stop crying. How the hell can they say this with a straight face? DWIs are a huge money-maker for the counties that issue them, and they have the balls to say that it's the people driving around with a BAL of 0.075% that are going to be exonerated by being forced to submit blood to the county, against their will, that are going to benefit? What the hell is this guy smoking?