Man arrested for DWI after testing negative on breath, blood tests
by TONY PLOHETSKI / KVUE NEWS and Photojournalist DEREK RASOR
Posted on February 24, 2014 at 10:26 PM
Updated Monday, Feb 24 at 10:40 PM
AUSTIN — One man endured a night in jail and a criminal case hanging over his head for year, only to have prosecutors say they don’t think he was even guilty of a crime.
It happened Jan. 1, 2013. Austin police pulled Larry Davis and his vintage Buick over in Northeast Austin after running a red light. Soon, they were investigating him for drunken driving. Then he was arrested.
Davis insists he only had one drink that night. A voluntary breath test showed he hadn’t had too much to drink. He blew a 0.00 on the breath test.
“I told them I would take a blood sample as well, just to prove that I didn’t have anything in my system,” Davis said.
That test looked for seven types of drugs in his system, and Davis tested negative for all of them.
When the evidence arrived on his desk a few weeks later, Davis’s lawyer couldn’t believe what he saw.
“My reaction was just shock that this happened,” attorney Daniel Betts said.
The Defenders first reported cases like this in a 2011 joint Austin American-Statesman investigation. One case was that of Bianca Fuentes, who blew below the legal limit of .08 in a breath test.
At the time, county prosecutors were dismissing about 30 percent of drunk driving cases – more than any major Texas county — because they said APD was bringing them weak cases that wouldn’t hold up in court.
A Defenders review finds similar statistics for 2013. Of 5,648 new DWI cases filed last year, 1,559, a little less than 30 percent, were dismissed.
Police are still abiding by a take-no-chances policy, even if it means the cases are later thrown out.
Police originally pulled Davis over for running a stop sign near Interstate 35 and Highway 290, and they say the officer arrested him based on his performance on a sobriety test.
But even police say his case is highly unusual. They almost never arrest a driver whose breath test was zero and whose blood tests came back negative.
Commander David Mahoney says the officer in Davis’ case believes he could have been on another drug – like marijuana – that wasn’t part of the drug test.
“If there is someone who is impared, we don’t want them driving. We need to get them off the road, so that was probably his mindset,” Mahoney said.
But now, Davis and his lawyer plan to file a grievance with the Austin Police Monitor’s office against the officer who arrested him.
Ho, hmmm… But with marijuana the suspect would display other, noticeable symptoms which you would imagine a decent police officer would have noticed at the time. So might it appear that some police forces are all too eager to blunder on with a prosecution rather than admit they have nothing on the suspect and let him walk away?
Oh, and Commander Mahoney (any relation to that guy in Police Academy, you think?) was hired by Austin police chief Art Acevedo, who appears to have nothing but sheer contempt for the public who pay his salary.
Blogger Chris Quintero, who captured the abduction on video, reports that the female victim had been jogging when members of the local slave patrol detained her and demanded that she present a “pass” from her master. The officers were carrying out a tax-farming operation at a busy intersection to mulct students for the supposed offense of “jaywalking,” and were feasting heartily on their victims when Amanda Jo Stephen – who was listening to music while exercising — happened by.
When one of the officers laid hands on Stephen, the young woman — not knowing that corpulent stranger was a cop — jerked her arm away. After Stephen, who wasn’t operating a motor vehicle and wasn’t under arrest, refused to give her name, her captors illegally arrested her for the supposed offense of “failure to identify.” She was then shackled and hauled off screaming by a phalanx of well-nourished tax-feeders.
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The public reaction to this crime was sufficiently vehement to provoke an effort at damage control by Acevedo, who used that opportunity to put on a display of contemptuous hostility toward the offended public. Indulging in the kind of stilted sarcasm we would expect from a spoiled adolescent, Acevedo suggested that Stephen should be abjectly grateful that she was spared being raped or killed by her uniformed betters:
“Thank you, Lord, that it’s a controversy in Austin Texas that we had the audacity to touch somebody by the arm and tell them, `Oh, my goodness, Austin Police – we’re trying to get your attention.’ In other cities, cops are actually committing sexual assaults on duty. Quite frankly, she wasn’t charged with resisting and she’s lucky I wasn’t the arresting officer because I wouldn’t have been as generous.”
So…she was lucky not to be raped by those well-fed cops? That should make American women feel safer. Surely that can’t happen, can it? But it can, and does:
Officer Adam Skweres of the Pittsburgh Police Department, a serial predator, was arrested and prosecuted for sexually assaulting a woman in her home. Skweres, who had attempted to violate at least three other victims, told one of them that if she put up a struggle, he could arrest her for “resisting.” That point of view isn’t limited to obvious sociopaths like Skweres. During oral arguments before the Michigan supreme court in October 2011, Gregory J. Babbitt, an assistant DA for Michigan’s Ottawa County, acknowledged that a woman who fought off a sexual assault committed by a state-privileged attacker could be prosecuted under the state’s “resisting and obstructing” statute.
Magdalena Mol, a young wife and mother, was detained without cause in the incongruously named village of Justice, Illinois on the night of May 5, 2012 by Officer Carmen Scardine.
At the time, Mol was waiting for a taxi to take her home after visiting a friend.
Scardine invited her into his car and demanded identification. When the cab arrived, the officer ordered the driver to leave. Scardine then drove Mol to a secluded spot and raped her. The assailant didn’t charge Mol with an offense – a gesture Chief Acevedo would probably treat as an act of regal generosity.
So women who resist rape by a police officer could get arrested for ‘resisting and obstructing’ an officer in the course of his duties. Doesn’t that make you feel good about law enforcement in America…?
Anyone know, for reasons of fairness, of anything stupidly similar on this side of the Atlantic?
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February 27, 2014 at 7:54 pm