Poor Exercise of DWI Discretion:
Yesterday, I posted about a woman arrested for DWI when she hadn't had a drop to drink. Now here's a case where an ex-cop was three or four sheets to the wind and caused a multi-car accident, and yet was not subjected to any alcohol test, and almost escaped drunk driving charges altogether.
This is an outrage! Why wasn't I told they still have Jack In The Box in California? I'm going.
[whit]It's an isolated incident. You always have a few bad apples. LEOs are under a tremendous stress. They are the the thin blue line between good people and the contamination of their bodily fluids. We don't have all the facts. Hey, maybe this is what really happened...(insert a story as unlikely as need be to explain away characteristic LEO misbehavior).[end whit]
It's easy to be whit.
It's easy to be Patterico.
Just take Occam's Razor, and turn your own brain into hamburger with it.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
Those who do care enough to do something about it too often wind up at the mercy of the bad actors and their coverup comrades when they need assistance. So good cops learn quickly not to interfere with their bad brethren's misdeeds.
The charge was misdemeanor manslaughter:He's still on paid leave.
He was doing 30 MPH on a winding road well known to be used by large numbers of bicyclists on weekends.
Any ordinary civilian who did that would go up for murder II and get the book thrown at them at sentencing. No matter what ADA Tomkins and Sheriff Morrisey say. If the dead bicyclists were cops or DAs, they'd be screaming for murder I.
No, the responsibility here I think rests squarely with the citizenry. If the sheriff or DA isn't elected, the City Council or County Board sure as hell is, and people need to have long memories about this kind of thing. The San Jose city government should be shitting bricks right now, worried sick they're all going to lose their jobs next election, thinking no glitzy gay marriage show or bicycle to work day is going to distract angry voters this time.
It would also help if the media took a break from trying to Save The Planet from Bushitler and Global Warming and/or a Lack Of Diversity and poked vigorously into this kind of bread-and-butter quotidian old as dirt corruption. Sounds like the Mercury News did so at least, so kudos to them.
In the San Jose case, the drunk driver was a former San Jose cop who was working as an investigator for the district attorney. Her husband is an SJPD officer. The district attorney is married to a SJPD lieutenant.
If I did my job the way I observe and have on occasion experienced police officers doing their job, I would be fired, I would be in prison, and there would be burned, exploded factories in several locations with my name on them. You'd better believe my profession self polices. If someone makes an error, and it is discovered, it gets fixed before it ever gets to the customer. Dishonesty tends not to happen, if only because there just isn't any percentage in it.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
Those last three are discouraged in LEOs by the presumption they are not lying, by sovereign immunity, and by the fact that by the time things are out, they have become a political question instead of a question of right and wrong.
Choosing to work in a scummy system makes you scummy. All LEOs are to a degree tainted, just like lawyers and politicians are, and some LEOs are working hard to make more scum. I don't see the other LEOs much working to shut them down. Sometimes by accident it happens. Sometimes like the fake drug raid in Atlanta that killed the old lady, they uncover themselves.
I am certain that kind on evil is done by persons in most PDs all over the country, and that it is discovered mostly by accident.
There is no new professionalism.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
Discretion IS abuse. Why excuse corruption just because you happen to like the perps?
Found not guilty on the most severe charges brought against him(Mostly because the investigation was so botched a defense attorney could raise reasonable doubt), Farrall only served 90 days for killing the the Thompson brothers. The FL Highway patrol people who gave Farrall profession courtesy? none got more than a five day suspension.
The FL Highway patrol not learning from the Farrall debacle, recently gave similar courtesy to a Miami Beach police officer who caused a crash down here. As I said, To serve and protect....our own.
I work in an office. I occasionally abuse privileges and wink at coworkers doing the same, sure. But you know what? No one's life is ruined, no one dies. Some office supplies go missing and some people get paid for 10 minutes of surfing the net.
Wrong? Yes. In the same league as this stuff? Nope.
I don't think its hypocritical to expect the police to do more policing than non-police do.
You don't like it? Then renounce the above privileges.
What was the speed limit on the road? 30 mph does not seem especially fast even on a winding road. The fact that bikers use the road means what, exactly?
The deputy was not drunk or high. He may have fell asleep for a second but the DA is right, dozing why driving is just negligence.
According to the first article:
The deputy could face up to 2 years. Seems similar.
Second: The only evidence that he fell asleep is his own statement at the scene.
Third: The 2001 speed exhibition conviction was a plea bargain in Los Angeles, where two charges of DWI, including having a BAC over .08%, were dismissed in exchange for the plea.
Fourth: The CHP did not draw a blood alcohol test in the Stevens Canyon Road accident. The sheriffs department took the sample.
Fifth: One witness reported:LEOs don't usually tell civilians to stop talking if they are incriminating themselves.
Those facts don't prove that the sheriffs department and DA circled the wagons to protect one of their own, but they certainly do raise the question.
But even the column you linked said there was no evidence of drinking. It was 10:30 in the morning, not a peak DWI time though peple do drink early sometimes. The fact that he was alleged to have driven drunk before he was a deputy means what?
Do you know what the speed limit is on that road? None of your linked articles say anything about that.
It seems that with increasing levels of the need for public trust of a profession, the self policing should also be increasing.
For example, self policing of garbage men should be somewhat lower on the self-policing scale than engineers, doctors, lawyers, or cops.
But as that is just common sense, someone will argue that it makes no difference and all should be treated the same.
According to news reports, the speed the sheriffs department relied on was determined from GPS records. Unless those records have data points on the order of a second apart or less, they are not going to give a reliable estimate of the speed in the last seconds before impact. A patrol car can accelerate many tens of miles per hour in very few seconds.
As I said, this case just raises questions about the government agencies involved. The most recent case posted by Prof. Adler above may provide some answers.
The preliminary hearing on vehicular manslaughter charges against Bismarck Dinius, 39, of Carmichael, was held yesterday and will continue today in Lakeport in Lake County. The charges were filed as a result of the death of Lynn Thornton, 51, who was killed on the O'Day 28 Beats Workin' II on the windless night of April 29, 2006, on Clear Lake. Dinius happened to be sitting at the helmsman's position of the sailboat at the time Thornton suffered the injuries that would kill her.
We think that Dinius to defend himself on these charges is a travesty of justice, as what really caused Thornton's death is Russell Perdock of Lake County slamming his appropriately named Baja Outlaw 24-ft powerboat into Beats Workin' II at 40 mph or more. Why hasn't Perdock been charged? There can only be one explanation in our mind — he's the number two man at the Lake County Sheriff's Department, and law enforcement up there, based on this case, appears to be corrupt as hell.
Wow. Nice bit of moral equivalency there. Yes, I see how being drunk and crashing into an on-coming car is the same thing as barely crossing an ethical line. After all, the driver merely "fudged" on that yellow line on the road thing.
Finally it rear-ends his vehicle. He stops and gets out, and a belligerent drunk gets out of the other car, wobbles up to him, starts yelling at him, and then pulls a gun and points it at him. So my buddy slaps the gun aside and decks the guy, who is very drunk and stays down.
When the police get there, they discover that the drunk is an off-duty Chicago copper, so they arrest my pal and send the cop home.
The trial required an attorney and consumed several days, ending with an acquittal.
Just one of those things.
Side note: While my guy was on the stand, he testified that the other car was being driven in "a very erotic manner." No one in court remarked on his misstatement.
"Actually, Jack in the Box's new 100 percent sirloin burgers (whatever they are called) are quite good."
They're called... (drum roll)
SIRLOIN BURGERS!
I'm eating one right now, which is kinda cool and kinda creepy at the same time.
I've always been fascinated by how Jack in the Box made their meteoric rise from the proverbial ashes after the e. coli scare several years ago. People got sick, the stock plummeted, and in the aftermath they decided to turn JitB from the Taco Bell of burger joints into a premium establishment.
My favorite episode in that drama was when Burger King introduced a 100% Angus beef burger (a high-end breed of cattle), and JitB successfully slaughtered the campaign with their 100% sirloin burger (a not-so-impressive cut of beef) by making several commercials that equated "Angus" with "anus": "Sirloin comes from this area of the cow." "Could you point to the... Angus area?" "I'd rather not."
Within a month, the Angus commercials from BK had disappeared entirely, and the drive-thru menu at our local BK had a few bright white spots where items had been hastily removed from the menu.
It doesn't have to be this way. When officers shoot someone, their weapons are confiscated, good shoot or bad. If there's no room for "professional courtesy" on that, why should there be any for being in a massive accident? Everyone should be tested with documented results as a matter of standard procedure.
But some of the examples in this post seem incredibly over-the-top, even for members of the Thin Blue Line. Back in the day when I was involved in the grittier parts of the legal profession, I got the impression that LEO professional courtesy ended when it was a matter likely to show up in the newspapers or where the Chief and elected officials might find out about it -- for example, cutting LEOs major breaks when they were involved in incidents that led to fatalities was generally viewed as a major taboo.
Care to explain the legal theory by which they'd get a murder charge?
You don't know what you're talking about, do you?
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