With marijuana’s increasing popularity and acceptance, it was only a matter of time before the advent of a handheld device to measure the presence of THC in an individual’s system. A THC breathalyzer would supplant blood and urine tests, which are currently the only available method to determine whether someone is under the…
Louisville, Kentucky Metro Corrections officer Liliana Hernandez has been suspended after being accused of lying under oath last month. According to court records, Hernandez falsely claimed on a form that a suspect refused to take a breath test, for which the suspect’s license was automatically suspended. She repeated the same fabrication while testifying in…
Based on close to 700 surveys given to law enforcement agencies throughout the state, the Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists (AAIM) compiled crucial statistics regarding DUI arrests in Illinois. AAIM, a non-profit citizens’ action group, was founded in 1982 with the aid of former Secretary of State and former Governor Jim Edgar,…
Hundreds of court cases in Orange County, California are under review amid allegations that someone forged court records to fix DUI and other traffic cases. The FBI and Orange County prosecutors are investigating close to 600 superior court cases going back as far as 2006. It has been suspected that a court employee recorded fake sentence reductions and…
A bill setting 15 nanograms as the THC threshold for DUI-marijuana is awaiting the governor’s signature. Governor Rauner has 60 days to decide whether to sign it or veto it.Under the current law, a driver caught with any amount of marijuana in his system is considered legally impaired. Opponents believe the current law is…
The Illinois Supreme Court recently held that an officer’s objectively reasonable mistake of law may form the basis for a constitutionally valid vehicle stop. Police officers stopped defendant Jose Gaytan, believing his car’s ball-type trailer hitch obstructed his car’s license plate in violation of the Illinois Vehicle Code. During the stop,…
Plaintiffs Mitchell Katz and Hasan Aksu sued Stephen Tanabe of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office for helping private investigator Christopher Butler set up a “dirty DUI” sting of which they were both victims. The United States District Court for the Northern District of California held that Tanabe did not violate…
In People v. Guthrie, a New York appellate court decided whether there exists constitutionally viable probable cause to effectuate a traffic stop when the stop is justified by an officer’s mistaken belief. The court concluded that when the officer’s mistake is objectively reasonable, the stop does not violate the Fourth Amendment.Just after midnight on September…
Last month in Williams v. State, the Georgia Supreme Court remanded a defendant’s DUI case after the trial court erroneously failed to address whether the defendant gave actual consent to his blood test. After a bench trial, defendant John Cletus Williams was convicted of DUI and failure to maintain lane in violation…
On February 27, an Illinois appellate court upheld a defendant’s license suspension despite the arresting officer’s incomplete report. Defendant Jaime McLeer’s driver’s license was suspended after he refused to submit to testing to calculate the concentration of alcohol in his blood. McLeer was arrested for DUI in January 2014. When McLeer refused testing,…