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,…
Thanks to improved awareness, harsher penalties, and significant legislative efforts, drunk driving fatalities in Illinois have decreased by over 37 percent between 2002 and 2012. Alcohol-impaired driving remains a serious problem in Illinois and throughout the country. In the United Staes in 2013, one person every 52 minutes was killed due to a…
Earlier this month, a North Carolina appellate court held that the Fourth Amendment does not apply in driver’s license revocation hearings, “even if those proceedings could be viewed as quasi-criminal in nature.”In 2013, Myra Lynne Combs was stopped by North Carolina police without reasonable suspicion in violation of the Fourth Amendment.…
This month, the Fifth District Court of Appeal reversed a defendant’s DUI conviction based on the arresting officer’s Fourth Amendment violation. The defendant, Katelyn Bozarth, was charged with two counts of DUI after being arrested in a private driveway in Wayne County. She filed a motion to quash the arrest and…
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) released a report last Thursday evaluating the status of drinking and driving across the United States. The report was put together by MADD’s Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving, a program launched in 2006 in response to over 13,000 annual drunk driving fatalities in the United States. Eight years…
The Illinois State Bar Association submitted a bill to the Illinois legislature last month seeking to amend Illinois’ no-tolerance DUI law. The bill refers to a 2011 incident in Lake Island where driver Scott Shirey was charged with homicide when his son died in a car crash. The accident was not…