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Sunday, October 09, 2011

Ind. Courts - "Less than half of Lake County's drunken drivers are convicted of that charge"

That is the headline to a long story today in the NWI Times, reported by Marisa Kwiatkowski.From a side-bar:

This is the first installment of a two-day series based on a Times analysis of more than 9,000 misdemeanor and felony drunken driving cases.

Coming Monday, The Times analyzes how repeat offenders' drunken driving cases are handled and the effect those offenders have on the community.

The side-bar also links to two related stories today. The lead story begins:
Harsher punishment for a repeat drunken driving offender could have saved the lives of a young region couple, the mother of one of the victims said.

That offender, Mario Cadena, twice received leniency from prosecutors and a judge before triggering a fatal crash in April 2008 that killed him and three others.

Cadena, 30, of Crown Point; Garry Weiss, 53, of Crown Point; Stephen Hough, 26, of Merrillville; and Amy Bartelmey, 25, of Hobart, all died of blunt force trauma with massive internal injuries in the three-car accident at the intersection of 101st Avenue and Randolph Street near the Merrillville-Winfield border, according to the Lake County coroner's office.

Cadena's blood alcohol level was 0.17 -- more than twice Indiana's 0.08 legal limit.

Cadena's experiences in the Lake County courts system were typical of first- and second-time offenders, a Times analysis of five years of drunken driving cases shows.

Less than 40 percent of drunken driving cases filed in the last five years resulted in drunken driving convictions, a Times investigation found.

The Times analyzed more than 9,000 misdemeanor and felony drunken driving cases filed in Lake County between 2006 and 2010.

Later in the story, from a section headed "How Lake County compares:"
Jack Crawford, a defense attorney and former Lake County prosecutor, said public perception determines how prosecutors handle drunken driving cases.

"Murder, rape, robbery, child molesting -- people think, 'I would never do that. None of my friends would ever do that,'" he said. "But when it comes to operating while intoxicated, it's a little bit difficult to argue that same point."

Some counties require jail time for first-time drunken drivers, while others are less severe.

Porter County prosecutors typically require defendants to plead guilty to an operating while intoxicated charge, as do Marion County prosecutors. Officials in both offices said they rarely will plead cases down to reckless driving.

In Cook County, first-time drunken driving offenders typically are sentenced to court supervision, according to defense attorneys who practice there. Court supervision is not a drunken driving conviction but still appears on an offender's criminal record.

Crawford said drunken drivers receive the most lenient treatment in Floyd and Clark counties in southern Indiana, followed by Lake County.

"I know at first glance that might appear to be unfair," he said. "If you have the same law in one county, and you're convicted of it, shouldn't you receive either the same or at least close to the same penalty as if you were convicted in a county 300 miles away? Technically and legally, I suppose that's true, but, practically, it isn't true."

Brad Banks, a division supervisor in the Marion County prosecutor's office, said the majority of first-time offenders in Marion County plead guilty to a drunken driving charge.

He said prosecutors take a harder line on those cases because of the number of drunken-driving-related deaths in Marion County.

"It makes us more keenly aware of what can be a worst-case scenario," Banks said. "We're aware of how serious crashing into a building or a tree could have been."

Local police officers who enforce Indiana's drunken driving laws said their goal is to keep drunken drivers off the roads no matter how the cases are handled in court.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 9, 2011 12:35 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts