I don't condone it, but a friend of a friend got away with it last night. He ended up running a stop sign, the cops stop him and knew he was drunk. Yet they only charged him for running the stop, which costs you like $150 and 3 pts. I just wonder why they didn't charge him for drunk driving. I guess they need the machine. At least they made one of his family members come pick him up.

Plus you should see his car, it is pretty bashed up in the front (from a previous incident), not sure how it happened though. So I won't speculate.

 

Drunk driving is so common, they had a road block in the middle of my town one night, and when I drove past they had like 20 cars with their owners sitting in a prisoner circle in the nearby parking lot

 

most cops know it would ruin his life, and rather then screw him, they just hope he learns from it. It really depends on the cop, they realize he's a good guy who probably just made a mistake, other cops aren't as forgiving, your friend got very lucky

 

He had a smashed up front end and was driving drunk? Wow super lucky to get away with only a stop sign ticket! Here in SoCal they'd take you down in NO time lol

 

Personally, I think your friend should spend the next 5 years in jail.

I also thing the cop that "let this slide" should lose his job, his pension, and spend a year in jail himself.

No one "accidentally" drives drunk. People make a conscious decision to put other people's lives at risk...because they're either incurably stupid, or the just don't give a $#!t.

 

That is one lucky guy. But without learning a lesson, his luck will run out eventually. Would be better to have taught him a lesson now, rather than later after he kills someone or himself. I don't think the cops did him any favors by letting him go. Most people who say, "okay, I'll never do it again" don't usually adhere to that plan.

 

Your friends lucky he didnt kill someone.

 

This 110x over. I have 0 sympathy for drunk drivers, and most of the time they end up hurting someone else or killing them and they walk away.

 

If you're drunk enough to get noticed (missing stop signs or red lights, unstable lane discipline), you deserve to get suspended or worse. The cops should mess with your life before you mess with someone else's (someone innocent).

 

The question that no one seems to be addressing is whether the cop's Breathalyzer was working properly. After all, it's a sensor-machine, and sensors sometimes fail. Even if the cop can smell alcohol on you, and you don't walk a straight line very well, if the machine can't verify the BAC-level, there might (?) not be enough legal evidence for an arrest.

 

Courts seem to be clogged here in South Florida with drunk driving cases. Some of those cases take years to go through the system. They recently had a story in the Miami Herald not too long ago and it seemed to me that reading it, it made it almost too lenient for drunk driving cases.

This was an interesting recent story about drunk driving in Mexico City, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2...htm?csp=34news

and another older story about the situation when I was living there, http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/...42864520071015

There, I routinely saw checkpoints set up everywhere. I don't know if the points system is still true there. They mention 12 points and a 3 year ban on driving, but I think that was moved to 1 year.

What happened there is that if you got caught either drunk driving or speeding, that was a 6 point infraction. There was a host of other fractions out there, too. If you were a foreigner and had any kind of infraction, they impounded your car until you paid up at the local municipal office. The way to get around that was mordida (bribe) or you could pay the ticket assuming you had a local Mexican license easy to get, no test, just your immigration documents, copy of a utility bill and $45.

In my last year there or so, they had checkpoints set up which I liked to call double jeopardy. What happened is that they would set up a speed trap and when you came around the bend, there was also an alcohol testing station. They would nail you for 6 points on the speeding and 6 points on being drunk and your license was gone. I think they had a system where you get the license back earlier if you took courses (but not sure how that finally worked out).

 

0 sympathy for drunk drivers. Your friend should be in a cell right now, and his car should have been seized and sold at auction. You don't want your life ruined? Don't go out and ruin other people's lives. I'm in the middle of trying to figure out who has been drinking and driving in my neighborhood. I've been finding beer cans in the road at night on my way home from work the past couple of weeks. I will turn them into the police when I find out.

 

I know a lot of cops that would rather let the guy sober up/get picked up so he's no longer a danger on the road than completely ruin someone's life with a DUI charge.

I also know that for LAPD, processing a DUI charge takes such a long time that it's technically more unproductive for them to book a guy as opposed to waiting for the guy to sober up/get picked up.

In many cases also, I know judges have leniency on first-time offenders and knock the sentence down to something else but impose the same fine as they would a DUI.

 

Why should a guy making a choice to break the law and drive drunk get a 2nd chance? He SHOULD have his life ruined. Not too mention more than likely it would'nt ruin his life, just make it more difficult and expensive for a while like it should. If a single DUI ruined peoples lives you would see far less repeat DUI's than what we have today.

 

I am not in a way condoning drunk driving--I never do it, and I've seen lives lost because of it.

But it is what it is depending on the workload of the law enforcement, and how each officer on duty that day sees the situation.