I know I have not posted in awhile, I have been busy.  Please note that the “comments” are turned off, mostly due to spam, but I would like to take a moment to thank all of you who come by every once in a while to see what’s new.

I have been practicing law about 18 years now and most of that has been in traffic and criminal courts, and well most of that has been defending drivers accused of being impaired.  While most attorneys or judges would not give you their opinion of the law, I feel unconstrained. 

DUI law is a scam.  Why you ask?  Well I will tell you.  First, let me give you a little background on myself.  In 1985 my father was killed by an impaired driver.  And paradoxically, I am a DUI defense attorney.  Why would that be so?  Because DUI law won’t bring back my father, and DUI law doesn’t decrease the number of impaired drivers.  Tougher laws are not the way to get society to change its behavior.  But tougher laws are easy for legislatures to pass so that they can SAY they are doing something about this “problem.”

You should have figured out already that DUI law is whacked.  DUI laws have their own commercials.  A crime that has a marketing campaign budget?   Hmmmm, nothing going on there.

If you took the time to look up sentencing in the Illinois Compiled Statutes (trust me don’t bother) you would find that DUI’s have there own special sentencing section.  DUI law is mentioned before murder.  Last year we had 6 amendments to DUI that were pending and active law, all at once.

The actual crime of DUI is defined this way: “any amount of alcohol that impairs a person’s ability to think or act with ordinary care.”  So arguably, a swallow of beer, if it caused any impairment to think or act with ordinary care would be enough.  Now that seems like a reasonable rule until the jury is in its third hour deliberating because one holdout wants to argue that the presence of an odor of alcohol and any small mistake on a field sobriety test is enough to find someone guilty.

I think where we are at is the same place they were at back at the Salem Witch trials.  If you remember, the evidence against someone there was a girl who had a vision that someone might have done a witchly thing.  Or in otherwords, really no evidence at all.  All who were accused of being a witch were found guilty, and all of those were put to death.  At least the prosecutor had a perfect record, so there’s that.

Anyway I apologize for not blogging much lately, and once again, thank you to all who read.

Ray Flavin