By Editor
According to News 4 in Jacksonville, Fla., a Tampa man was arrested Wednesday, August 20 for DUI while in a school zone.
The police said that Michael Trotter Shaffer, 28, had a blood alcohol level of more than four times the legal limit.
Shaffer was arrested around 2pm after being pulled over by a deputy monitoring traffic in front of an elementary school.
The breath tests registered his blood alcohol level at .376 and .367. The officers charged Shaffer with a DUI, driving with license revoked-habitual offender, battery of a law enforcement officer and obstructing or opposing an officer.
By Editor
Law enforcement won’t be the only ones out on the road this Labor Day weekend. Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Manatee Country Sheriff’s Department in Florida will be working together on a “first in the nation” program that will put trained MADD observers on the road to watch and report for potential drunk drivers.
The MADD volunteers will add to the high visibility enforcement many counties across the nation will be implementing. Manatee County Sheriff Brad Steube announced that there would also be DUI checkpoints and saturation patrols on the road this weekend.
The volunteer teams will be in unmarked, private vehicles and using their personal cell phones to communicate with police. When people see drivers that are demonstrating signs of impairment, they will contact the sheriff’s department to respond to the situation.
The pilot program will be assessed after operating for six months to look at data collected about response times, percentage of arrests, number of observations and more.
Read more about this program in the following article:
MADD Volunteers to Deputize Themselves
By Tiffany Sanders, ESQ.
The Florida legislature has been very active in DUI matters this year.
Governor Jeb Bush is currently considering a bill that swept through both the House and Senate and will, if signed, amend the statute requiring disclosure to defendants in DUI cases to specifically preclude access to breathalyzer source code.
Another bill, which passed the House but died in the Senate Appropriations Committee this week would have instituted a mandatory minimum two year prison sentence for a fourth (or subsequent) DUI conviction. A judge would have had the authority to substitute treatment for the second year of imprisonment, but could not otherwise reduce the sentence.
The demise of the bill appears to have been based more on the increased costs associated with its enforcement than any philosophical differences, and lawmakers have vowed to re-introduce the idea next session with new cost-cutting measures attached.
If that bill passes, it will make Florida one of the toughest states in the country in sentencing offenders with more than a first DUI offense.
By Tiffany Sanders, ESQ.
For months, DUI lawyers in Florida have been arguing for the release of the Intoxilyzer 5000 source code. The resistance has come not from courts or prosecutors, but from the manufacturer of the breathalyzer machine.
The company argues that the source code is a “trade secret”, and refuses to turn the information over to prosecutors and DUI attorneys.
DUI lawyers have argued that without access to that information, they can’t evaluate possible challenges to the validity of the breath test results, which are usually the primary evidence in a DUI offense.
Courts have taken the argument seriously enough that more than 400 cases currently hang in the balance–and many more could be affected, since the Intoxilyzer 5000 is or has recently been used in as many as twenty states.
Judges heard testimony this week to help them determine whether the reliability of the machines could be determined by conventional means or the source code was necessary to assessing their accuracy.