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Dinner with the “One Trick DUI lawyer” Warren Redlich
I recently had the opportunity to host the Fair DUI Lawyer, Warren Redlich, featured in several media outlets. He takes the idea of not incriminating yourself to a different level.
The conversation was very revealing. There have been cases of people being charged despite having a 0.0 alcohol reading on the breathalyzer machine, according to Mr. Redlich. The trouble, according to him, is that DUI laws assume a person is guilty until proven innocent; and in a lot of cases, the innocent end up paying the price. A breathalyzer has a margin of error of 15% – that would be considered ridiculous in any other type of crime/scientific purpose, but the public opinion on DUI is so strong that we allow innocents to be prosecuted in the name of safety.
Apparently, having consumed Wonder bread, and no alcohol, can create a positive reading on a breathalyzer test. So imagine of you have a slice of bread with a glass of wine. A conviction under the DUI laws can be damning. And in many cases, the people being charged have no idea how to get out of the mess.
One of his points is this: if the point is to reduce drunk driving, then the more efficient way would be to offer free rides to drunk drivers, not create DUI checkpoints.
A recent video featuring his technique has gone viral; and as of this post has had more than 2.5 million hits.
My own view of all DUI laws are that they are “pre-crime” laws – a la Minority Report. In other words, laws created to “prevent crime” are on morally dubious grounds. Punishment should be for committing a crime, not for creating a possibility of committing a crime. Mr. Redlich did not dismiss my point of view.
In any case, it is good to see some new perspective and some push back on the encroachment of our freedoms. Especially when there is a distinct possibility of the innocent getting incriminated.
What are your thoughts?
Published in General
Warren Redlich? No dude – he lives one town over from me; he moved from the frozen tundra.
He really moved to Florida? Like permanently?
Yes, Sir. The libertarian movement in SFla now has 3 people (kidding).
Also, another neighbor (as in a couple of towns over) is Tom DeLorenzo.
Look for SoFla to secede in about 10,9,8…..
I assure you, as the mother of 4 children I have long learned NOT to take the word of any adolescent.
I could go on and on about my own experiences and the harrassment that I have personally witnessed and experienced, but that is not the point of this conversation and it’s not appropriate.
But trust me, while I’m a Republican mom, I’m not a terribly nice one and all my children can attest to that fact. NONE of my opinions are based upon the legions of stories I’ve heard – they are based upon the facts I have witnessed and the fact that there are “legions” of stories.
And yes, with the BS stops I have WITNESSED, stops that cops won’t even bother to show up and defend, I question their motives.
P.S. NO cop, first responder or anyone else for that matter wants MY children safer than I do.
And any kid who rolls their eyes at me in the midst of a lecture about drinking and driving would get the back of my hand. The words “lighten up” wouldn’t even escape their mouths before the words would get crammed back in.
This is certainly a heartfelt comment and I don’t wish to discount the horrible things that police officers and EMT’s see. I wouldn’t want to have to tell parents about their dead children, that’s for certain. However I hope I would be able to keep things in perspective and not become a crusader or take it upon myself to ‘save’ people from themselves. People have been driving drunk for a very long time, and it seems that no matter what the laws are and no matter how vigorously they are enforced what the limits are etc, somehow it’s not changing. Maybe it’s even getting worse.
I don’t think it is effective to take on too much of this kind of thing into ones’ job. We all have difficult jobs and I’m sure it’s no fun to be a cop in social situations, and it might be why cops tend to hang with other LEOs. But that’s true with a lot of things. The problem here is that LEO’s are in a position of authority over people and many of them abuse that authority. A lot of them are on some kind of crusade, or think they are doing the “lord’s work” or some other delusion of grandeur. Too many are on a power trip and more and more they want to rearrange society and traffic stops for them to have an optimally safe work environment for themselves, never mind that it puts innocents at risk and terrorizes and alienates people, so that you have an even worse time at that party.
Care to comment on this recent Ricochet thread?
The problem here is that LEO’s are in a position of authority over people and many of them abuse that authority. A lot of them are on some kind of crusade, or think they are doing the “lord’s work” or some other delusion of grandeur. Too many are on a power trip and more and more they want to rearrange society and traffic stops for them to have an optimally safe work environment for themselves, never mind that it puts innocents at risk and terrorizes and alienates people, so that you have an even worse time at that party.
While it is my job to tell civilians that their loved ones are dead, and comfort both them and the police officers who must deal with the cumulative stress of dealing with death, I’m not actually a police officer. I’m a chaplain.
The guys I work with tell me my job is harder, but I know theirs is: My whole job at a scene is to be kind to grief-stricken people. They are actually responsible for any life-saving that has to be done, safely managing a chaotic situation with a lot of moving parts, then figuring out what happened, which laws (if any) are applicable, and making sure all the paperwork is done properly and submitted on time.
The guys I work with do all of this with skill, compassion and professionalism. I admire and love them. So as law enforcement chaplain and the widow of a police officer (oh, and I’m a mother of four, too, Annefy! and my kids tell me I’m not all that nice at home either! Yay for strict mamas!) I am definitely and possibly unnecessarily knee-jerk-protective about police officers. My guys are familiar with this phenomenon. Someone insults one of them, and shazaam! their ordinarily peaceful, compassionate chaplain’s hair is suddenly standing on end, and sparks are flying out of her eyes… you folks got a taste of it here, and probably a bigger taste than you deserved.
It is indeed possible that police officers in your jurisdictions aren’t performing their necessary functions as thoughtful and tactfully as they might…I’m just inclined, by experience as well as instinct, to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Since you asked, the NHP officers shown in the other thread certainly appear to have made a mess, and I would guess that the higher-ups mishandled the aftermath as well, and made a bad situation worse. Like many other similar screw-up videos, it will probably end up being used as an instructional tool in law enforcement academies like the one I teach in, so that new recruits can learn from it—one of the many benefits of the ubiquity of cameras.
Police officers can screw up. They might be badly trained or badly led, actively corrupt, lazy, bigoted, violent, cowardly, ill-mannered, burned out or just not cut out for the job to begin with.
But even when a police officer does everything right, the public will still be inclined to react negatively to them because no one likes being pulled over or otherwise detained. For anyone with libertarian inclinations, the police officer is a visible, vivid embodiment of the state’s power over citizens, and when you already feel humiliated, stopped by the side of the road with those bright lights on you, and rubberneckers driving slowly by, it’s natural to get annoyed.
Can I suggest that if you have a good experience with a police officer, please take the time to call his/her chief and say so? Compliments do as much as complaints to encourage good policing and probably more, since they’re rarer.
There are unintended consequences to any laws that are passed by any legislative body. First of all human beings have flaws and that includes legislators which means legislation can be flawed. This also includes lobbyists on either side of legislation.
In the case of a law that specifies that minors are impaired by consumption regardless of blood alcohol level the unintended consequence for a police officer is that they cannot release said minor for liability reasons. If the minor kills themselves or someone else the police officer or deputy and the city, county, or state who they represent will be sued by all who suffered any loss due to the accident, regardless of who was at fault and regardless of blood alcohol level in the case of a minor.
One should know that even though a state may place a cap on a settlement that involves the death of an individual there is no cap on a settlement that requires paying for specialized care due to injury. Enablers, ambulance chasers, or if you prefer lawyers are well aware of this. They are also well aware of the fact that some pockets are much deeper than others. They will cite the fact that the minor was impaired by law but the officer let them go in spite of the law.
Kate Braestrup: You being knee-jerk defensive of LEOs makes no more sense than me being knee-jerk defensive of my kids. Something I didn’t do.
And your sweeping generalization of the public being hyper critical I think is unfair. And the first time I have a positive experience with the cops in my small town I’ll be sure to note it.
Irony is that I have wanted to raise hell with them for years for their misbehavior but have been advised by everyone to not do it until I’m on my way out of town for good. Seems our department has a bit of a reputation for not taking criticism well.
Doug Watt I agree with you completely and I’d be furious with any cop that let my kid go if they were impaired.
Is there anyone disagreeing with you that I missed?
Annefy if I wanted to be loved I would have become a fire-fighter. Everyone loves a fire-fighter. I was not sworn in until I was 35 years-old. That worked to my advantage because I could use my different experiences to try and relate to people I dealt with on the street.
As a police officer I could not generalize in trying to sort out incidents. Everything I did involved specific incidents, specific actions, and specific individuals, to include specific laws. Generalizations about incidents bother me more than they should. All I can say is that I saw my share of intended mayhem and unintended mayhem. I love fictional mysteries and as an officer I hated mysteries.
Not all law enforcement agencies share the same standards. My agency used the LAPD model. Kate is dealing with trying to comfort officers and victims. It is difficult work. When I was an FTO (Field Training Officer) my first priority was to instill survival skills in officers just out of the academy, the second was to instill a sense of ethics and then to be fair with everyone they dealt with. Survival came first for me because the other two lessons mean nothing if you don’t survive. I also told them not to stare into the abyss when they were off duty because they wouldn’t like what was staring back at them.
There is one incident I have not written about. A firefighter talking about behavior and fires brought some unexpected peace. I will write about it for Ricochet someday because I feel comfortable here. All I will say is that for several years if a news story on TV talked about a house fire and children losing their lives I would walk out of the room.
Doug: I don’t discount for one minute the challenges and difficulties of being a cop. I am sure it’s harrowing. I’m sure it’s emotionally taxing.
But you know what? So is being a mom. So is talking to your child behind bars after being treated with contempt at a police station. So is sitting on my front porch watching a cop try to find something, anything to charge my son with.
If I had come home and told my mom that a cop had harassed me, she probably would have whacked me upside the head. She wouldn’t have believed it for a minute and would have assumed I was in the wrong.
Because of my own experiences, because of what I have witnessed, because of how I’ve been treated, when someone makes that claim to me now I don’t dismiss it out of hand. I don’t automatically believe it. But I sure as hell don’t dismiss it.
So what’s changed?
Annefy it all depends upon the agency and their supervisors. The only way I can explain it is that: Some human beings are jerks. Police officers are human beings. Therefore some police officers are jerks. Substitute police officers for accountants, priests, teachers, politicians, actors, or whatever noun you care to substitute, unfortunately it will be true.
One thing that might help is multiple ride-alongs’ or a citizens academy. Possibly having a district officer meet with the citizens in their district at the local church. Start with info on neighborhood concerns and also have the officer inform neighbors of their concerns. Do this on a regular basis and see if any change occurs. In Portland usually a day shift officer acts as a liaison between the citizens and the Police Bureau in their district. That officer passes along citizens concerns to the afternoon and night shift district officers who in turn pass info back to the day shift officer and the meeting cycle starts again.
well… having defended quite a few DUI’s, I’m skeptical of this guy. No, I wasn’t really a believer in DUI defense. I only did it for 3 years (all public defense, not just DUI), and I never met an innocent victim. I did meat a lot of people who probably drove drunk hundreds of times before getting caught.
Also, Doug is right. Those breath tests w/ the 15% margin are not admissible in court. The real breath tests are far more rigorous and do not have that same margin of error. That’s not to say they’re perfect (i.e. if you blow a .085, you have a decent argument), but they’re not as bad as the field tests.
Are there a ton of people just being victimized by the police? I have my doubts. Yes, there are bad cops, but to have that be your justification for this sort of defense… well … I guess there’s a reason I don’t do public defense (much) anymore. If you really believe in it, you’re delusional. If you don’t, it’s kind of hard to convince yourself that you’re doing any real good, unless you pick some sort of pet-issue so you can say you’re doing it because you’re a staunch libertarian, as this guy obviously does. I don’t buy that even taking him at his word.
FWIW, I also dislike sobriety checkpoints. And traffic ticket cameras. And speed traps on roads where the natural driving speed is about 20 mph over the posted limit, because the posted limit is insanely low. My wife was once stopped for “avoiding a stoplight.” She had picked me up at a bus station as I was walking through a parking lot. So rather than drive back through the lot and around to the street, she just pulled out the store’s exit (the parking lot was a good city block). That law is designed to stop those guys who come to a stoplight and then whip through a gas station (or whatever else) so they don’t have to wait. It’s the same people who tailgate you and then whip around, flipping you off… I’m pretty sure they drive like that all the time. Those laws are stupid (or stupidly enforced a lot of the time). But that doesn’t mean the cops are out of control and we’ve become a police state. It also doesn’t mean that we should go around trying to make excuses for legitimate criminals in order to make a point.
I am now reminded of an incident that happened to me almost 50 years ago as a 12 year-old. First I want to say most of my interactions (including arrests I was a teenage alcoholic) I had basically good encounters with the police. When I ‘straightened out’ and became an upstanding citizen from 1974 to around 2000 (and up to present) I started to have mixed encounters – as a law abiding citizen – with police. I had one very negative encounter with police in rural New Mexico where they sabataged my enginewhen they couldn’t find drugs, but that’s another story
Now to the story: Someone had set a Volkswagon on fire in our suburban apartment complex and two policemen interrogated me in my home for about 45 minutes. They used all the common tactics, but they didn’t work on me because I was innocent. They said they knew I did it and if I just confessed it would go smoothly. Leaving without an admission on my part, they assured me that they would be back to take my fingerprints, etc.
My mother believed the cops. It didn’t matter what I said in my defense, my mother’s logic was “But they’re the police!” A week later in the local paper I read that a couple of teen girls had admitted to the crime and were arrested.
That was a sad week for me and it served to undermine my respect for authority and my respect for my mother’s intelligence with her blind respect for authority. Of course we never heard from those cops again. It’s not a good thing when teens lose respect for their parents and authority. Parents need to be very careful around that time when innocent kids start waking up to how the world really operates. I have a 16 year old girl and she trusts me. I trust her. She’s not afraid to talk to me. Because of that I know more about her and her life. That makes me a better father.
And you are obviously a good mom.
Yeap, the blood-sucking lawyers always win, no matter what. And I don’t put all the blame on the lawyers…I suspect that they’re more a symptom rather than a cause. I guess it’s like Obama. Sure he’s evil, but I don’t blame him, I blame the stupid Americans who voted for him.
Last time I drove drunk was in 1972. A DC cop stopped me and I was too drunk to pull out my license without also grabbing my military ID. He wrongly assumed from the haircut and my incohenerant answers that I was returning from combat. “You didn’t get killed there so I’m not about to let you kill yourself here.” I rode in the front seat of his cruiser all the way home. His partner drove and parked my car.
I figured I had used up my lifetime supply of DUI/DWI luck that night and never did it again. God bless those guys.
well… I don’t know that we’re any more blood-sucking than anyone else, though. I don’t think you’d like to know what I got paid as a public defender. Let’s just say that there were sometimes clients who would walk in – asking for a public defender – making more. That said, in Washington, legislature and courts require attorneys… but they don’t require that attorneys be paid well, yet they do impose pretty strict requirements. Recently, they passed case load limits. No more than 300 (or so) cases per year. I called and spoke with a friend at my old firm. She said they only go to court once a week, now, and spend almost all of their time sitting around the office, playing on phones, etc… But the state has put itself on the fast track to bankruptcy.
Here’s an example of “you’d better have the video.”
Seven cops lied, two prosecutors filed false reports and then prosecuted an innocent man. Six of the cops and both prosecutors are apparently still employed by their respective “law enforcement” agencies.
This is the reason many people distrust the cops. Here you have 9 of “the good guys” screwing up someone’s life. This is thuggery and in this case these cops and prosecutors are not better than an street mob.
I have respect for police officer for the job they do. They put themselves in harms way and they protect ordinary citizens, but let’s not pretend they are all heroes or choir boys. While a lot of these guys are probably wonderful people we have to be honest there are a fair number of cops that are jerks. They were the bullies in high school and now they get to be professional bullies because they have badges and guns.
Doug writes: One thing that might help is multiple ride-alongs’ or a citizens academy. Possibly having a district officer meet with the citizens in their district at the local church. Start with info on neighborhood concerns and also have the officer inform neighbors of their concerns. Do this on a regular basis and see if any change occurs. In Portland usually a day shift officer acts as a liaison between the citizens and the Police Bureau in their district. That officer passes along citizens concerns to the afternoon and night shift district officers who in turn pass info back to the day shift officer and the meeting cycle starts again.
Yes to all of the above! I would add that small town departments are often working with less generous budgets, which means that training (including continuing training) is given short shrift. Law enforcement is not a static field: Innovations and improvements are being generated all the time, but an agency needs an energetic, imaginative command staff and a reasonable training budget to be able to capitalize on these and improve service. Determined citizens can “noodge” a lazy chief to get on the ball, or they can provide him/her with the kind of political juice that will allow him to make the improvements he’s been wanting to make for years. Again, the more you know about good police work, the more targeted and effective your suggestions can be.
One question I would ask is: How many of your local law enforcement officers are young part-timers? In my state (and doubtless in many others) small town departments save money by hiring young people as part-timers. They receive minimum training, inadequate FTO time, and because they are at the bottom of the pecking order, they get the shifts the older guys don’t want. Meaning that the chances are very good that the police officer who is responding to a call on a Saturday night is a scrawny twenty-two year old with virtually no experience and maybe 200 hours of training, much of it online. The uniform is exactly the same, so it can be difficult to tell.
If this is true in your department, it’s a miracle that more people aren’t having terrible (or fatal!) experiences with the police. If I ran the world, every department would hire (and be willing to pay for) police officers with the kind of education, training and supervised experience commensurate with the authority to deprive citizens of their liberty and, at times, their lives.
Oh, and p.s.—if you can make a citizen meeting happen, bring the kids. We had a meeting in my own small town around the issue of school bomb threats, and the local teenagers were a wonderful, passionate addition. (I’ll never forget a plump girl with a nose ring standing before the town elders, including the police chief, and saying “this ass**** wants to blow up MY SCHOOL!” She was terrific.
One, safety IS a valid concern of the law and law enforcement, and has been all throughout the history of western law. We should be arguing about degrees here… determining what limits to place on law enforcement in order to maintain a minimum of public safety and a maximum of personal liberty… not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And two, as a matter of law, driving is a privilege and not a right in most states, and always has been. If you want to change that… making driving a right… then the only way to do that is changing the law itself… probably via state constitutional amendments… and not through a guerrilla campaign directed at cops on the street.
I’ve always said: surely there are real examples of bad cops. This quoted case seems to be one of them. Unfortunately, many cases that are brought forth as examples are incomplete, inconclusive, or even wrong – certainly disputed as to assessment. The clear cases are the exception (when compared to the entire population of interactions with police). The tendency to toss questionable cases onto the pile in order to make a case that this is a bigger problem or trend, is itself a problem.
That’s what I’m talking about with degrees. You can know that cops and public safety laws are important, and STILL know that things like traffic cameras and checkpoints are overkill and wrong. To too many people, it’s one or the other. Cops are either saints or fascists, and no two ways between it.
Lastly, I think this is overkill. Where would this guy’s pamphlet be most useful? If you’ve been drinking. I don’t think there are a whole lot of innocents getting incriminated of DUI’s. There are plenty of people who have been drinking to some extent but who don’t believe that their driving was actually impaired… that is quite a different thing. So no, I don’t think this lawyer is doing anyone at all any good at all. He should spend his time lobbying his legislature to change the laws if he doesn’t like them.
But is drinking (even just a little) and driving a freedom I’m willing to sacrifice? I don’t know that I’d vote for a lot of the more harsh laws if given the opportunity, but I can tell you that there are freedoms for which I am much more concerned. How about my economic freedom? How about the freedom to buy whatever health insurance I want? How about my freedom of association? I’m not going to be one of those people who says the conversation is stupid – it’s not – but I don’t have much respect for people (especially highly paid lawyers) who claim to be protecting freedom on some ideological ground and choose to focus on these ones (which just happen to net them somewhere between 5-10K a pop). Call me cynical, but this guy seems like just another scumbag DUI attorney, and the video doesn’t impress me in the least.