DUI Entrapment
Information
courtesy of Lawrence Taylor - DUIblog
Suppose
a police officer asks or orders an individual to drive a vehicle
-- and then arrests him for DUI when he complies?
This
situation comes up more often than you might think. Take, for example,
the following case that eventually made its way to the New Jersey
Supreme Court....
The
defendant asked his brothers at a wedding reception to drive him
home because he was too intoxicated to drive. In the parking lot,
however, the brothers got into a fight, attracting the attention
of local police. One of the officers struck a brother with his nightstick.
The defendant asked the officer to quit hitting his brother. The
officer replied by ordering him to leave the parking lot. When the
defendant did not immediately comply, the officer repeated the order
and then forcefully escorted him to his truck. The defendant obediently
got into the vehicle, started the engine -- and backed into a police
car.
He
was arrested for drunk driving.
At
trial, the judge ruled that the defendant had failed to prove entrapment
or duress as a defense, and he was convicted. On appeal, however,
the conviction was reversed on grounds of quasi-entrapment -- that
is, the defendant should have been acquitted if he could show that
but for the officer’s order to leave in the vehicle he would
not have driven. The prosecution appealed this reversal to the state’s
supreme court.
Incredibly,
the supreme court reversed the lower court and reinstated the conviction.
Its reasoning? "Obviously," the court said, "if the
law were to permit [drunk drivers] to offer as a defense that they
drove only because they reasonably feared that telling the police
that they were drunk might lead to arrest, the invitation to offer
a pretext would be clear". The court continued its twisted
logic:
"No
one ordered the defendant to get drunk and no one ordered defendant
to drive drunk. The police did not coerce defendant into driving
his vehicle through the use
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