Thursday, July 07, 2011

Indiana Supreme Extreme Court: Vote 'Em Out.

I'm all for tarring, feathering and riding them out of town on a splintery split rail, but they tell me that's all nekulturny an' stuff.

Okay, fine; we'll vote 'em out. The latest insanity? A Public Intoxication DUI conviction -- for being a passenger! So much for the designated driver thing, kid, Carrie Nation's bastard sons don't like it. Demon Rum, y'know, and y'must be guilty of something. (I have been chided, and rightly so, for misstating the charge. I still gotta wonder: as long as a sober person is driving the inebriate in question home or to another non-public place, just how sensible it is to arrest 'em for being too far inside a bottle as long as they're not harming others.)

Our chance to start removing these "Justices" comes up in 2012, when Grand High (oh, ain't he?) Panjandrum of the Indiana Supreme Court Steven H. David takes his seat in the dunking booth. Let your aim be true, O Fellow Hoosiers, and vote this freedom-hating nitwit back to ambulance-chasing, where he belongs. Or, if he promises to be nice, the gutter, which is a step up.

My home state does a lot of things right. Picking him wasn't one of them. Some of his backup singers need to hie themselves otherwhere, too. Y'know, I'd even take me a straight-up Leftie, if he was a good lawyer and promised to read all the rules and apply 'em fair and square, rather than go diddling around after whatever whim went wafting through the howling, empty wilderness of his mind. But I'm a dreamer; Lawful Evil was only ever a category in a game.
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Semi-relatedly: Didja know Oklahoma was Dry from the start in 1907 right up through 1959? Strewth, and it was ended in an unusual manner: "In the 1950s governor J. Howard Edmondson, wanting to end the illegal traffic in booze, realized that the way to end prohibition was to enforce it. With vigorous tenacity Edmondson instructed local authorities to set up roadblocks, search vehicles, arrest violators [...]. [...]Oklahoma began to dry up, liquor became increasingly hard to find, hotels began to lose convention and conference business when it was learned for the first time that they wouldn’t be providing liquor. Now unable to get their drink, Oklahomans demanded change. [...W]ent to the polls and officially ended prohibition." D'ya suppose that was the original goal of the War On Some Drugs? --No, me neither. Anyway, there's your wild and wooly West, all two-faced Temperance an' such for half a century. Next time someone tells you this law or that will "take us back to the days of the old West," don't forget this tid-bit of history!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

My beef in this case is with the cops and prosecutor. As I read it, the court was right: "Hey, look: the law is the law, and our job is to see that it is followed."

What idiot police officer decided that writing a cite for "public drunkeness" was a good idea? And what prosecutor said, "It's a slow day; I'm takin' this one to da judge!"


Bah.

Anonymous said...

Not "DUI" (Indiana does not have this, but OWI), rather it is a conviction for Public Intoxication.

The General Assembly attempted to modify the PI statute last session but was tabled. Next year they should try again.

Shootin' Buddy

Old Grouch said...

What Shootin' Buddy said. You can be nailed for PI if you're walking down the street while drunk (or, I suppose, sitting on your own front porch, if you're being loud and obnoxious about it).

My first thought was this was yet another case of cop-being-ass, but if I can believe the Star story, I'm no longer so sure. It was a clusterf*** waiting to happen: The car was Moore's, but was (supposedly) being driven by a buddy who, it turns out, didn't have a driver's license. Wouldn't surprise me if the cop suspected a driver-switch and went into charge-everybody-present-with-anything-applicable mode, leaving the prosecutor to sort things out.

Anybody know if the "cause public harm and annoyance" test (that the court rejected) is part of the statute? Did Moore get loud and belligerent during the stop? I'd love to see the arrest tape.