How Dare the Police Enforce the Law I Wrote!
Months after a D.C. woman gets hauled in for driving after drinking a single glass of wine, prompting the D.C. council to revise its moronic DUI laws, The Washington Post asks how the law got that way in the first place:
On July 7 of [1998], then-council member Sandy Allen tried to tack an amendment onto the open-container law to lower the level at which a driver could be considered intoxicated from .05 to .03 and below.
On July 13, according to the thick legislative record, Allen again brought up the amendment and asked that it be attached to Schwartz's bill. There was no discussion. All three committee members -- Allen, Sharon Ambrose and Harry Thomas -- voted in favor.
Allen said in an interview yesterday that she does not remember proposing the legislation. An aide to Ambrose said that neither she nor Ambrose remembers the amendment. Thomas died in 1999.
"I think we were trying to minimize the number of alcohol-related fatalities in the region," Allen said. "It was not my intention to have a zero tolerance policy. That was the police, using their own discretion in how they interpreted the law."
Whole thing here.
