It was perhaps a precedent-setting reversal the Arkansas Court of Appeals handed down last week on drunken-driving arrests.
Basically, the court said just because an officer witnesses the passenger in a parked vehicle leaning out of an open door while throwing up doesn't constitute valid grounds to arrest the driver for being under the influence. There must be some legitimate grounds to stop and cite a driver based on an officer's legitimate suspicions that he or she is lawbreaking or intoxicated.
In this interesting case, the driver of a Chevrolet Tahoe, William D. Meeks, pulled into a Fayetteville supermarket lot at 1 a.m. to let his passenger get sick outside. I'd have done the same thing.
Fayetteville officer Kristin Mercado was passing and saw the passenger as he was throwing up. The news account by veteran reporter Ron Wood said she shined her patrol car's spotlight on the Tahoe but didn't flip on the blue lights.
By then, the passenger was back inside the SUV. Meeks began driving and Mercado used her lights to stop him because he began to drive away.
Meeks wound up arrested on drunken-driving charges. He appeared before Circuit Judge Mark Lindsey, who denied Meeks' request to suppress the evidence used against him. Meeks had argued he hadn't given the police officer any cause to even suspect he was driving while intoxicated, or doing anything criminally wrong. All he'd done was to allow his friend to get sick outside.
Nonetheless, Meeks entered a conditional guilty plea and appealed, arguing there was no legitimate reason to pull him over, including any need for emergency aid. His friend was just sick to his stomach.
After confabbing, the appeals judges found Meek's argument convincing. They ordered the case remanded for further court proceedings based on their findings. Here's what they determined:
"Officer Mercado did not observe anything that would lead a reasonable person to suspect that either Meeks or his passenger was committing any crime. The only information known about Meeks' passenger was that he was leaning out of a vehicle and [throwing up]. This act gives rise to a suspicion only that the passenger was sick, the cause of which is irrelevant because, whether due to a stomach virus, a gastrointestinal condition, eating too much, drinking alcohol, or any combination of these things, none of these things is illegal in Arkansas."
They also said a dashcam video showed Meeks wasn't trying to evade the police officer, but simply leaving under normal circumstances.
Finally, the appeals court justices found there was no reason for an emergency exception since there wasn't a shred of evidence that Meeks had sought the officer's help or that he couldn't deal with his sick friend's needs.
It's an interesting ruling, one that raises a number of questions in every instance where there's no apparent legitimate cause to stop and cite a motorist for violating the state's driving laws.
One jumping readily to mind involves police roadblocks where every motorist passing through is stopped and questioned without any cause other than a wide-cast net to perhaps find those otherwise driving safely who have had a drink and climbed behind the wheel.
The only reason for stopping me was that I was driving that night, right? Perhaps this comparison's on-point. Not being an attorney, I can't say with any certainty. Yet, based on my take, both instances have gotta be brothers from the same law-abiding mother.
His worst opponent
A beleaguered Benton County Sheriff Kelley Cradduck has emerged to rehash on KURM radio in Rogers that he's convinced the barrage of bad press he's been getting of late is the result of "half-truths and childish allegations" and behind-the-scenes politickin' in an election year.
It's basically the same refrain Cradduck has repeated for months.
These flaps include that in some instances he's chosen to be selective about which media he'll give interviews. There's an employee's admitted improper use of county vehicles for personal vacation travel. Then the matter of allegedly ordering two jail deputies to backdate the starting date for a newly hired deputy who listed Cradduck's address as his own, the same man Cradduck also had to fire recently after he was arrested on misdemeanor drug charges. An ongoing Arkansas State Police investigation. Then there's the latest grievance filed by a deputy jailer alleging that Cradduck created a hostile work environment. Whew!
Cradduck claims one or more of his three opponents in the coming election have been peppering him with a sustained barrage of politically driven controversies that give the impression things aren't operating smoothly in his department when, in fact, they've never been better.
Hmm. Personally, I think he'd have been far better off by never having turned away any reporters and choosing to attend the grievance hearing against him to make his arguments heard to begin with. In that respect, the sheriff has done far more damage to himself publicly than his worst opponent could possibly do.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 01/17/2016