Extremely Lame

Less than a week after I post an entry about the jackbooted thugs in Arizona regarding arresting people for being drunk when they aren’t, we have another case of an Arizona cop abusing his authority and falsely imprisoning someone for DUI when said person was not just below the legal limit, but had a Blood Alcohol content of 0.00.

Heather Squires was acting as the designated driver for her husband who happens to be a DUI lawyer and a buddy of his who just got accepted to law school. Shortly thereafter, she gets pulled over, and instead of asking her if she’d been drinking, orders her out of the car and tries to get her to take a field sobriety test in a patch of gravel in high heels. At her husband’s recommendation, she refused (as is her right), so she was immediately handcuffed and arrested for DUI and driving over the .08 limit (As an aside, why do we need two different standards to say that someone’s impaired to drive?). Never mind that the arresting officer never gave her a breathalyzer test, nor did the other four cops who arrived at the scene.

That said, this case may not be exactly random. The interesting thing is that Heather’s husband is a DUI lawyer in the same city that she was pulled over. Her husband had gotten someone off of a DUI a few months previously in a case where this guy was the arresting officer, and they just so happened to be in her husband’s car.

Note this. She had not had a drop to drink. Nothing at all. None of the police officers did a breathalyzer test to confirm assertions that she was as sober as a judge. She was driving at night, so they pretty much assumed from the get-go that she was drunk. This isn’t just wild speculation here. The officer, during the trial that Jason Squires defended a few months prior to this incident, admitted in court that he’d regularly pull people over at night for things that he’d never pull people over for during the day.

And people wonder why the police are rarely seen as protectors of the public good these days.