Too many DWI cases get knotted up when the
defense attorney is unable to interview the officers involved in the
arrest before trial.
It's not a hardship for the
client, because judges often grant the defense its request for dismissal.
But it probably is the biggest contributor to Metropolitan Court's high
dismissal rate. About 33 percent of the 7,000 DWI cases filed annually
fall by the wayside.
Now, Metropolitan Court
proposes to slice through the knot by shifting the burden for conducting
the interviews to the defense.
The schedule for
providing witness lists to opposing attorneys would be accelerated, as
would the timetable for completing interviews. But instead of being able
to ask the court to dismiss charges if the pretrial interview wasn't
completed, defense attorneys could ask the court to order a witness to
submit to an interview.
And if the chain of events
didn't occur on the front-loaded timetable, the right to pretrial
interviews— and the ability to use lack of one as the basis for dismissal—
would be lost.
The court, prosecutors and law
enforcement should make defense attorneys' new burden as light as
possible. Facilities at, or convenient to, the courthouse should be
provided to ease interview logistics. All involved should have access to a
case scheduling system that keeps everybody on the same page of the
calendar and minimizes conflicts. The District Attorney's Office should
contact officers or their supervisors about impending appearances and
notify departments when officers fail to show up. The burden should be put
on departments to impose appropriate discipline.
If
the state Supreme Court adopts new rules along the lines of the proposal,
more attorneys will focus on preparing to defend their client at trial—
and far fewer DWI suspects will detour around justice.
