Posts in "DUI"

By Brian Beyer at 5:43PM

May 4, 2010

Michael Crook: Worst Person of the Day

Today, I will be borrowing the idea of "The Worst Person of the Day" from uber statist Keith Olbermann. Today, that award goes to Michael Crook.

As you may or may have not heard, Steven Consalvi, a 17 year old from Philadelphia, ran on the field during a Philadelphia Phillies game. Some people may have not found the stunt funny, but I sure did. It can be seen here.

Michael Crook, on the 'Steve Consalvi is a Hero' Facebook page, wrote,

How can you people call him a hero? Look at the defiance and arrogance on his face, along with that enormous nose. Hopefully, Penn will yank him as a student and he will get jail time for what he did. He should have been shot with a real gun. Too bad the cop was too much of a coward to do that.

While what he did was technically criminal, would it really warrant lethal force? Even the tasing is in question. After all, he had no escape and would have eventually had to surrender. Why put the kid's life in danger?

Cities Begin Abusing Checkpoints for Revenue

The San Diego Union-Tribune recently published this staff editorial pointing out some how some cities are setting up random checkpoints in order to impound vehicles and sell them for city revenue.

Never underestimate just how creative municipal governments can be when it comes to finding new ways to generate revenue. And, as you might imagine, they tend to get even more enterprising during a time of severe budget cuts. Given all that, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that many local governments in California are using a new tool to help fill their coffers: the impoundments of vehicles at random police checkpoints.

Say it isn’t so. According to a recent series in The New York Times, these kinds of operations have become increasingly profitable and now exist, more often, to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than to catch drunken drivers.

Sleeping Man Convicted of DUI

As reported on the LewRockwell.com blog, a Minnesota man was convicted for drunk driving because he was found sleeping in his inoperable car in the parking lof of his own apartment building:

The Supreme Court of Minnesota on Thursday upheld the drunk driving conviction of a man caught asleep behind the wheel of a vehicle that would not start. At 11:30pm on June 11, 2007, police found Daryl Fleck sleeping in his own legally parked car in his apartment complex parking lot. The vehicle’s engine was cold to the touch, indicating it had not been driven recently. The keys were in the center console, not the ignition. Fleck admitted to having consumed around a dozen beers that night.

It sounds much more like he was, in fact, avoiding drunk driving by sleeping, a crime for which he'll get four years in prison for it. No doubt this is for his own good (eye roll), for as the judge explained, he was "was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of being in physical control of a vehicle." Riiight, because clearly he could have done so much with a car he could only have moved by pushing it.

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