Free Republic

SANTA FE – About four years ago, a doctor probably helped Juliana Reyes Vasquez into the world. Now, a doctor is accused of ending her life. Juliana, 4, died early Saturday morning, about two hours after an alleged drunken driver struck a minivan at a Santa Fe intersection that carried the child, her 3-year-old sister Yeretez Jasmine Reyes Vasquez and their mother, Carla Vasquez Rivera. Mother and sister were both injured, but survived. Both girls were in the back seat and in car seats at the time of the crash, and both drivers were wearing seatbelts, according to police. Deborah...

MANKATO, Minn. - A KEYC-TV anchor who made David Letterman's Top 10 List after many speculated she could have been drunk during a newscast has been arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. An anonymous caller contacted the North Mankato Police Department on Wednesday morning to report an intoxicated person was leaving a Roe Crest Drive residence in a vehicle. A report describing the vehicle was put out to law enforcement officers in the area and the car was stopped by a Nicollet County sheriff's deputy on U.S. 14. Annie Stensrud, 28, was arrested for allegedly driving while intoxicated. She...

The trooper’s radar had Robert Jahns going 119 mph. Not only was he well over the 70-mph speed limit, he was intoxicated and his wife and stepchildren, ages 5 and 16, were in the car, according to the Indiana State Police. The family was driving through Steuben County, heading north on Interstate 69 to Battle Creek, Mich., for a Thanksgiving Day gathering. Another motorist alerted authorities to Jahns’ driving, and trooper Chris Kinsey received a report about 5 p.m. Thursday that a vehicle was traveling at more than 100 mph on the interstate. Kinsey later spotted Jahns’ car, a 2005...

GOP Rep. Steve King (R-IA) - a stalwart opponent of illegal alien amnesty, came out with a strong response to Barack Obama's "Uncle Omar" - the 20-year fugitive from justice busted for DUI in Massachussetts 2 weeks ago, who was then summarily released by ICE a few days ago. This follows the outrage of Obama's Aunt Zeituni mooching off welfare and public housing for years in Boston, before being outed - and then getting asylum in an unprecedented closed immigration hearing. As Judiciary Chariman Lamar Smith said Friday, "It appears there is a double standard — one for President Obama’s...

Huge increases in deportations of people after they were arrested for breaking traffic or immigration laws or driving drunk helped the Obama administration set a record last year for the number of criminal immigrants forced to leave the country, documents show. The U.S. deported nearly 393,000 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, half of whom were considered criminals. Of those, 27,635 had been arrested for drunken driving, more than double the 10,851 deported after drunken driving arrests in 2008, the last full year of the Bush administration, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data provided to The...

Shocking, isn’t it? But good on the Washington Times for exposing the money grab behind the “public safety” campaign to mandate the devices for first-time DUI offenders. A bill that would withhold up to 5 percent of each state’s highway funding unless that state requires such as device in the cars of all convicted drunken drivers was introduced in the Senate in February by Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, New Jersey Democrat, and last month in the House by Rep. Eliot L. Engel, New York Democrat. For the past 18 months, lobbyists for “ignition interlocks,” as they are called, have jockeyed...

BROADALBIN -- A car driven by an off-duty state trooper likely hit a Northville man who was found dead in the road, and the victim had a previous DWI conviction for striking a teenage girl, authorities said. The Fulton County Sheriff's Office said the trooper, Brian Beardsley, 32, was driving with his girlfriend on county Highway 110 around 2:41 a.m. Sunday when he struck Chad E. Finch, 29, of South Shore Road. Deputies say the original call to police was made by an unidentified woman who reported that she saw what appeared to be a body in the southbound lane...

HURLEY — The wife of Rep. Maurice Hinchey was charged Tuesday night with driving drunk. State police said Allison Lee-Hinchey, 49, of Hurley, was pulled over at 9:40 p.m. on Morgan Hill Road for allegedly failing to keep right, use a turn signal and stop at a stop sign. She had a blood-alcohol content of 0.12 percent, and was charged with two counts of driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor, state police said. Lee-Hinchey works as a lobbyist for DKC and represents the Committee to Save New York, a pro-governor group that spent nearly $5 million in March and April. She...

Laura Barfield spends a lot of time these days swinging around Florida in her state-issued Chevy to defend the technology that the state uses to catch drunken drivers. As the state's chief defender of the breath-testing Intoxilyzer, her job is to assure everyone that the most challenged of all forensic tests is accurate and reliable. In recent weeks, she has been called to testify in Sarasota, Hillsborough and Port St. Lucie counties. In the weeks ahead, she has dates with courtrooms in Taylor, Lake, Leon, Pinellas and Escambia. It has gotten to the point where the state's breath-testing machine is...

Looking back, David Dutcher realizes the gorgeous blonde who approached him through an online dating service came on too strong. During their 2008 date at the Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown Concord, Dutcher said the woman chugged shots of hard alcohol and punctuated each with a kiss to his lips. After a second flirtatious woman showed up, the blonde told Dutcher, then a 46-year-old recent divorcee, that their night would continue if he followed the ladies home to join them in a hot tub. Dutcher never got there - minutes after he left the restaurant, a Concord police officer pulled...

Two men were arrested for driving while intoxicated on 6th Street Friday night. One was riding a horse, while the other was riding a mule. Austin police say the ment were both intoxicated. They were apparently trying to lure people out of bars and into the street to take pictures with them and their farm animals. Bartender Brian Matthews thought he'd seen everything, that is until he walked outside to have a cigarette Friday night. "There were these two guys on horses, or mules, or something, outside of Shakespeare's," he said. "(It) looked like they were being pulled over for...

SAN DIEGO — A drunken wrong-way driver who caused the death of a sheriff’s deputy who tried to stop him was sentenced Friday to seven years and eight months in prison, a term some of the deputy’s supporters said was too low. Jose Pedro Lopez Jasso, 23, was charged in connection with the Feb. 28 death of Deputy Ken Collier. Eight months later, he pleaded guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and other charges related to the deputy’s crash in Santee. Lopez also pleaded guilty to manufacturing a weapon — a comb fashioned into a shank — while in...

GALVESTON — A Galveston County assistant district attorney and a sheriff’s deputy were among 25 people charged with driving while intoxicated, authorities said Friday. Prosecutor Lester Blizzard, 50, and deputy Tino Ramirez, 43, were booked on the charges stemming from Thursday night arrests, sheriff’s office spokesman Maj. Ray Tuttoilmondo said. Their bonds on the misdemeanor charges were set at $5,000 each. Their arrests followed traffic stops by state troopers at 51st Street and Harborside Drive in Galveston, Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, said. Blizzard was arrested at 10:16 p.m. State troopers accused Blizzard of speeding...

When an inebriated driver was pulled over by police after being spotted swerving dangerously across the road in Lincoln, Nebraska he must have known that his chances did not look good. The bottle of vodka and empty beer cans might be overlooked, but the head-to-toe breathalyser costume was going to be a dead giveaway. Matthew Nieveen, 19, had spent the evening at a Halloween party in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he decided to model himself after a blood alcohol monitor used to test suspected drunk drivers. It is believed he then got behind the wheel of his pickup truck after the...

CONROE, Texas — Montgomery County jurors sent a message that drunk driving in the county will not be tolerated. George Harvey, 59, was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday after a jury thought eight convictions for driving while intoxicated was too many to let him back on the streets.

A Bexar County grand jury Wednesday returned four murder indictments against Valerie Andrews, 39, accused in August of driving drunk, fleeing police and causing a collision that killed four people. Andrews was indicted under the “felony murder rule” because at the time of the Aug. 8 crash on the South Side, she was evading police — a felony, a news release from the district attorney's office states. The rule allows a murder charge to be applied to someone who causes the death of another while committing or trying to commit a felony, the news release said. In the past two...

A campaign to create a new category of driving while intoxicated is being promoted at the Capitol as one way to curb growing problems in Texas' system of punishing drunken drivers. Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, among the supporters of the change, said the idea behind a new offense of "driving while ability impaired" — DWAI — would cover drivers whose blood-alcohol content is between 0.05 and 0.07

SAN ANTONIO -- How drunk is drunk? Some police officers in Texas want a newly revised definition. Currently, the blood alcohol level (BAC) of 0.08 or higher is considered to be under the influence, but one police chief wants to lower that number and change the legal limit. KENS 5 talked to drivers about the proposed new law and we observed a varied reaction. The next time you are at the bar or perhaps at a sporting event enjoying a casual cocktail, you may want to think twice about drinking that alcoholic beverage before planning to drive. "I guess if...

George Michael wept yesterday as a judge told him he was a drug addict - and jailed him for crashing his range rover into a shop. The singer was sentenced to eight weeks for driving after taking a 'dangerous and unpredictable' cocktail of cannabis and anti-anxiety prescription medication - but may be out of jail in a month.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Hundreds of DUI and other traffic cases are in jeopardy after 1,300 Metro police crime videos were deleted by a glitch in computer software. "It's a fairly significant piece of evidence obviously," said presiding General Sessions Judge Dan Eisenstein. The judge said video evidence can play a key role in all types of criminal cases. "It's highly unusual. It doesn't happen everyday," said Eisenstein. Metro police said an ICOP computer system caused the problem over a six month period. The video is recorded in the squad car and onto a hard drive. When the hard drive was...