Well, the legislature is at it again. They will do anything to get their pictures in the paper or on TV regardless of the sense of the legislation. They continue to draft more and more legislation that is more and more punitive towards drinking and driving but they care not about defining who in fact are the culprits that society is concerned about.
Now they want to put names and addresses on websites and allow an officer to force an accused to take a chemical test if arrested for drinking and driving. Unfortunately, at no time in the last twenty five years has the legislature ever considered requiring law enforcement to use chemical tests that accurately measure the amount of alcohol in the body of an accused person. Nor has it ever considered requiring law enforcement to release, without charging, someone who actually passes the test that has been administered.
More distressing, the Ohio Supreme Court has ordered that juries are not permitted to know the truth of how defective are the chemical tests used in this state or how incompetently they are administered to an accused. If juries were told at trial that the scientific principles that underpin the breath testing machines used in Ohio are akin to flipping a coin, few convictions would occur.
The result is that many people who are driving legally are accused and convicted because of faulty equipment and faulty science, both of which are concealed from juries at trial, resulting in faulty verdicts. Clearly a horribly black mark on our legal system.
And don't even tell me that we need to get drunk drivers off the streets. That is begging the question. We agree on that principle. The point is that we should be just as committed to preventing the conviction of innocent people as we are obtaining convictions of the guilty.
The mantra in Ohio is: If it's good enough for a totalitarian regime, it will work for us as well.