Yet Another Judge Refuses to Blow

8 comments May 16th, 2008

Illinois judges are on a roll: Almost without exception, any Illinois judge arrested for DUI refuses to take a breath test. Many also refuse the field sobriety test.

From the AP, via the Daily Chronicle:

TINLEY PARK, Ill. - A Cook County judge is expected to appear in court next month on drunken driving charges filed last week in the southern Chicago suburb of Tinley Park.

Tinley Park Police Commander Rick Bruno said Thursday that 47-year-old Judge Sheila McGinnis of Chicago was charged with misdemeanor driving under the influence after she struck another vehicle stopped at a traffic light on the evening of May 8.

Bruno said it appeared McGinnis was not traveling at a high speed, and neither she nor the five occupants of the minivan she struck were injured.

Officers said that when police arrived, McGinnis appeared intoxicated and smelled strongly of alcohol, but she refused to submit to a field sobriety test or a breath analysis.

Since covering appellate courts for the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in 1999 and 2000, I’ve been intrigued by the uncanny consistency with which judges handle DUI arrests.

Who knows the law better than a judge?

Last spring, I authored an overview on this topic for the Register Star:

Cases filed by the state’s Judicial Inquiry Board, which prosecutes judicial misconduct, read like a playbook for limiting your culpability during a DUI stop. […]

John Karns, an appellate court justice from southern Illinois, refused to blow when he was arrested for DUI in 1978. He threatened to fight police officers and “challenged one or more of the police personnel to engage in such fighting,” the JIB said.

The next morning, Karns and his lawyer seized all police documents pertaining to his arrest. The JIB said he and his lawyer destroyed or suppressed them, and that he was never prosecuted.

The JIB prosecuted two other judges arrested for DUI in the 1970s, but its complaints in those cases make no mention of breath or field sobriety tests. In that decade, breath tests were not yet widely used.

George Ray, a trial judge in central Illinois, refused field sobriety and breath tests during his DUI stop in 1989. A sheriff’s deputy stopped him for swerving in and out of his lane 20 minutes after seeing the judge sleeping in his vehicle outside a tavern.

Ray was convicted of improper lane usage but the DUI charge was dropped.

Edwin Gausselin, a Cook County judge, was stopped in 1998 for DUI in Michigan City, Ind. He refused field sobriety and breath tests, and officers later found an open bottle of whiskey in his vehicle. An Indiana judge dismissed a drunken driving and two other criminal charges, according to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.

The same year, a sheriff’s deputy arrested LaSalle County Judge Cynthia Raccuglia for DUI. The deputy discovered her vehicle in the middle of a street after another motorist towed it from a ditch. As the deputy followed her from the scene, the judge steered her vehicle off the road and attempted to drive down railroad tracks.

Raccuglia submitted to field sobriety tests but refused to take a breath test. She pleaded guilty to reckless driving.

Then in late April, there was this:

Lake County Chief Judge David Hall refused to take Breathalyzer and field sobriety tests Saturday morning when he was pulled over for allegedly weaving across the center lane, according to Lake County court documents.