Report: Indiana County Pleads Out Most Drunk Driving Cases

Less than 40 percent of the drunken driving cases filed in Lake County courts in the past five years have resulted in drunken driving convictions, according to a newspaper analysis published Sunday.

The Times of Munster found that more than half of all cases were pleaded down to misdemeanor reckless driving, and more than a quarter of defendants charged with injuring or killing someone in a drunken driving accident had been charged with drunken driving before.

The newspaper analyzed more than 9,000 misdemeanor and felony drunken driving cases filed in Indiana’s second most populous county between 2006 and 2010. It found that more than 700 defendants reoffended within the five-year period. The analysis did not include cases filed in city or town courts in Lake County.

Bonnie Hough of Merrillville, whose son was killed in a wreck caused by a repeat drunken-driving offender, said she believes prosecutors and judges are in such a hurry to dispose of cases that they forget their duty to keep streets safe.

“You’d think they’d think it through a little more and stop giving free passes,” she said.

Her son, Stephen Hough, and two other people died in an April 2008 collision caused by Mario Cadena, 30, of Crown Point, who had a blood alcohol level at the time of 0.17 – more than twice the 0.08 legal limit for driving. Cadena, who also died in the crash, had twice before received leniency from prosecutors and a judge for driving while intoxicated, the Times reported.

Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter said his office’s policy for plea agreements in drunken driving cases is based on an offender’s level of intoxication, and whether there are other circumstances involved, such as injuries, deaths or resisting law enforcement.

Most first-time offenders’ charges are pleaded down to misdemeanor reckless driving, the Times analysis showed.

A reckless driving conviction gives a defendant six points on his or her driver’s license instead of the eight points imposed after an operating-while-intoxicated conviction. Drivers face the possible suspension or loss of their licenses if they accumulate 18 points over two years. Points also can drive up auto insurance premiums and restrict driving privileges.

If a defendant is charged more than once with drunken driving during a five-year period, the subsequent charges are supposed to be felonies. But a plea to reckless driving is not a drunken driving conviction. Therefore, if a defendant is charged again within five years, the charge will be a misdemeanor.

Defendants must still pay attorneys’ fees, fines, and probation and counseling costs. They also may be sentenced to performing community service, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, wearing monitoring devices or speaking to children at local schools about the dangers of drunken driving.

“There’s a lot of justice that really is incurred here,” said Peter Villarreal, first assistant deputy prosecutor in Lake County. “Even though someone might say, ‘Oh, they reduced it to a reckless driving.’ Well, you know what, there’s a whole lot that goes into that.”

Carter said defense attorneys would threaten to send all drunken driving cases to trial if prosecutors became too stringent with plea guidelines.

“We had to come up with a policy that the people of Lake County can live with and that the judges can live with – that we can move these cases but yet get justice,” Carter said.

In Marion County, the state’s most populous county, the majority of first-time offenders plead guilty to a drunken driving charge, said Brad Banks, a division supervisor in the county prosecutor’s office.

Jack Crawford, an Indianapolis defense attorney and former Lake County prosecutor, said public perception determines how prosecutors handle drunken driving cases.

“Murder, rape, robbery, child molesting – people think, ‘I would never do that. None of my friends would ever do that,”‘ he said. “But when it comes to operating while intoxicated, it’s a little bit difficult to argue that same point.”

Crawford said drunken drivers receive the most lenient treatment in Floyd and Clark counties in southern Indiana, followed by Lake County.

“I know at first glance that might appear to be unfair,” he said. “If you have the same law in one county and you’re convicted of it, shouldn’t you receive either the same or at least close to the same penalty as if you were convicted in a county 300 miles away? Technically and legally, I suppose that’s true, but, practically, it isn’t true.”