Lawyer Got Him Out, He Got Himself In
A Stamford, Conn., man who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor drunken driving earlier this year following a June 2014 crash on Napeague, so angered the judge in the case that he was resentenced on July 30 to nine months in jail.
Three months after the accident, in which Sidney R. Hughes, a motorcyclist, was severely injured and underwent multiple operations, a grand jury indicted the driver, Jason E. Monet, 44, for assault in the second degree, a felony, among other felony charges. East Hampton Town police said at the time that Mr. Monet’s westbound 2013 BMW had swerved across Route 27 in front of Sidney R. Hughes’s 2005 Yamaha, which was headed east, to turn in to the Ocean Vista Resort, where he was staying. Police tracked the BMW to the resort’s parking lot by following a trail of parts and fluid from the wrecked but still moving BMW.
Mr. Monet’s lawyer, Barry S. Jacobson, said following the indictment that he was happy to see the case move to the courtroom of State Supreme Court Justice Fernando Camacho in Central Islip, as his client could not get a fair trial in East Hampton. He said many angry members of the Enders East Motorcycle Club would have shown up in support of their fellow member, a Montauk resident who has since left the area, had Mr. Monet appeared in justice court here.
The case dragged on, with nine appearances before Justice Camacho. According to Jim Barr, president of American Bikers for Awareness, Training, and Education, an advocacy group that continued to monitor the proceedings, contributing to the delay was the fact that there were no witnesses to the accident.
On April 17, Mr. Jacobson stipulated that his client would plead guilty to misdemeanor drunken driving in exchange for the dismissal of the three felony charges, the most serious of which could have sent him to prison for up to seven years. Mr. Monet was given a conditional discharge, requiring him to meet regularly with a probation officer and to have an interlock device on his car.
According to Robert Clifford, spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota, that device caught Mr. Monet “on multiple occasions, trying to drive while impaired or intoxicated, in June of this year.” The defendant told his probation officer that “he had been painting, and the fumes from the paint caused the interlock to register an alcohol reading.”
On another occasion, Mr. Clifford said on Tuesday, Mr. Monet, who owns a hair salon in Stamford, told the officer that the interlock was recording alcohol in his system due to “hair product fumes.”
On July 14, Justice Camacho had had enough. According to Mr. Clifford, he “remanded Monet to the county jail due to the violations, and the preposterous explanations he gave to probation and the court.”
“On July 30, the defendant admitted to the violations of his conditional discharge conditions, specifically that on numerous occasions he attempted to operate his vehicle with greater than a 0.02 [blood-alcohol level] and consequently was locked out of operating his vehicle by the ignition interlock device,” Mr. Clifford wrote in an email.
Justice Camacho then sentenced Mr. Monet to the nine-month term in the county jail in Yaphank, where he will be expected to participate in an alcohol treatment program. He began serving his term immediately after the sentence was pronounced.