Prosecutors in both Suffolk County and town court systems are turning up the heat on drunken drivers, leaving them with little room to plead down their charges.
Ever since May 3, when two teenage tennis players from Roslyn were killed in a crash with an alleged drunken driver in the Nassau County hamlet of Jericho, pressure from the local community has mounted on prosecutors to take cases of drunken driving much more seriously — and lawyers here say they are seeing the difference.
“I think that the community and MADD” — formerly known as Mothers Against Drunk Driving — “have brought a lot of pressure on the D.A.’s office and the police,” said Susan Menu, a Springs attorney. She is “noticing that things are changing,” she said in a recent interview.
State law allows judges to impose various penalties upon conviction, including fines, community service, probation, rehabilitation programs, and jail time. First-time D.W.I. offenses are misdemeanors; charges rise to the felony level if a defendant was convicted of drunken driving within 10 years of the current offense.
By way of example, Ms. Menu spoke of a man who had a blood-alcohol reading of .12 of 1 percent; the legal limit is .08 and a charge of aggravated D.W.I. starts at .18. This recent case was “not ‘aggravated,’ but ‘intoxicated,’ and right away he was offered a jail sentence,” she said. “That would never have happened a month ago. It is a direct result of the seriousness of the D.A.’s office, and rightfully so.”
Melissa Aguanno, a Holbrook attorney who has clients in both the East Hampton and Southampton Town court systems, concurred. Prosecutors “are trying to protect the community,” she said. “I believe their intentions are in the right place.”
The crackdown now is aimed primarily at the average, everyday person — a first-time offender, not someone with prior convictions, or twice the legal blood-alcohol reading, or a car crash to answer for. That driver now has fewer options. Those very minimal, just-legally-drunk cases, which were easier to plead down with community service and an evaluation for an alcohol problem, are the ones now seeing the stiffer penalties, Ms. Aguanno said.
“It used to be that with a .15, you might have wiggle room” to plead down to impaired driving. “Now, there has to be an extenuating circumstance to get that reduced plea.”
It should come as a warning to drivers to make safer choices, the attorneys agreed. “People should be paying attention,” Ms. Menu said. “It costs $20,000 to defend” a D.W.I. charge.
“It’s harder to negotiate the cases, there’s no question about it,” Ms. Aguanno said.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney’s office also weighed in on the heavier-handed approach to D.W.I. prosecution.
“It is necessary for us to make tougher recommendations where appropriate and necessary,” a D.A. spokesperson said in a statement. “Any time there is stepped-up D.W.I. enforcement on our roads, where more officers are patrolling on Suffolk County roadways with an eye toward D.W.I. enforcement, we hope for less incidents and crashes. There is no excuse” for drunken driving.
Mr. Tierney’s prosecutors typically do not reduce charges for “D.W.I. fatals [or] serious physical injury,” the spokesperson continued, and they “endeavor to take strong positions where that would be the proper outcome.”
The ever-changing landscape is moving in favor of releasing the incarcerated with “presumptive release, the advent of Clean Slate legislation, [and] the reality that more and more defendants seem to be getting out of prison after serving the minimum or close to it on indeterminate sentences,” the spokesperson commented.
Earlier this summer, the county sheriff’s office introduced Project HEAT, a high-enforcement effort to keep drunken drivers off the road.
“THE HEAT IS ON this summer for drunk and drugged drivers in Suffolk County,” County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon Jr. said in a June 29 statement, with capital letters for emphasis. “Our deputy sheriffs will be out in full force patrolling the roadways with an eye out for impaired drivers. If you don’t drive sober, you will be pulled over.”
Beginning around July 4, the sheriff’s office began increasing D.W.I. patrols and checkpoints from Huntington to the East End. Summer is one of the deadliest times of the year because of drunken drivers; the National Safety Council estimated that 462 people were killed on the road in July 4 weekend crashes last year, “with excessive alcohol use the cause of 41 percent of these fatalities.”
The sheriff’s D.W.I. team has already made a record-high number of impaired-driving arrests this year, it said, with “nearly a 40-percent increase in D.W.I./D.U.I. arrests from 2022.”
Sheriff Toulon has offered a few personal safety tips:
“If you are hosting a party, designate a sober driver or arrange for alternate transportation to ensure guests get home safely,” he said. “If you’ve been drinking and you don’t have a designated driver, then ask a sober friend for a ride home, call a taxi or ride-share service, or just stay for the night. Also, take the keys from a friend if you think they are about to drive while impaired.”