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Bart wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:As AFCop has testified, he has gotten successful DWI convictions on people who blew significantly less than the legal limit.

They can get a DWI conviction with zero alcohol consumption. If the driver is intoxicated because of any foreign substance, legal or not, "drug" or not, that's enough. Intoxicated is intoxicated.

No argument from me. You reinforce my point.

JNMAR wrote:

lws380 wrote:I'm glad it turned out the way it did and I too think it could have gone a lot worse. Good luck on getting the ticket taken care of.

You mentioned you are younger and in college. From an older guy I would recommend you restrain from drinking and driving and restrain from concealed carry and drinking. If it happens again, you may not be so lucky. Then you will be out tons of money to try and defend yourself. If I drink, I don't drive or carry. I'm not trying to be critical, just offer some advice that might help in the future. Best of luck to you!

And, not to pile on, but I would add one more thing...

I rarely ever consume alcohol anymore — maybe not more than 3 or 4 times a year now and never more than one or two drinks (usually a bottle of cold beer) at a time — but like most people who are moderate in their alcohol consumption, I am fully aware of whether or not it is having much effect on me. Being a largish person, it probably takes a little more to intoxicate me than would be required to intoxicate a mere slip of a man; but even so, there is some boundary point at which the alcohol is beginning to affect me, but I'm not noticing it yet because in addition to the minuscule physical impairment, there is also a minuscule impairment of judgment. That is the only mature way to look at it. Any other attitude falls into the realm of denial, and denial is not truth; it will not set you free. So, the only way to be intellectually honest about the effects of alcohol is to confess that, although we may be largely in control after only one or two drinks, it does have some effect on us, and that effect is a degree of impairment (not enhancement) of both our judgment and our physical coordination, even if those effects are not perceptible to us.

But there is more at stake here than just whether or not you are too impaired to drive a car. A prosecutor who has an unfriendly agenda with regard to CHL will use any evidence of alcohol in your system against you, even if you had only one beer and it was two hours before a self-defense shooting in which you were involved. It won't matter that you were intellectually in control enough to discern a legitimate threat to your safety in which, under any other circumstances, use of deadly force might be justifiable. A hostile prosecutor will take that evidence and use it against you... ...and until proven otherwise, you should consider all prosecutors to be hostile to your interests as a matter of practical application if you are involved in a self-defense shooting. The only sure-fire way to deny a prosecutor that evidence is to not create it in the first place by not having any alcohol in your system when you are carrying a gun.

Before anybody jumps on me about this, let me say that I am not 100% perfect in that application either. Although virtually all of what little alcohol I consume is consumed at home, I have had a beer with dinner in a restaurant, and I was carrying at the time. So I'm not perfect either; but that doesn't change the truth of what I've written above.

As AFCop has testified, he has gotten successful DWI convictions on people who blew significantly less than the legal limit. If you have to shoot somebody in the parking lot of a restaurant where you had one single beer with your dinner, and an LEO on scene asks you to blow into his meter (or takes you in for a blood test, etc., etc.), and any alcohol is found in your system, you are going to be deep in the Kimchi. So any protestations that you were not intoxicated and were in control of your faculties are out the window.

Just my 2¢.