says that South Carolina is one of two states in the nation where police officers prosecute their own DUI cases. Because the public index records, which is how we monitor many of our cases, do not indicate who prosecutes the case, we often will label the prosecution type according to what we observe to be the predominant type of prosecution in that area based on our observations. In some areas, we know that an attorney prosecutor handles all cases. In some areas, we have rarely ever seen an attorney prosecutor and the officers handle them all. For the latter, we still use the conservative term “Likely Officer Prosecuted” just to leave open the possibility that some of them may have been handled by an attorney prosecutor but we were not in court that day to be certain. Given our experiences, we put the cases we monitored in Greenville, Spartanburg, and Lexington cases under the category of attorney prosecutors. This does not mean that officers do not prosecute some cases or maybe even the majority of cases in some jurisdictions. We can only speak to the courts where we monitor. Charleston and Berkeley Counties were a mix of attorney prosecuted and likely officer prosecuted depending on the jurisdiction. We consider Horry County to be likely officer prosecuted based on our observations. We heard multiple comments that Richland County is prosecuting much more cases with attorneys than it used to, so we did not put that county in either category for data analysis based on prosecution type. We also created two categories to describe the representation of the accused. “Defense Attorney” means the accused had a paid attorney or a public defender. The other category, “Defending Self,” is for those who handled their own case without any attorney. The legal term for this is “pro se.”
Case Dispositions by County
Below, we share by county the results for the cases that we monitored that had a final outcome.
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