reckless driving should be considered an “enhancing penalty” upon a future DUI conviction. To give an example, when someone is convicted of selling one drug, the judge is allowed to consider that they may have been convicted of selling some other drug when determining a penalty. Similarly, a judge should be allowed to consider that someone being sentenced for DUI has had a past DUI arrest pled down to a lesser conviction. However, state statute does not currently allow this. To treat that person as a true “first-time” offender, knowing that it is likely South Carolina’s many technicalities or leniency that led to the first reckless driving plea, ignores the reality of the situation. Short of this legislative change, we encourage judges to seek all available information on possible past offenses, such as what might be learned by seeing the person’s driving record.
Focus Area #4: Enhance the Use of Technology for DUI Enforcement/Prosecution
Some aspects of our state’s fight against DUI could be boosted by maximizing available technology, which in some cases would include simply catching up to what other states are doing. First, we need to follow the wisdom of 34 other states and pass a law requiring all convicted DUI offenders to install an Ignition Interlock Device for some period of time. IIDs are “in-car breathalyzers” that will prevent a car from starting if the driver blows with detectable alcohol levels. They have prevented 3 million drunk driving trips in this country, yet South Carolina still only requires them for repeat offenders and high BAC (greater than .15) first-time offenders. Moving to including all convicted offenders is a well-researched policy change that has been shown to decrease fatalities by 16% and is an improvement on license suspensions alone given that 50% to 75% of those who have licenses suspended for DUI keep driving. Secondly, additional funding should be made available for every law enforcement agency to have officers wearing body cams. In addition to other benefits of body cams, officers and prosecutors increasingly speak of DUI cases being “saved” by body cam footage picking up what the dash cam did not. Thirdly, during periods of restricted face-to-face interaction due to COVID-19, there were multiple examples of courts adjusting to teleconferencing to keep progress going, just as in so many other sectors. Courts should adopt the best advances that were discovered during this time. One application could be to have nurses or toxicologists appear in hearings over “Zoom” to verify chain of custody for blood draws instead of inconveniencing them to appear in person. In fact, an inability to produce those individuals in court sometimes leads to cases having to be pled down. Ideally, the courts could issue a rule authorizing this. Finally, similar to the concept above, South Carolina can improve on its use of technology in obtaining search warrants quickly and efficiently from summary court
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