Case Dispositions by Level of Prosecution Support
Some cases we monitored were prosecuted by an attorney from a Solicitor’s office or a municipality. Some were prosecuted by the arresting officer. The latter is an unusual practice from a national perspective. A report, written by Clemson University and commissioned by the South Carolina Department of Transportation, titled “Applying Successfully Proven Measures in Roadway Safety to Reduce Harmful Collisions in SC” says that South Carolina is one of two states in the nation where police officers prosecute their own DUI cases. Given our experiences, we put the cases we monitored in Greenville, Spartanburg, and Lexington Counties under the category of “high prosecution support” areas because generally cases are assigned to an attorney prosecutor if there is not an early guilty plea. We also added our data for Mount Pleasant Municipal Court in Charleston County under this category because they have a full-time prosecutor that handles all DUI cases. 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 specifically monitor. Richland, Horry, Charleston (excluding Mount Pleasant Municipal Court) and Berkeley Counties were a mix of attorney prosecuted and officer prosecuted depending on the jurisdiction. We put these four counties into the “low prosecution support” category because a majority of the cases we monitored were officer prosecuted.
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