MADD SOUTH CAROLINA - 2021 CM Report

of Court Monitoring on DWI Adjudication, December 1990, DOT HS 807 678). Court monitoring has also proven to be a highly effective method of creating ongoing productive discussions between citizens and the judiciary. This makes the courts more accountable to the community they serve. Research shows that a first-time DUI offender has driven drunk an average of 80 times prior to their first arrest. Nationally, about one- third of drivers arrested for DUI have had a previous DUI conviction. Inconsistency in the handling of DUI cases, DUI charges being amended to lesser charges and dismissals of cases may contribute to repeated DUI offenses. MADD supports swift and equitable treatment for all DUI cases. MADD’s Court Monitoring Program was created to ensure that DUI offenders are prosecuted, dismissals of DUI cases are decreased and justice is achieve d. Our Court Monitoring program’s goals are: • To compile relevant statistics regarding the dispositions of DUI cases in the courtrooms • To raise awareness of the level of public concern regarding the dispositions of DUI cases

• To report information o n the dispositions of DUI cases in order to make improvements to the DUI enforcement, prosecution and/or adjudication systems

Court Monitoring in South Carolina

Our court monitoring program is funded by grants from the Office of Highway Safety and Justice Programs (OHSJP) within the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. Our initial grant was for three years and began on October 1, 2015, addressing Greenville, Pickens, Richland, and Kershaw Counties, the 13 th and 5 th judicial circuits. Our second grant began on October 1, 2017 and added Horry, Berkeley, and Charleston Counties. When the original grant ended in September 2018, OHSJP funded a new grant where we proposed monitoring in Greenville, Spartanburg, Richland, and Lexington Counties, meaning w e are now monitoring in seven of the state’s largest counties. Since that time, OHSJP removed the three-year length on the grants. If funding is approved for our annual applications, we currently plan to remain in those seven counties in an attempt to measure long-term impact of these efforts. The counties we select are supported by data provided by OHSJP. We determined our counties of focus based on the number of fatal and serious injury alcohol-related crashes. None of our counties were selected based on known “problems” with those counties in terms of adjudication or prosecution. In fact, we knew very little about what the status of those counties were in terms of DUI case outcomes or prosecution approaches until we began monitoring there. To achieve the above listed goals, MADD South Carolina Court Monitoring staff and, to a lesser extent, volunteers collected specific information on DUI cases from court

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