Law Vibe

An appellate court ruled that a conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol can be imposed on someone who isn’t driving but is behind the wheel.

Say what?

Well, David Montalvo, 36, was sleeping in his GMC pickup truck in the parking lot of a Market Place Deli, apparently sleeping off the effects of his drinking from the night before. A police officer from the Hamburg Police Department knocked on his pickup truck window at 5am in the morning. When Montalvo awoke, the officer instructed him to take a Breathalyzer test due to suspicion of drinking, but Montalvo refused to take the test.

Montalvo was arrested and entered a forced conditional guilty plea. His lawyer, Evan M. Levow, argued that the officer had no reasonable grounds to suspect a criminal activity on a guy sleeping in his truck. One key piece that may have affected the situation is that his car was running, although it was parked. The temperature was 25 degrees Fahrenheit so he apparently had the heater running.

The appellate court disagreed with Montalvo and Levow.

“From the perspective of the officer on the scene, I don’t find at all that what he was doing was unreasonable. In fact, I find it would have been unreasonable to have stopped his inquiries at any point short of what he did,” said Superior Court Judge Thomas Critchley Jr. “The officer wanted to make sure the driver was ‘okay,’ nothing was wrong with the businesses and that the truck was operating properly. We are convinced that under the facts as observed by Officer Aaronson defendant was lawfully subject to limited inquiry based upon an objectively reasonable exercise of the officer’s community caretaking function.”

Now the sleeping motorist has a DUI on his record, a “driver responsibility” tax of $3000, miscellaneous fines and fees of around $1000 and legal bills to take care of.

Doesn’t seem right to me. Wasn’t he doing the right thing sleeping off his drunkenness in a parking lot?

I can see both sides of it.

On one hand, the police officer has a duty to keep drunk drivers off the street. How can he be assured that half an hour later he’d wake up and still being intoxicated drive around and smash into something or someone?

On the other hand, it’s much better to have a drunk driver sleeping it off in a parking lot than trying to get home drunk. Do you think maybe this ruling may cause more people to drive home drunk because they’ll be scared a cop will give them a DUI for stopping somewhere to sober up? It’s a tough situation for sure.

Legal Filing: A-1303-06T5 STATE OF NEW JERSEY VS. DAVID MONTALVO
(SUSSEX COUNTY AND STATEWIDE)