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Local MADD activists plan to sit in on DUI cases... |
A few extra sets of eyes and ears soon will be monitoring drunken driving cases in courtrooms throughout Hampton Roads.
Activists with Mothers Against Drunk Driving plan to mobilize volunteers who will go daily to general district and circuit courts and record details of drunken driving cases, said Linda Kaye Walsh, vice chairwoman of the group's state chapter.
MADD already has volunteers in court systems in 10 states, including North Carolina, who sit through proceedings, filling out forms that track details such as the names of the defendants, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys and the disposition of each case. Offenders also are tracked to see if they drink and drive again, Walsh said.
The goal of ''court monitoring,” Walsh and others said, is to look at how the judicial system as a whole deals with DUI cases.
In early December, Walsh and other volunteers from Virginia Beach, Loudoun County and Fairfax will go to Richmond for training. They'll learn how to fill out pre-designed forms, get an overview of the state's court system and get a crash course on DUI laws.
They will then teach others in their communities how the program works, Walsh said. Volunteers could be tracking cases in courtrooms by the end of this year or in early 2006.
After the information is collected, it will be sent to the group's state chapter, which will forward it to national leaders. The data will be analyzed by Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.
MADD wants to use the data to see whether tougher laws or court rulings have discouraged impaired driving, to analyze the positions taken by judges and prosecutors and to spot trends in other parts of the court process.
Prosecutors said Friday that they will welcome the volunteers in their courthouses.
Virginia Beach Commonwealth's Attorney Harvey L. Bryant III said he has invited members of MADD to the courthouse to sit through cases.
According to MADD's Virginia Web site, 28,471 people were convicted of DUI in the state in 2004. The site states that 343 people died in alcohol-related crashes and 7,911 were injured.
The group, which marks its 25th anniversary this year, has set a goal of decreasing impaired driving 25 percent by 2008, said Walsh, who has worked with the group for a little more than a year. Her daughter was killed by a drunken driver in Virginia Beach in 1997.
Earlier this year, Walsh and two neighbors began attending DUI appeals in Virginia Beach Circuit Court. Walsh doesn't track every case but finds herself taking notes on more defendants each week.
Walsh has long been critical of attorneys who try to get DUI charges lowered to reckless driving. She said she hopes that having the volunteer observers in the courtrooms will discourage the practice.
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