Chicago DUI Attorney Comments on License Suspensions for DUI Arrests

This Chicago DUI attorney has posted here and here about having your driving privileges taken away before you ever have your first day in court. 

From the Chicago Tribune:

Bureaucratic mix-ups have let thousands of drunken drivers avoid mandatory license suspensions and stay on the roads, a Tribune investigation has found. 

 A Tribune review of state data found case after case across the Chicago area in which the arrest of these drivers—some with repeat DUIs—are not being logged into the state computers to ensure their licenses are suspended.  The failures come in a process that still relies on police filling out forms by hand and mailing them to the state, a process rife with human error that frustrates anti-DUI advocates. “There are so many ways for things to get lost,” said Cathy Stanley, with Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists.  “Nothing is instantaneously done or efficiently done like it should be.”

 The process leaves a host of ways arrests can fall through the cracks.  Police may not mail the proper forms.  The forms could get lost in the mail, or in state offices.  An officer’s handwriting might be too hard to read and be sent back for fixes.  The secretary of state’s office told the Tribune it tries to work with police but it’s impossible to know how many reports aren’t sent.

There is just one major problem with these concerns and that is a failure to provide the accused with Due Process.  It does not cease to amaze me that on the one hand we don’t want the government listening to our conversations, and yet on the other hand we do want the government to decide whether you get to have a judge decide whether you are entitled to drive when you are accused of a DUI or whether we want to trust law enforcement to make that decision for you.   It remains my contention that if we genuinely wish to have law enforcement make those decisions for us, then lets just scuttle the entire court system.  After all, everybody knows that when law enforcement makes a decision they are infallible right?