TheAgitator.com
Lawsuit Claims Forced Catheterization After DWI Stop
Monday, September 7th, 2009An Indiana man has filed a lawsuit against a Lawrenceville, Indiana police officer and a local doctor and hospital, claiming he was forcibly catheterized after a DWI stop. According to the lawsuit, Jamie Lockard passed his roadside breath test. But the officer still detained Lockard and took him to a local hospital, where doctors strapped him to a gurney, pushed a catheter inside of him, and forcibly extracted blood and urine from him. The blood and urine tests also showed Lockard to be under the legal limit.
Lockard was never charged for drunk driving. According to the lawsuit, he was charged with “obstruction of justice,” apparently for having the temerity to resist someone shoving a tube into his body without his permission.
A local magistrate signed off on a warrant for the procedure.
I guess this means the results of those trustworthy roadside breath tests are only reliable when they show that someone is intoxicated.
I hope he sues the fuck out of everyone, including the docs.
So what was the reason he was stopped for in the first place?If he was driving recklessly,speeding or even had a taillight out you would think there’d be a ticket.It seems it was another random stop hoping the guy was drinking then charge DUI.This is why law enforcement wants mandatory tests,it’s the only way to prove DUI in many cases because the person had done nothing wrong.
This is nothing less than a form of rape.
The penalties should be the same.
Wow. I sure am glad we don’t live in an evil communist country like the Soviet Union-cue Toby Keith
I am as annoyed at the magistrate as at the cop in this instance. Since Lockard had already passed the breath test, it seems that the most objective evidence at hand indicated that he was not legally intoxicated. That evidence is what should have dominated the magistrate’s decision, not the testimony of some cop who is obviously interested in harassing the guy, as is made clear by the fact that he bothered to get a judge to sign off on such a procedure just to get a DUI.
I am sure some apologists would claim that the cop must have seen Lockard driving very drunkenly for the cop to have gone through the trouble of forcing a urine test. However, if Lockard’s driving was posing a hazard, he could have been cited for that alone, whether or not he was under the influence. In the time it took to get a judge to sign off on the forced test and have the test run, the cop probably could have followed Lockard all the way home.
I think this is just another example of an officer assuming that anyone he suspects must be guilty and there are almost no practical limits on what he can force a citizen to do to incriminate himself. It’s also an example of a judge taking the word of a cop over the word of a citizen, even when objective evidence favors the citizen.
[BTW, I am not trying to validate breath tests; from a science perspective, they are so bad that the fact that they are even allowed in a court is a travesty in itself. However, if the law considers them sufficient to establish some to be over the legal limit, then they should be consistent and consider them equally compelling in establishing someone to be below it.]
Wonder if there are any quotas for DUI arrests in that department…
Wonder what the probable cause was for the warrant as he had passed roadsides. Also wonder why they took both blood and urine. You would think one would be enough. They could have taken the blood and been less intrusive.
I would think the Dr and hospital would be immune from a lawsuit because the warrant was signed off on. I think Judges have immunity. So the only option may be to go after the cop and the PD.
How dare you question the manner in which they provide your safety?!
“I am as annoyed at the magistrate as at the cop in this instance. Since Lockard had already passed the breath test, it seems that the most objective evidence at hand indicated that he was not legally intoxicated. That evidence is what should have dominated the magistrate’s decision, not the testimony of some cop who is obviously interested in harassing the guy, as is made clear by the fact that he bothered to get a judge to sign off on such a procedure just to get a DUI.”
You just can’t design a just system with assholes like this.
Pretty obviously this fellow thoroughly annoyed the cops; given the outcome of other cases of ‘Pissing Off Police’ he could consider himself lucky. Very bare-bones report. Big question for anyone following up on this is if the guy was involuntarily committed. That of course has it’s own civil-liberties issues; not claiming that if the commitment papers were filled out then–poof–all is well. But it would require the cop (or Dr or whoever) to describe why they considered him at risk of self-injury.
Officer Brian Miller and the other fine members of the Lawrenceburg PD risk their lives every time they forcibly restrain a not-legally-intoxicated suspect to a hospital gurney in order to violate their persons to extract blood and urine. They do it for you and for the children. WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!?!?!!1111
For all you folks who don’t hate America you can call the Lawrenceburg PD at (812) 537-2282 to express your support of Officer Miller. I suggest directing your glowing comments to Chief of Police Gene Hunefeld.
A friend in Ralieigh NC charged with read his DUI citation
which says “you have the right to an independent test.”
So he got a taxi after release 2-3 hours afterwards and went to WakeMed which is the biggest hospital in the area.
They charged him $600 and never gave the blood test.
They subpoenaed the VP of the hospital
who said on the stand “We only give
blood test if law enforcement askes for it.”
WHat the funk There’s not a hospital in the area that
will do the blood test. So this “right” is an empty promise,
one that the police rely upon.
Please tell me I just woke up on April 1.
At what point during the birth of our country did the founding fathers begin to think that a person is not a hot-headed wacko to simply ask that an intelligent discussion begin concerning a rising to arms? Was it with the tea tax? the Boston massacre? the quartering of troops? I’m sure it wasn’t any one thing; but rather, a culmination of many affronts to the sensibilities of the colonists. When and what was the final straw? (if such a question even makes sense to ask)
Did the British government attempt to assuage the rising anger of the colonists by pacifying a few of the most outspoken or egregiously harmed; perhaps by paying them a large sum of money? Did the British government attempt to persuade the colonists that all was in order; that they were receiving the rights that were afforded all British citizens by the crown?
At what point did a person become a traitor to the crown? Certainly by taking direct armed action, but what about distributing or writing pamphlets which advocated removal (not violence) of the crown? What about going to a meeting (assembly). What about just thinking the thoughts?
But it’s not about the citation. It’s about the DUI arrest. It’s about adding another stat for the PD to say “We’re getting drunk drivers off the streets.”
-Darryl
I have often wondered along those lines myself. What really justifies violent resistance by a populace? My example has always been Jews in Nazi Germany. Here was a group whose rights and freedoms were steadily stripped over two decades. At what point would they and their sympathizers have been justified in violent reaction against government.
Was it the special licenses for Jewish businesses?
Was it having to identify themselves at all times as being Jewish?
Was it Krystallnacht, when the outbreak of violence began?
Was it the forced relocation into slums?
If you take it one step further, at what point of losing our freedoms are modern Americans at? You need a license for everything, you need ID’s for everything there is even talk of needing a passport to travel in your own country. Violent home invasions and police brutality are occurring on a daily basis. I mean if the Jews would have been justified for violent resistance after Krystallnacht, then wouldn’t Americans have just as much cause after repeated indecencies of police aggression?
It’s kind of a frightening premise, because you begin to question not that violent resistance is acceptable, but that it is an obligation depending on the behavior of the state. Up until recently it was the extreme economic and material wealth that allowed statist powers to grow in the US, the citizenry had to much to loose by fighting so they gave up little freedoms. I’m curious as to what might happen if the economy doesn’t recover and people who have lost everything begin to realize how much of it was actually taken from them by the government itself.
random guy, Brilliant post!
It is a sad but logical extension of the mindset that tolerates the notion that a person’s natural rights to their person and their property can be casually disregarded because a dog licks his balls.
Hey, guys. Don’t forget, driving is a privilege. You only get it if you agree to wave all your Constitutional rights. To paraphrase the typical DUI stop, these days:
Officer: Have you been drinking?
Driver: No.
Officer: Prove it.
Driver: Huh?
Officer: Ok, that’s it. I’m arresting you.
Driver: For what?
Officer: Resisting arrest, obstructing justice, refusing to prove your innocence, and assaulting a law enforcement officer? Now get out of the car.
Driver: I didn’t assault you?
Officer: Don’t make me tase you bro!
Driver: Huh?
ZAAAAAAPPPPPPPP!
Officer: Of course, you assaulted me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had to tase you. You got any other wise ass remarks?
Ditto.
People are too lazy to resist total government control. They naively want to think government is their friend. You can even see that on this very forum. When it finally occurs to the population at large that it isn’t their friend, it’s too late.
Fortunately, total government control can’t happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We have democracy, so there is nothing to worry about.
“I’m curious as to what might happen if the economy doesn’t recover and people who have lost everything begin to realize how much of it was actually taken from them by the government itself.”
They will realize that when hell freezes over. Insead, the people will line up for the next king promising even better plans…and less freedom.
But, I’m a pessimist.
An important caveat: Blood-alcohol tests are only reliable when they show intoxication… unless you happen to be a prosecutor accused of drunk driving, in which case they are unreliable!
http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/warren-county/express-times/index.ssf/2009/08/warren_county_prosecutor_accus.html
Who inserted the catheter? What doctor authorized the procedure?
If I had been working that emergency room, I would have declined the order and filed a written complaint with the hospital administration.
Darryl: “At what point during the birth of our country did the founding fathers begin to think that a person is not a hot-headed wacko to simply ask that an intelligent discussion begin concerning a rising to arms? Was it with the tea tax? the Boston massacre? the quartering of troops? I’m sure it wasn’t any one thing; but rather, a culmination of many affronts to the sensibilities of the colonists. When and what was the final straw? (if such a question even makes sense to ask)”
randomguy: “What really justifies violent resistance by a populace? My example has always been Jews in Nazi Germany. Here was a group whose rights and freedoms were steadily stripped over two decades. At what point would they and their sympathizers have been justified in violent reaction against government.”
Milton Mayer wrote those exact sentiments more then 40 years ago:
“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? – Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
“And you *are* an alarmist. You are saying that *this* must lead to *this*, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
“But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to – to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must *make* an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. *That’s* the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked – if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the
holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
“You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
— Milton Mayer
“They Thought They Were Free” (http://tinyurl.com/lvvxg4)
pages 169-72
Not long ago, I thought I saw a little hope in juries, but that’s gone.
At one time, a political solution (http://www.two–four.net/Essays/toolate.html) may have been possible, but that door’s long been closed and welded shut.
It distills to this: would Lockard have been justified in killing Miller, Cheek, the magistrate, and any other accessories?
That’s a heart-breaking question.
On the opposite side of the law- citizens assisting to find the dastardly robbers in a small community.
http://www.wmur.com/news/20783634/detail.html
#23
As a physician, I, too, would wonder about the possibility of being charged with assault and battery! But, when I worked ER’s, I never got the feeling that administration cared whether or not what we were doing was legal, but whether or not they could get away with getting us to do something illegal! The final question is who is liable? And, you can bet the lawyers will think the doctor is first in line for responsibility, because he is “captain of the ship”. There are too many administrators pulling our strings,already! Now the cops, too?
I loved your answer! But, could that attitude get you fired or privileges suspended/revoked? I wonder!
#23: Who would have thought that “Dr. Psycho” would be calm, rational and respectful, while Dr. Cheek would cath someone without their consent? Let this be a lesson to us all not to judge a book by its cover.
The only time the blood and urine tests are remotely legal is when the person stopped refuses the breath test.
Personally, I find the fact that intrusive blood/urine tests are legal at all to be insane.
I hope that the judge, the cop and the doctor all get sent up for this one.
#27 The judge has total immunity, everyone else can probably claim qualified immunity. This case is going to be very interesting.
That’s a useful concept for citizens to reckon with.
How do we educate cops and cops-in-training out of it?
I’m wondering if this poor guy will even ever get this suit heard. I’m not 100% sure but I think in Indiana you have to submit to the test and I think it’s up to the officer to decide which test you get (breathalyzer, blood, or urine). Any of the lawyer types around here that can tell me I’m mistaken, I hope?
Can someone explain how a breathalizer test doesn’t violate your right to not incriminate yourself. I mean, doesn’t the 5th Amendment guarantee me the right to not do/say something that will incriminate me in a crime?
Can I plead the 5th when asked to blow into a machine?
I’m not a lawyer and I’m sure this has been discussed in legal circles ad nauseum. I’m just curious as to how this doesn’t violate the 5th Amendment. Is it because you’re not yet under arrest?
Fuck, fuck and fucking fuck!
The justice system is broken from top to bottom. The overly credulous LEO fellating judge should be a defendant as well.
#32, IANAL either, but I expect it is interpreted as a search, and not as testimony in a legal proceeding under which you are protected under the fifth. Similarly you cannot plead the fifth to prevent the police from searching your house for a murder weapon; it’s just that in this case the evidence of a crime is believed to be within your own body, rather than your property.
#32–every state has passed an “implied consent” law which basically says that by driving on the roads of the state, it is implied that you consent to take a breath/blood/urine test when requested by a cop who has “reasonable suspicion” that you are impaired. Thus a refulsal to take the test is admissible against you in court, and can be grounds for a variety of penalties. “Implied consent” is yet another legal fiction (along with sovreign immunity, asset forfeiture, constructive fatherhood, etc) that courts have pulled out of their ass in order to ignore the Constitution.
Also, according to most courts, Miranda (the right not to incriminate one’s self) applies only to “statements” and these courts have ruled that a test result is not a “statement” and thus not covered by Miranda. Another example of the “DUI exception to the Constitution.”
Check out this site for everything you ever wanted to know:
http://www.duiblog.com
There was this gem of a comment from the article. Sadly, I’ve met enough people who think exactly like this. The attitude is “don’t get accused if you don’t want to being abused.” because as we all know, all accused people are guilty.
My advice to those of you who think that this was absurd: Don’t Drink and Drive- It is simple as that. I think that they should do this to EVERYONE who commits the same offense who thinks that they can beat the system by just simply refusing the Breathalyzer. I undesrstand that this man was tested negative on the machine, but had he not been operating a motor vehicle while under the influence maybe he wouldn’t have experienced such. Suck it up, Mr. Lockard- afterall, it was YOU sucking up (an) alcoholic beverage(s) that caused all of this.
No, this case will read from the well established script because of that immunity. If the case gets sufficient media attention, they’ll throw some stolen money at him to shut him up. If it doesn’t, they’ll tell him to jump off a bridge.
What would make the case interesting would be if, for example, the victim got to do to his abusers (all of them) what they conspired to have done to him.
And put it on youtube.
I thought the law for refusing DUI tests was a severe penalty (equal to or worse than the DUI)
Even for contempt of cop, a forced catheter is pretty bad, almost as bad as what happened to abner louima
I think the best answer to an advocate of resistance to government control is “you first.”
Who wants to be a martyr for this fucked up culture?
When a cop pulls you over, they’ve already decided you’re guilty of something. Any evidence to the contrary will just make matters worse.
A similiar situation happened with me. I was parked, and they stated I was stumbling around and had not been drinking at all.