DWI Charge Has Long Reach in Va.
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Perhaps Justin Flanagan will walk next time. Or, better yet, stick to soft drinks. Flanagan, of Purcellville, was charged Saturday night with driving while intoxicated, although his foot never touched an accelerator and he only briefly grabbed the steering wheel. He was the front-seat passenger. It began with an argument about 11:30 p.m., Leesburg police said. Flanagan, 25, was riding shotgun as his 20-year-old girlfriend drove west on the Route 7 bypass in Leesburg. The two began to quarrel, and Flanagan ripped the window crank from his door, hurled it at the woman’s forehead and demanded to be let out of the car, police said. Flanagan then grabbed the steering wheel, causing the woman to lose control and sending the car careening into a median at West Market Street, police said. An officer gave the pair sobriety tests. Police said that Flanagan’s girlfriend passed. Flanagan failed. Flanagan was also charged with malicious wounding, a felony, because the woman suffered cuts and bruises to her hands, leg and arm in the crash, police said. She was treated at a hospital and released. Reached at home yesterday, Flanagan, heeding the advice of an attorney, would not say much about what happened. “I’m just real messed up over it. I lost a good girlfriend over it,” Flanagan said. “It’s just a tough time in my life.” Flanagan said the police account sounded “almost” accurate, and added, without elaborating, that he was “trying to save myself and her, really.” Authorities and observers said that, no matter what happened that night, Virginia law — which forbids a person to “drive or operate” a vehicle while drunk — makes it clear that drunken driving does not require driving at all. In a case like Flanagan’s, it seems, the operative word is “operate.” “You can find cases when people were convicted when they were sitting in their car with the engine running, or the engine is not running and the key is in the ignition and the lights are on,” said James E. Plowman, Loudoun’s top prosecutor, who said he had not been briefed on Flanagan’s charges. Plowman said he once tried a case in which a police officer had pulled over a drunk driver, who, panicking, hurriedly switched seats with his passenger as the officer approached. But the passenger was drunk, too, and both were slapped with DWI charges. David Oblon, an Arlington lawyer whose firm handles many DWI cases, said he was not surprised by Flanagan’s charge. He cited the case of John Terry Dugger, a passenger convicted of DWI, who took his case to the Virginia Supreme Court. According to the court’s 2003 ruling, Dugger was riding in the passenger seat of a car that his sister was driving from Petersburg to Richmond in 2001. As the two quarreled, Dugger seized the wheel and sent the car sailing into a guardrail, leading to a DWI charge. Dugger argued his actions did not fit the definition of DWI. The court disagreed. Citing previous cases, the court ruled that “operating a vehicle” does not require vehicle movement or even that the vehicle’s engine be running. In one case, the court noted, a driver was found to be operating a car while standing on the road and leaning into a parked — but running — car. The DWI law, the court concluded, is about drunk people causing harm with vehicles. “Whether that risk comes from an inebriated passenger . . . or from a drunk driver should not matter,” the court wrote. When told about the Leesburg case, Kurt Gregory Erickson, executive director of the Washington Regional Alcohol Program, said it sounded as if Flanagan might have done just what drunken-driving prevention programs call for: ridden with a sober driver. But Erickson said the case offers a lesson about the hazards of alcohol all the same. |