Jul. 26–RALEIGH — General Assembly leaders agreed on a far-reaching overhaul of North Carolina’s DWI laws Tuesday that limits judges’ discretion and imposes tougher penalties for cases that result in fatal accidents.

The bill also would requires merchants to keep records on keg sales and would make it illegal for anyone younger than 21 to drink an alcoholic beverage. “Hopefully what it does is get some uniform standard of law applied across North Carolina,” said Sen. Tony Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat who co-chaired a special DWI task force. “We did not believe that was happening before.” Defense lawyers criticized the legislation as stripping judges of latitude in deciding cases and relying too heavily on a single piece of equipment, the Intoxilyzer, which measures blood-alcohol content. “We’ve gone from driving while impaired to driving when you’ll make the machine read 0.08.

Source : accessmylibrary.com

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 11:12 pm and is filed under DWI Attorney, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.