DUINew Hampshire DUI Bicycle Case
|
Timothy
Bradley |
By David Lazar
LONDONDERRY — A judge won’t get to rule whether an intoxicated bicyclist can be charged with drunken driving — at least not for now.
Amid drumbeats of Supreme Court challenges from both sides, an attorney for Londonderry bicyclist Timothy Bradley yesterday said his client didn’t want to become a legal spectacle. Bradley, arrested last July for hopping aboard his mountain bike after a few drinks, pleaded guilty in Derry District Court to one count of misdemeanor reckless conduct, after reaching an agreement with prosecutors to drop the landmark DWI charge. It was the state’s first involving a bicycle.
“Mr. Bradley is a person who just wanted to resolve these issues today,†said Rick Monteith, Bradley’s Londonderry-based attorney. “If the prosecution had lost (and the case was dismissed), they would have appealed. If we’d have lost, we’d have appealed. And the appeals would have dragged on and on for a year and a half or so. My client wanted to get this over with, especially with the new year . . . I think this was a fair resolution of the case.â€
So did prosecutors, who reached the agreement after deciding Bradley’s case may not have been the best with which to test the state’s DWI statute when it comes to non-motorized vehicles, they said.
In exchange for his plea, Bradley, 44, will pay a $250 fine and agree not to appeal an automatic two-year suspension of his driver’s license. The license was suspended after Bradley, whom police stopped a quarter-mile from his Auburn Road home for swerving across a yellow line on his bicycle, refused a field sobriety test. A state Department of Safety ruling last October upheld that suspension.
“It was the right thing to do,†Londonderry police prosecutor Kevin Coyle said yesterday of the plea agreement. “In looking at all the facts and circumstances, we believe that what Mr. Bradley did was wrong, and we believe we could have substantiated the charge.
“At the same time, I think the general public thought what he did was wrong, but that he shouldn’t have been charged with DWI,†he continued. “We wanted to do what was right by everybody. It was not a simple case, and I think the issue ultimately needs to be resolved with the legislators drawing up the laws and not in the courtroom.â€
At issue in Bradley’s case were a pair of apparently conflicting statutes in the state’s motor vehicle code — one saying the “rules of the road†that apply to motor vehicles also apply to bicycles, another defining the word “drive†as operating a motor vehicle.
Legal experts have said the case is a perfect example of what state Supreme Court justices are paid to sort out. At the same time, a local legislator, angered over the arrest, has already proposed a bill that would specifically remove bicycles from the state’s DWI laws.
State Sen. Frank Sapareto, R-Derry, said Bradley, whose license had already been suspended three years for a DWI conviction in Massachusetts, actually did the right thing by getting on his bike rather than behind the wheel of a car in the early hours of last July 5.
On his way home from a fireworks celebration, Bradley was pulled over by police around 2 a.m. on a deserted road near his home for swerving and not sporting a headlight. Though adamant he wasn’t drunk, Bradley said he’d had a few drinks earlier in the night, and still had a shot of vodka in the sports bottle attached to his bike.
While Bradley’s attorney would argue the bike didn’t fall under the DWI umbrella, prosecutors and police would argue the case was a matter of safety. They argued that if Bradley had lost control and veered into traffic, or hurt someone, and police did nothing to stop it, they could have been held responsible.
Asked yesterday, the patrolman who made the arrest said he had no regrets about filing the charge.
“The way I look at it, he made it home safe that night,†Officer Randy Dyer said. “There were no fatalities, and that’s really what my concern is.â€
Monteith said Bradley, a local machinist who remained quiet throughout his appearance yesterday, just wants to get on with his life. The case, he said, had made his client an uncomfortable local celebrity.
“This is not an issue that’s going away, and it’s going to be taken up by someone else,†Monteith said. “And I think it should be taken up by someone else. It’s just not going to be this case.â€
Source: Union Leader Correspondent
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