When the story of Lori Phillips, the repeat DUI offender who is charged with killing a man and injuring his fiancée while she was driving intoxicated on the Seward Highway in November, hit the news, outrage ensued. Phillips was out on bail for a pending DUI charge, and already had two convictions for DUI prior to that arrest.

Phillips’ case has raised awareness of the problem of impaired drivers, but there are issues within the system that prosecutes DUI offenders as well. Most DUI prosecutors are straight out of law school, don’t receive any specialized training for DUI cases, and aren’t paid much, which results in a high turnover rate.

Mayor Dan Sullivan’s administration is trying to address some of these issues, including enhancing the ability of officers and prosecutors to recognize when a driver is impaired by a substance other than alcohol. Earlier this month the city, in partnership with the State Highway Safety Office, used grant funding to create the part-time position of Traffic Safety Resource Prosecutor (TSRP) to focus on public education, training for officers and prosecutors, and prosecutorial assistance with other traffic cases. Jennifer Messick, a DUI prosecutor for the last four and a half years, began work as the TSRP on December 7—she spends half her time prosecuting cases and the other half in her new position.

Messick points to several factors that resulted in the new position being created: the lack of training for prosecutors, a lack of community education about DUI, and growing community intolerance of DUI’s, as evidenced by the Phillips case.

Her new role is multifaceted; her responsibilities include training police and prosecutors in field sobriety tests, drug recognition expert cases, trial preparation, compiling a trial notebook of commonly used DUI defenses, and familiarizing prosecutors with the Datamaster breathalyzer and the protocols associated with the device.

When you’re arrested for DUI in Alaska, you can be charged with two crimes: having a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of over .08 percent, and driving impaired. The latter charge is for situations where an individual’s BAC is under .08 percent but they’re obviously impaired, or for cases where the driver is under the influence of drugs.

“The majority of training needs to be used in impairment,” Messick says, “so prosecutors understand, what are the signs of impairment? And that can be anything from driving without headlights on, to swerving, or accidents.”

The Anchorage Police Department also has six officers who are certified Drug Recognition Experts (DRE). Two of them are certified trainers, who Messick will bring to train prosecutors in drug recognition so they can prosecute the cases effectively.

“I would say either we are in a trend where more and more DUIs are impairment DUIs involving drugs, or our ability to detect them is getting better,” Messick says. “And I think it’s a combination of both.”

Messick says she’s also working with different agencies to look at modifying laws or enacting new ones to increase DUI prevention. Not all offenders are the same, she says.

“You have people like Lori Phillips who are addicts and can’t stop drinking at one end of the spectrum. Then in the middle, the Saturday night Chilkoot Charlie’s group, who either don’t think they’re drunk, or think, I’ve been drinking water the last two hours, or I don’t live far away, those sorts of excuses. Then at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a small group who really didn’t understand they were DUI. They didn’t know sitting in the car, warming it up, you can get a DUI. They didn’t know when their doctor told them the muscle relaxant wouldn’t kick in before they got home, and it did kick in, they didn’t know—they were following what their doctor told them.”

Messick believes that latter group can be deterred by community education and outreach. “The middle group, there are measures we hope to implement to deter that group. Then the extreme group, for those people you have to either prevent them from getting alcohol or from driving. Because of our road system, preventing them from driving is next to impossible. So how do we prevent them from getting alcohol?”

For those chronic alcoholics, Messick would like to see judges order them not to drink alcohol for an extended period of time, and have the Department of Motor Vehicles receive those judges’ orders, so that their licenses can be marked as alcohol restricted.

The city’s press release announcing the new TSRP position states that Messick “has shown special interest in DUI cases and Drug Recognition Expert training by attending and facilitating several conferences on DUI and highway safety, serving as a panel participant for the Alaska Impaired Driving Assessment and the International Association of Chemical Testing.”

Messick’s “special interest” in these cases as a prosecutor might lead one to think she’s lost a friend or family member to an impaired driver, but that’s not the case. “What I came to realize is that DUI is unlike any other crime,” she says. “Anybody can be its victim. It has nothing to do with anything you’ve done or not done. The risk is incredibly high—one person dies every 12 minutes in a crash involving alcohol in the United States.”

As the city’s central resource for community education and training for officers and prosecutors, Messick is hoping we don’t see cases like Lori Phillips. “This is a crime that’s one hundred percent preventable,” she says.

bjk@anchoragepress.com