Dartblog

From Joe Malchow:

New Hampshire’s pernicious internal consumption law makes it a crime to be drunk, transforming olde timey police behavior—driving drunk college kids home, if they’re stumbling about—into a venomous concoction of secrecy, conniving, and misallocation of municipal resources. (As Phil Aubart has noted, arresting Dartmouth lushes is also a tidy little revenue stream for Hanover.) Call it Walking Under the Influence. W.U.I.

College administrators do a lot to ‘instruct’ students in how to behave when alcohol and the law meet on Webster Ave., but a lot of that is misdirection. Dartblog asked George Ostler ’77, a Norwich lawyer who has aided many a Dartmouth man—and even the sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma—to compose a memo detailing exactly what ought to go down when one-too-many Keystones made you trip the light fantastic right into Chief Giaconne or one of his boys.

It ought to be noted that all of the foregoing applies to foot-borne Bacchanalia, not driving.

Read George Ostler ’77’s memo here.

From Joe Asch:

George Ostler of the Norwich, Vermont law firm of Desmeules Olmstead & Ostler, has been advising Dartmouth students for many years concerning their relations with the police. In order to apprise students of their rights in dealing with the Hanover police, he drafted the attached memo, which H.Po’s Chief Nicholas Giaccone graciously reviewed for accuracy. Below is my own summary of students’ rights when dealing with a typical situation of alcohol enforcement.

The dance between the police and a suspect has been choreographed over the years by the Supreme Court in numerous rulings, but one aspect remains constant: if the police ask something of you, and you assent, then you can inadvertently waive all manner of constitutional protections — and get yourself into hot water in the process.

The police know the rules extremely well, and they stay within them quite carefully, but don’t expect any more than that of them. Here are a few tips:

Rule 1: You are walking down Webster Avenue thinking about your Freshman Seminar and you have had a beer or two. As long as you are behaving normally, the Hanover Police cannot accost you in any way. In order to investigate whether you are in violation of a statute, an officer must have an articulable suspicion that you are behaving improperly. Holding a cup of beer in your hand gets you into trouble right away, but if you don’t have any visible alcohol in your possession, then indicia like stumbling, slurred speech, and the smell of alcohol gets an officer past that test.

Remember that the internal possession statute in N.H. requires intoxication for a conviction. If you act sober, then the police can neither stop you nor convict you.

Rule 2: The officer can ask for I.D. from you, and although the Supreme Court has not ruled specifically on the question, it seems accepted that you have to turn over some kind of identification to the officer.

Rule 3: If the officer asks you for any more information than this, you may politely decline. You are protected by the Fifth Amendment here. My advice to you is to avoid being a pinhead: simply tell the officer that you would prefer not to answer any questions. No need to trumpet your knowledge of constitutional jurisprudence.

You may refuse to respond even to queries like: Have you been drinking? Are you drunk? Where have you been? and the like. If the officer wants to oblige you to answer questions, a search warrant from a judge is needed. As Chief Giaccone personally put it to me, the appropriate metaphor is “name, rank and serial number” only. But, I repeat, the officer can ask you all sorts of questions, and you are on the hook for any answers that you voluntarily provide.

Rule 4: If the officer asks to physically search you, or to breathalyze you, or to do any type of field sobriety test, and you consent to do so, then you are liable for the results. But you can refuse an officer’s request for any of these things, too — again, do so politely — under the search and seizure provision of the Fourth Amendment. To conduct a search in this context against your will, the officer needs to obtain a warrant from a judge.

All that said, if you reek of alcohol and are stumblingly incoherent, then an officer can have you charged for a violation of the alcohol laws based simply upon these observations. That is how students are prosecuted when they arrive at DHMC in an ambulance and Hanover’s Finest are there to greet them. But by knowing and deploying your constitutional rights, you present a tougher test for the police than if you thoughtlessly confess to your indiscretions.

So if you must drink, please do so discretely and don’t appear in public in a way that makes it obvious that you have been indulging.

It is worth reiterating, as Joe Malchow mentioned above, that the previous advice applies solely to situations where an underage student is on foot. If you are driving a car while under the influence, I’ll try to put you in jail myself.