Data missing on thousands of Georgia DUIs

Drivers convicted of a first or second DUI offense are guilty of a misdemeanor, which calls for a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in prison. A third DUI conviction is treated as “a high and aggravated misdemeanor.” Drivers convicted of four or more DUIs can be charged with a felony.

The state has no record of the outcome of nearly 100,000 DUI charges because counties and cities have failed to properly report how they handled Georgia’s most dangerous drivers.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of DUI charges in the Georgia Crime Information Center found yawning holes in the data that make criminal histories unreliable. This is of particular concern to employers, who are given limited access to the database to run background checks on job applicants. Courts and police use it on a daily basis to guide them in dealing with offenders.

Between 2007 and 2013, Georgia cops made slightly more than 400,000 DUI arrests and slapped drivers with nearly 500,000 DUI charges as part of those arrests, according to the GBI.

For about one in five of the DUI charges in the database for two years or more, no report of a disposition has ever been filed with the state. Under a new law, most DUI charges that remain unresolved for two years no longer show up as part of the criminal histories employers rely on.

“There could be people out there driving a school bus with two DUIs and no one knows it,” GBI Director Vernon Keenan said. “The dispositions ought to be there in our database, not these black holes.”

Keenan, who said he is deeply troubled by the DUI reports, recently convened meetings with leaders of Georgia’s top law enforcement agencies to discuss the problem. The missing data — coupled with seemingly low conviction rates in many counties — also has state investigators wondering whether some judges and police are fixing tickets.

Every time they file a DUI charge, police or prosecutors across the state send a report to the GCIC. Counties and cities that prosecute cases are supposed to file a follow-up report when the charges are resolved.

The AJC found that many are doing a miserable job. Twenty-six Georgia counties, most of them rural, have failed to report any disposition for more than half the DUI charges filed there between 2007 and 2013. In five of those counties, the GBI had no reports of the outcome on more than 70 percent of the DUI charges.

Missing information about outcomes was widespread, with only five Georgia counties reporting on 95 percent or more of the DUI charges on the books for at least two years.

Having accurate information to immediately identify drivers with previous convictions is crucial, said Barry Martin, executive director of the Georgia office of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

“This isn’t just a reporting issue, it’s a safety issue,” he said.

In 2012, 301 people died in car crashes in Georgia caused by drivers who were under the influence, Martin said.

“What is happening to these cases — that’s the mystery,” Keenan said. “Are there convictions that are not being reported?”

It’s all but impossible to say. The data anomalies could signal anything from mass ticket-fixing to high conviction rates sabotaged by poor record keeping.

Screening job candidates

Background checks are considered so important that Georgia law authorizes the use of fingerprint-based checks for all sorts of licensed workers and business operators. Those checks rely on accurate criminal histories coming out of GCIC.

Among the many positions included are owners of child care centers, massage therapists, teachers, EMS workers, real estate brokers, drivers seeking a chauffeur’s permit and restaurant owners seeking a liquor license.

Susan Hale, a spokesperson for the Fulton County Schools, said all school employees and all volunteers go through a background check.

“We have to keep our schools as safe as possible for all of our students,” Hale said.

Screening for a criminal record has become a routine part of the process for getting almost any job these days, whether it’s a nanny position for a family or a job at one of Atlanta’s largest companies.

UPS said it uses background checks, along with screening by its human resources staff, when evaluating its candidates.

“Of course, accuracy is important, because it can help us determine if the applicant is a good fit for our business where integrity and honesty are paramount,” said UPS spokesman Dan McMackin.

Judge’s grope kicks off investigation

The GBI’s review of impaired-driving cases started with one aim: to study whether Georgia has a problem with crooked judges allowing dangerous drivers to escape DUI convictions.

The state’s Judicial Qualifications Commission has already investigated judges in three counties on allegations of ticket-fixing and more investigations are anticipated, Ronnie Joe Lane, director of the watchdog agency, said.

It began with an allegation by a woman who accused a judge in northeast Georgia of trying to grope her. When the qualifications commission interviewed the woman, she said she had approached Hart County Probate Court Judge Bobby Joe Smith to ask him for help with a speeding ticket she received in Bryan County.

Smith has admitted to calling Bryan County and telling the judge’s office there that the ticket had been issued to his granddaughter, according to court records. After making the call, Smith then kissed the woman on the mouth against her will and tried to fondle her breasts, an arrest warrant alleges. Citing health reasons, the judge notified the governor in July that he will resign at the end of September.

The Judicial Qualifications Commission’s chief investigator, Richard Hyde, headed to Bryan County to look into the ticket-fixing allegation, but along the way local law enforcement officers told him DUI tickets were being fixed in a neighboring county, Lane said. Hyde soon asked the GBI for its statewide data on DUI arrests and outcomes, and those records have the commission looking at other counties as well, Lane said.

“The question is: How bad does this really stink?” Lane asked. “I think it could be pretty widespread based on what the numbers show. We didn’t start out looking for ticket fixing, but that’s where we ended up.”

Who’s lenient and who’s not?

The GBI reports make it difficult to discern which counties may be especially lenient with drunk drivers — and that’s not just because some courts fail to report the outcomes.

Prosecutors in some jurisdictions said they may file more than one type of DUI charge against an impaired driver in the hope that one will stick. Once a guilty plea comes in on one DUI charge, the other charge is dismissed. That’s a successful case, not a 50 percent conviction rate, they say.

For example, the GBI reports show that courts in Gwinnett County reported convictions on about 40 percent the DUI charges made between 2007 and 2013.

But Solicitor Rosanna Szabo, who prosecutes most DUIs in Gwinnett, said “that’s not a true picture” of her office’s conviction rate because almost every DUI case has at least two counts.

Szabo said that in 85 percent of the DUI cases her office prosecutes, the defendant is either found guilty or pleads guilty to DUI, according to a review of outcomes her office conducted this week.

With more than 50 counties reporting convictions on fewer than a third of DUI charges, law enforcement officers said it’s important to figure out whether courts are failing to report outcomes or failing to hold drunk drivers accountable.

In tiny Glascock County, with a population of 3,100, Probate Court Judge Denise Dallas handles everything from wills to elections to traffic offenses. Dallas said she reports traffic convictions to the Georgia Department of Driver Services — a task she does herself since her office does not have a full-time clerk. But Dallas said she did not know she also needed to report DUIs separately to the GBI. The records showed no reports of DUI outcomes in 102 of the 109 DUIs charges filed in Glascock between 2007 and 2013.

“Whatever we need to do we’re willing to do,” she said.

‘We’re moving aggressively on this’

The GBI reports show missing outcomes for charges being handled by the largest courts, too, including Atlanta Municipal Court, which handles thousands of cases a year. Court Administrator Christopher Patterson said the busy Atlanta court has a strict system for resolving DUI cases within six months, although many cases are transferred to a higher court. Patterson said he would need more information from the GBI to determine whether the court’s disposition information is arriving properly — or not.

Prosectors acknowledge a problem.

“We’ve been trying to figure out how to clean up the reporting process for some time,” said Chuck Spahos, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia. “It’s been an ongoing problem. There’s a lack of clarity who’s supposed to report what.”

One major problem, Spahos said, is that the charges entered when someone is arrested may differ from the formal charges later lodged by the prosecution, which makes it hard for the computer system to track the case.

“Often those will show up as a non-report,” he said.

Prosecutors in 44 of the state’s 49 judicial circuits now have case management systems that sync up with GCIC; the remaining five will be added as funding becomes available.

Part of the problem is that clerks and prosecutors often differ on whose job it is to send the final dispositions to the GBI.

“We’re moving aggressively on this,” Spahos said. “We’re trying to get it worked out so that no matter who’s responsible for reporting the data, it would happen, just as a matter of course.”

‘A very serious safety issue’

While gaps in reporting are common, the GBI reports show a handful of jurisdictions appear to report the outcome of almost every charge filed into the system.

Clarke County is among the best in the state in reporting the disposition of its cases. The GBI data also suggest that Clarke has one of the highest conviction rates.

“We’ve long had a focus on DUI cases because we’re a university town with a young population,” Athens-Clarke County Solicitor C.R. Chisholm said.

The office dedicates two prosecutors to handle DUI, and it fast-tracks prosecutions of defendants with prior DUI convictions. “Those are who we consider our most dangerous offenders,” Chisholm said.

Georgia’s top cops say most cities and counties need to either improve their reporting or their prosecutions — or both.

“We’re very concerned with what the numbers show in a number of jurisdictions,” said Frank Rotondo, executive director of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police.

Rotondo, who met recently with Keenan about the DUI reports, said police chiefs are often pressured to fix tickets.

“I hear concerns from police chiefs on a regular basis about the pressures put on them with DUI cases. They say, ‘My mayor, my city council wants me to drop the charges.’ Or they’ll ask for favors for their contributors, their friends and they’ll say if nothing happens there are going to be implications. The chiefs are between a rock and a hard place.”