A Deputy with the Jefferson County Sheriff was arrested for DUI
Around 8 a.m. on Sunday, July 13, a Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputy was arrested for Driving Under the Influence (DUI). Jeffco sheriffs received a report of someone passed out in their car in the parking lot of an apartment complex near Hampden Ave and South Harlan. When they arrived, they found that the person in the car was Tyler Stahl, a Deputy with the Jeffco Sherriff. When they learned he was an officer, they called in the Colorado State Patrol to take over the investigation. Stahl was arrested for DUI, and once booked was released that morning. Deputy Stahl has been on paid administrative leave since his arrest. There have been no additional reports about this case since the initial posts from the Sherriff’s department early last week.
This is an interesting case, because it actually touches upon a lot of the false information out there about DUI laws. I’ve seen and heard it all in my 27 years of practicing DUI defense. People’s online comments to this story show the misconceptions that are out there. I’ve picked out a few of the online comments that I commonly hear, and I’ll address them below.
“He was sleeping in his car, not driving, so it will be difficult to prosecute.”
In Colorado you don’t need to be driving to be found guilty of DUI. Instead, you just need to be shown to be impaired when capable of driving the vehicle, which is called having actual physical control. To determine if a driver can be found guilty based on actual physical control, they look at factors like whether the engine was running, where the keys were located, whether the person was in the driver’s seat, whether the seat was reclined, and the location of the vehicle. Whether the person is found guilty or not is supposed to be based upon the totality of the circumstances of the entire case, not based on one individual component. In this case with Deputy Stahl, we know very little about the facts of the case, so it is difficult to know if he can be found guilty. However, people are regularly found guilty of DUI in situations similar to what is known about this case so far.
“You usually don’t get arrested on suspicion.”
This is just a matter of terminology. In criminal cases like this, officers initially look for “reasonable suspicion” of DUI in order for them to pull someone over for DUI or question you. There is a relatively low legal standard for suspicion, so an officer just needs to be able to articulate why it was reasonable to have suspicion. In this case, seeing a person passed out in their vehicle would typically meet the standard of reasonable suspicion. Then, “probable cause” is a higher legal standard that requires concrete facts in order to make an arrest and invoke the express consent law (which requires a person to take a chemical test). In this situation, again, we don’t know the facts of the case yet. However, in similar situations, as the officers started to investigate, other facts could have come to light that provided probable cause, such as the deputy in the vehicle smelling like alcohol, slurring his speech, etc.
“He was on private property so they had no authority to arrest him, so the case should be dismissed.”
In Colorado, DUI laws are not restricted to public roadways or areas. If you are on your driveway, or on other private property, the law still applies. In Colorado, in most cases standard moving violations apply only on public roadways. However, criminal offenses including DUI, reckless driving, and hit-and-runs are fully enforceable on all private property, including driveways, private roads, and parking lots.
Here’s a common example of this that I see in my practice. Someone is driving erratically on the road, and another driver calls the Colorado tip line for DUI (*DUI or *384 to reach the impaired driver hotline.) The officers don’t find the person driving on the road, but they look up their address based on the license plate, and they find the driver in the car on their private driveway. This person could be arrested for DUI even though they were not found on a public roadway. Or, a person is weaving while driving or hits another car in a private parking lot. Again, it doesn’t matter if they were on a public roadway, they can still be arrested for impaired driving. DUI arrests happen on private property all the time.
“What if he had drinks somewhere and then immediately drove home before the alcohol took effect, so when he was driving his BAC was below .05., but he fell asleep in the vehicle later?” And a follow-up question was, “How soon after arresting him did they do the blood alcohol content test?”
I’ll answer the second question first. In Colorado, officers have two hours after the initial traffic stop, or in this case after initial contact, to give the blood or breath test. If they don’t get the test done in this amount of time, the BAC (Blood Alcohol Concentration) test would likely be considered inadmissible. Without a measure of Stahl’s BAC, it would be challenging to prove DUI. So, his defense attorney will be looking at this timeline of the testing, but arresting officers are usually paying attention to this and usually get the test done in time.
Related to that is the first question. If a driver drinks quickly and then drives home before the alcohol takes effect, they might have something called a “rising BAC defense.” The rising BAC defense is the idea that your BAC was below the cutoff while driving, but continued to rise above the limit by the time the chemical test was actually done. Alcohol can take 30 to 120 minutes to fully absorb, so blood or breath test taken later could show a higher BAC than what they had when actually on the road.
In Colorado, DUIs are supposed to be based on the driver’s BAC when they were actually driving. Based on that, a rising BAC defense can be used, but it can be difficult to prove. A DUI defense attorney would need to provide evidence of the timing of consuming the alcohol and the time the person drove, and may need to have expert witnesses testify.
“Nothing will happen to him.”
It’s difficult to know if this comment is based upon the impression that the driver couldn’t be found guilty if not actually driving (see response to that above), on the fact that he is an officer of the law. There is a perception out there that law enforcement will protect their own, and not prosecute other officers. In this case, the Jefferson County Sherriff officers who arrived at the scene did the correct thing, and immediately handed the case over to the Colorado State Patrol. This distances the deputy from his own law enforcement branch, but would the CSP give special treatment to a Sherriff’s deputy as well? In this case, because they did arrest him, this limits the ability of law enforcement to protect Deputy Stahl in the future proceedings of this case. In Colorado there also have been many recent cases of law enforcement officers being arrested and prosecuted for various crimes. Recent police reforms have made efforts to increase accountability and tracking of officer-involved crimes.
So, while the public’s first impression may be that nothing will happen to Deputy Stahl, it seems that he will be prosecuted just like anyone else. A statement from the Jefferson County Sherriff’s’ office says: “We are deeply disappointed by the conduct involving one of our deputies… No one is above the law, and our employees are expected to uphold the same laws they are sworn to enforce. We will allow both the criminal and administrative processes to proceed thoroughly and fairly, and we will take appropriate action based on their findings.”
“So when cops get arrested for DUI and get to go home instead of to jail like everyone else?”
This is similar to the comment above about whether law enforcement officers get special treatment when arrested. In the case of Deputy Stahl, he was arrested, booked, and then released to a family member, rather than staying in custody for a period of time. While this may sound surprising, it’s isn’t all that unusual. In my experience as a DUI attorney, what I see is that on a first offense, most people arrested for DUI are not kept in custody. Most of the time they are released pretty quickly. On a second offense, however, they are much more likely to be taken into custody so that they can appear in front of a judge before their release.
“I wonder how many times he WASN’T caught.”
This one isn’t a misconception, it’s pretty accurate, and there is actually quite a bit of data on it. Research suggests that when a person is arrested for DUI, they have driven impaired on average 80 times before their first arrest. While this number is just an estimate, it comes from a whole lot of data from the CDC, the NHTSA, MADD, and many state highway offices. It is clear that many people who drive impaired are arrested only a small percentage of the time.
And a viral story from a few years ago…
In a strange coincidence, the officer who was arrested in this case, Tyler Stahl, is the same officer who was involved in a controversy about not arresting someone for a DUI a few years ago. The officer was accused in a viral TikTok video of letting a drunk driver go free after she flirted with him. Stahl was cleared of wrongdoing after review of the bodycam video of the incident. However, the driver in question continues to tell the story in online posts, including commenting publicly on a news outlet’s post about this current arrest. The comment says, “this is actually so insane when i was 18 i went crazy viral for getting out of a dui and that’s the same cop who let me go with a warning insane i wonder if its go late to pay his bond.” Yup, stranger than fiction.
Arrested for DUI? Know the law!
There are many misconceptions out there about the laws and procedures related to DUI arrests in Colorado. I’ve tried to address a few of them here. If you find yourself arrested for DUI, be sure to talk with an experienced DUI attorney, so you know what’s true, and what’s fiction. Kevin Churchill has been handling DUI cases in the front range for over 27 years. Give him a call at 303-832-9000 for a free consultation.