Supervisor Found Guilty Of Charge
Walkers Creek Supervisor Jay Lewis was found guilty of driving while intoxicated Nov. 15 in Rockbridge County General District Court.
He received a sentence of 60 days in jail, all suspended, 12 months of probation, was required to enroll in and complete the Virginia Alcohol Safety Action Program and had his driver’s license restricted with an ignition interlock system, which requires a breath test for alcohol before the vehicle will start.
He also received a fine of $500 with $250 suspended and was ordered to pay all court costs, all of which constituted the mandatory minimum sentence for a firstoffense DWI charge. He paid the fine and costs the following Monday.
The charge stemmed from a traffic checkpoint conducted on the evening of Sept. 14 at the intersection of Brattons Run and Maury River Road, just outside of the town of Goshen.
During the trial, Matthew Falwell, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney with the Staunton commonwealth’s attorney office who was brought in as a special prosecutor for the case, called two witnesses – Virginia State Trooper Patrick Cantrell, who set up the traffic stop, and Rockbridge County Deputy Jake Tomlin, who assisted with the stop and was the one who performed sobriety tests on Lewis.
Cantrell testified about the procedure by which the state police conduct checkpoints and how they are set up. For the Sept. 14 checkpoint, he selected three locations from a list of 10 possible locations within the county and took them to his supervisor, who made the final decision on the location.
Cantrell said there was “no particular reason” he chose the three possible locations that he did, and that he didn’t know why his supervisor chose that location. He further testified that he received clearance to set up the checkpoint and had it set up about an hour after he received the clearance from his supervisor, and he and Deputy Tomlin, along with another trooper, began stopping cars around 9:45. The checkpoint ran for “about an hour, hour and a half,” Cantrell said, which he said followed the protocol for checkpoints and was typical of how he conducts checkpoints. He also said that the protocol for traffic checkpoints is that they last between 30 minutes and two hours.
Deputy Tomlin testified about his interaction with Lewis, saying that he observed that Lewis “had trouble focusing” and had a “thousand-yard stare.” Tomlin said that he didn’t observe any open containers of alcohol in the vehicle, but did detect a “slight odor of alcohol.” When asked if he’d had anything to drink, Lewis said that he had had some bourbon “at a friend’s house.”
Tomlin asked Lewis if he would take field sobriety tests, which Lewis agreed to. Tomlin had Lewis pull off of the road and into a gravel driveway on Brattons Run near the intersection where the tests were conducted.
Following those tests ‒ some of which gave indicators of intoxication ‒ Tomlin conducted a preliminary breath test and took Lewis into custody. A second breath test, this one conducted by Trooper Cantrell at 11:48, showed that Lewis had a blood-alcohol level of .11, over the legal limit of .08.
Following the testimony, David Natkin, Lewis’s attorney, made a motion to strike the evidence, challenging the constitutionality of Lewis’s arrest. He cited the 1991 appeal of a case from Accomack County, Hall v. Commonwealth, in which the conviction was overturned because the Court of Appeals determined that the checkpoint the defendant had been stopped by was set up with the officers conducting the checkpoint choosing the time, duration and location.
Natkin argued that Trooper Cantrell had “effectively” chosen the location by narrowing the list of 10 possible locations down to three and that he had had discretion in when to start the checkpoint and for how long it ran.
After reviewing the Hall case, Judge Tim Caryle denied the motion, citing the fact that Cantrell’s supervisor made the final decision on the location of the checkpoint, and that the starting time and duration of the Sept. 14 checkpoint were within standard protocols for such checkpoints.
