Former Southampton Town Supervisor Linda Kabot said she is disappointed that her DWI trial was pushed back to early next year, and criticized prosecutors for moving to introduce two new witnesses during a recent court conference.
In an interview a short time after last month’s court appearance, Ms. Kabot said prosecutors asked a judge to allow two new witnesses to testify at trial—a move that pushed back her trial date from October to late January. Ms. Kabot said that if the witnesses, who she said are employees at Magic’s Pub in Westhampton Beach, are allowed to testify, they will say she was drinking alcohol at the Main Street bar some six to seven hours before she was arrested in the early morning hours of September 7, 2009—an account she called “patently false.”
“I am disappointed that my trial date has been delayed yet again, and in open court on October 26 my attorney stated that the assistant district attorneys should be ashamed of themselves,” Ms. Kabot said. “It’s an outrage that the district attorney’s office should use such false testimony and malicious rumors as testimony against me.”
Ms. Kabot said she did not know the names of the two employees who could take the stand, and Robert Clifford, a spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota, declined to identify them.
The account by the witnesses would contradict what Ms. Kabot told Westhampton Beach Village Police officers on the morning of her arrest on Labor Day 2009: that she had consumed only two glasses of wine at her sister’s house in East Moriches the prior evening, according to Mr. Clifford.
“Assistant District Attorneys Anthony Baron and Joshua Shapiro stated in court ... that the witnesses’ testimony will establish an ongoing course of conduct by the defendant,” Mr. Clifford wrote in an e-mail. “These witnesses will testify that Linda Kabot was at a bar between approximately 4 and 6 p.m. [on September 6, 2009], and that she ordered two beers and another round. When she was stopped by the police, the defendant claimed she had consumed only two glasses of wine.”
In an interview just weeks after her arrest, Ms. Kabot’s defense attorney, William Keahon, said his client drank two normal-sized glasses of wine over several hours before her arrest on September 7, 2009. At the time, Mr. Keahon said his client had one glass of wine around 7 p.m. and a second glass between 9 and 9:15 p.m. while attending a 40th birthday party at her sister’s house. She was pulled over at 12:25 a.m. on September 7 on Main Street in Westhampton Beach, just down the block from Magic’s Pub.
Riverhead Town Justice Allen Smith had scheduled Ms. Kabot’s trial to begin on October 25, but pushed it back to January 31 while he decides on whether or not to admit the two new witnesses. The decision will come some time in December, according to Ms. Kabot and Mr. Keahon.
In another interview, Mr. Keahon said the accounts offered by the witnesses are irrelevant. He said there would have been too much time between Ms. Kabot’s alleged drinking in the late afternoon and early evening on September 6, 2009, and her arrest at 12:25 a.m. the next morning for the alcohol to have had any effect.
“If they’re claiming she had three beers from 3 to 6, by 7 o’clock all those beers are out of her system,” Mr. Keahon said. “All the alcohol in her bloodstream is out of her system.” In any case, Mr. Keahon said he believes the accounts offered by the witnesses are false.
Ms. Kabot, who lost her reelection bid to Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst in November 2009, said she is not considering a return to politics, and instead has been “focused on her family, and my own personal well-being and health.” She said she has lost 40 pounds since leaving office, through diet and exercise.
The former supervisor, who lives in Quogue with her husband, Lance, and their three children, said she has taken her LSATs and is considering enrolling in law school. She also said she is considering going back to work on a part-time basis, perhaps at a law office, to help support her family, but is worried that the charges leveled against her may make it difficult to land a job.
“It’s unsettling sometimes to an employer that you’re a controversial former public figure, and there could be news about the situation,” she said.
And Ms. Kabot remains adamant that she is not, and never was, a “closet drunk,” as she said some may suspect based on the charges against her.
“They’re going to be embarrassed at the end of the day,” she said of prosecutors. “Because it’s not true. I do not go to bars.”
Linda, the more you make up these silly excuses, the further you are from your constituents.
This might be a good time to plea bargain, if the DA is willing.
You may have backed yourself in to a corner, again in my personal opinion.
Of course, all coins have two sides. If the new witnesses are NOT credible for some reason, this may be a good move.
Time will tell.
Why didn't her attorney issue a statement? Is Mr. Keahon still Ms. Kabot's attorney on this matter?
Hmmmm. What can we read in here between the "dots?"
. . . . . . .
Hmmmm.
Perhaps a small difference, but it's misleading nonetheless.
It's misleading, and is designed to get the reader interested in the story. In another context, it would be false advertising.
In the end, I think that the judge and jury will realize that Ms. Kabot's arrest was motivated by the cops' ire at her attempt, while Supervisor, ...more to retire six STPD cops who were working beyond their mandatory twenty year anniversary. Westhampton Beach is the ONLY OTHER police jurisdiction in NYS to have a mandatory twenty year retirement date. Her attempt threatened WBPD cops as well.
It was a bogus bust, made in retaliation for Ms. Kabot trying to derail the STPD gravy train and as an object lesson to her colleagues on the Town Council. If this ever goes to the jury, she will be acquitted but I wouldn't be surprised at a directed verdict.
The DA is bailing a leaking boat. What possible relevance could Ms. Kabot's drinking a couple of beers between 4 and 6 p.m. have on her arrest the following morning for DWI. They don't have a case and are attempting to extort a plea bargain from Ms. Kabot by delaying and piling on court procedural expenses, a common, reprehensible lawyering tactic.
If Kabot was DUI....she was DUI!
Who gets excuses?
Who listens to excuses?
Would anyone else be given the leeway that she has?
If she is guilty, she is guilty! and the facts seem to support this.
A simple look at which side has repeatedly requested the delays puts the lie to most of the foregoing conjecture. Keahon (not "Keaton") likes to drag things out, the same strategy he is employing with the hearinsg for the two suspended WHB cops.
Correction noted. Apologies.
What you failed to note was that Keahon raised his objection following a CONFERENCE IN COURT, an expensive item. Keahon's own earlier requests for delays were made largely by telephone/fax because they were standard administrative requests.
The instant request, made in court, for a postponement so that the prosecution can introduce witnesses to Ms. Kabot's behavior over six hours before the incident, IS unusual. You may ...more believe, if you wish, that it is s.o.p. However, these irrelevant witnesses will add thousands of dollars to Ms. Kabot's legal bill because the defense will have to depose them (in addition, of course, to having made the $1K + that Ms. Kabot will pay Keaton for the day's outing an feckless expense.)
This is extortion by procedural expense, the bedrock of our tort law system. One expects it of amoral tort plaintiff attorneys but it is unethical behavior for state's attorneys. If these witnesses prove to be as totally irrelevant as they seem, Ms. Keaton should file a grievance with the 10th Judicial District against the state's attorneys participating in this malfeasance after she is acquitted.
I think we should look at that connection...
She is the joke of Southampton
Would that it were that simple. In fact, a positive breathalyzer result is only one piece of evidence of drunk driving. (The field breathalyzer test doesn't count, by the way. You have to fail several at the station house.) If he wishes, a cop can bust you for drunk driving even if you pass the breathalyzer, as has happened often. In addition, manipulation of a breathalyzer result is a piece of cake.
She is the only Town Councilmember EVER to stand up to the STPD PBA and is being punished for that stand by a spurious charge that she cannot answer personally because all her enemies would jump on her for "whining". It's a great frame-up, using a tactic in which East End cops are well-versed ...more and which, if successful, will leave her both impoverished and politically neutered by the label, "drunk driver".
My hope is that she will pursue her case through to an acquittal and then run again for Supervisor with a greater awareness of just how out-of-control the STPD has become. When one isn't touched personally by their malfeasance, their autarchical behavior is academic. But now that Ms. Kabot has suffered herself, she will be acutely conscious of the corrective measures that need to be undertaken. She may even draw some of the spineless Councilmembers along in her wake when they see that the STPD PBA CAN be defied.
Actually, the turth is that breathalyzer results are correct only if the machine is recalibrated regularly but, even so, the machines only register the alcohol content of the "breath", they don't indicate from whence it came.
You are wrong. Thank goodness because if you were right, tainted evidence would be statutorily admissible at trial. A field breathalyzer test measures the alcoholic vapors in a person's mouth in addition to alcohol in his bloodstream. If a suspect has drunk ANY alcohol shortly before the field breathalyzer is administered, it will show him to be beyond the legal limit for blood alcohol even it he spit the alcohol out after swishing it in his mouth.
Just imagine ...more how much EASIER it would be frame a suspect for DWI were unsupported field breathalyzer test results admissible!
The section that you cite only describes the field breathalyzer test result as being grounds for requiring a chemical test for intoxication later. THAT is the authoritative evidence. If a field breathalyzer test were not followed by a chemical test distant enough in time to eliminate the possibility of mouth vapors skewing the result, any defense attorney would have it thrown out. It has to be authenticated by the subsequent chemical test.
Patience.
Peace on Earth.
There is being a pompous know-it-all and then there is being right. You cited a statute and, upon examination, it didn't say what you thought it did. You then follow up with a slew of anecdotal statements without citation.
However, I was wrong to state that field breathalyzer evidence is STATUTORILY inadmissible. Rather, I should have said that field breathalyzer tests ARE NEVER entered as evidence by the state without the evidence of the results of subsequent tests ...more at the station house. Since the second through fourth tests are meant to validate the breathalyzer test without the possibility of innocent contamination of the evidence, to submit the field breathalyzer test without the subsequent tests raises the question of WHY. No state's attorney would submit such evidence. Assuming that the defendant is cooperative, why would the state decline to administer breathalyzer tests that are known to be free of contamination, and, instead, rely on one that might be?
To reiterate, thank god that this is so. Were field breathalyzer tests afforded the authority of those at the station house, the malleability of breathalyzer test results to tampering would be unconscionable (instead of just a piece of cake.)
- highhatsize
According to my information, every driver who takes the field breathalyzer test is retested at the station house, usually more than once. That IS, after all, what the statute YOU cited referred to.
DWI cases can be brought under the DWI "per se" law (based only on alcohol level, not impairment) or under traditional common law (where the prosecution must prove impairment). You imply that the courts are now according unreliable field breathalyzer tests the same authority ...more as station house tests if a driver refuses the latter.
I find that hard to believe and I can't find a citation that confirms it. Considering how childishly easy it would make manipulation of the test results in the privacy of the arrest site, it seems highly unlikely. Especially since, under the common law approach, the officer's testimony should be adequate.
If true, however, the STPD has slipped its leash entirely.
As to the stpd, dont know much about them, other tha you apparently don't like them much as yu seem to take shots at those who put their lives on the line to protect you any chance you get. Whats with that??
Following is a link to a site that discusses at some length the problem of inaccuracy in breathalyzer tests both in machine malfunction and sample preparation. In fact, your suggestion that I am making up the fact of suspects being given successive tests indicates that you are unaware that this is ONE of the precautions that must be taken for proper testing.
http://www.duicentral.com/evidence/rfi_in_breathalyzers_2.html
Apparently, ALL breathalyzer testing ...more is subject to machine error in addition to the error caused by ambient alcohol vapors in the mouth. According to the above website, radio frequency interference can render breathalyzer results useless. How much more likely is this to occur in the field where rfi interference varies rather than in the station house where that interference can be located and the analyzing machine protected from it.
On this basis I reassert that field breathalyzer testing is inherently unreliable and should not be allowed in evidence without verifying tests at the station house.
In spite of this, you say that it commonly IS due to suspects' refusal to take the subsequent test. If so, then the court is admitting an unreliable test. However, since this evidence is undoubtedly ALWAYS presented along with testimony of the arresting cop, it is probably harmless error, however wrong. If presented as the sole evidence of intoxication, I would hope that any competent attorney would have it kicked out of court.
As for my attitude towards the STPD, without repeating prior posts, I believe that they are overpaid, insubordinate and unprofessional, one of the hallmarks of their unprofessional conduct being their fishing of DWI suspects without probable cause. We can hire cops who are willing to "put their lives on the line" for us for a lot less that the $150K that the average STPD officer is paid. Moreover, that phrase has vastly different meanings in Southampton Town and, say, East St. Louis.
He IS listening, and thinking that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
A VERY different instrument.
Yes, I did know that. Had you read my discussion with Clarity, you would see that she pointed that out several days ago. I was using breathalyzer generically, like kleenex,a brand name that has come to stand for a product. If the state continues to unfairly penalizes people for drunk driving who merely have a certain percentage of blood alcohol (regardless of manifesting perfect coordination), the Intoxilyzer will eventually be replaced with yet a more exact tester of blood ...more alcohol, perhaps called the "Bacmaster". For the purpose of clarity (no pun intended) of communication, using a name that everyone would recognize seemed best.
Only now the DA finds out about these "witnesses"? Interesting how their memories come to the surface on the eve of trial?