Milwaukee Point 08

Mequon businessman takes his constitutional right to drive drunk to the Supreme Court—and beyond

Let’s say you’re a retired businessman in Wisconsin with a lot of time on your hands. What do you do with yourself?

First you get drunk. Next you hire a lawyer.

Richard M. Fischer of Mequon got busted for his second drunk driving offense in 2005. In Wisconsin, that’s the legal equivalent of your Mommy waving her finger in your face going “Tsk, tsk.” Most guys do the five days and vow to better next time. Not Mr. Fisher. He hired James Shellow, a lawyer who specializes in getting drug dealers, armed robbers, embezzlers, child pornographers and murderers off the swinging rusty hook of justice. It paid off for them when a US Magistrate Judge ruled that Fischer’s constitutional rights were violated because he couldn’t bring in a special expert to his jury trial. This was after the Supreme court ruled in February that it’s a good idea to get drunken drivers off the road, and Mr. Fischer was a drunken driver–so there.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel October 4, 2010.

Fischer’s lawyer was using the trendy “Rising Curve Defense” where the driver’s test results at the scene are compared to the results taken later in the police station. The hope is that an incline in blood alcohol level may indicate that the accused may not have been quite exactly legally drunk a half hour earlier when he was arrested. This requires special experts to be hired by the defense and the state, causing huge expense to the people of Wisconsin.

Like the kid who kills his parents and appeals to the court because he is an orphan, Mr’s Sellow and Fischer claim it’s all about the 6th Amendment. “My client decided the constitutional issue . . .  was so important, not only to him and not only in (this) drunk-driving case, but in other cases, too. He felt it was important enough to take it as far as it could go, so he did,” Shellow said.

Hundreds of thousands of people are being laid off by the census bureau. Whether or not they qualify for  unemployment? It’s an alchemical art.

Even though federal employees are covered for unemployment insurance under the Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees program and you don’t even have deductions taken out to pay for it, they are bound by the eligibility rules of the state they worked in.

In Wisconsin, where I worked for the census bureau from March til August, the rules are really arcane. Now pay close attention:

Benefit amounts and eligibility are based on the first four of the last five quarters prior to the start of your claim — unless you don’t have enough wages to qualify for a claim based on that formula, in which case, you use the ‘alternate base period‘ method. The alternate period is the four most recently completed calendar quarters prior to the start of your claim,  where your wages must be at least 35 times your weekly benefit rate AND your wages equal at least 4 times your weekly benefit rate outside the highest quarter.

Got it?

It took four phone calls with wait times of up to 40 minutes to determine that I need to reapply in October (when the next quarter begins) to have my last quarter (July and August) considered as part of the formula.

And as my passionately-right-wing Republican,  Fox-News-Network-loving Mom noted: “What are people supposed to do if they need that money to live?