Cara King needed smokes. Before she hopped into her aunt’s silver Mazda 6 to head to the gas station, the 27-year-old took a hit of marijuana. While it’s been legal to smoke marijuana in Michigan since 2018, it is still illegal to drive while high.
But police don’t have a perfect system for determining that – and what happened next to King would have a lasting impact on how counties across Michigan prosecute motorists suspected of being too stoned to drive safely.
Her court case raised questions about the validity of Drug Recognition Experts (DRE), a decades-old, national program that has trained officers to become “experts” at detecting impairment from drug use.
King and her attorney would fight back – and ultimately set a new precedent in the courts.
“I have a real problem with the science behind the DRE,” said Chris Langholz, King’s attorney. “It’s junk science and it shouldn’t be used to convict anybody.”
The traffic stop
King — who changed her name from Bowden when she married in August – spent years struggling with drug addiction, hard stuff like heroin and meth.
By December 2020, when she went out for cigarettes, she was making positive changes – an 11-month jail stint and three months in rehab behind her, newfound dedication to her son, a steady job managing a McDonald’s, a supportive boyfriend and a hard-fought commitment to never use hard drugs again.
“I’ve got it totally under control now,” King, now 31, told MLive more than three years later. “But it was scary. There was a time when I didn’t think I’d come out on the other side. A lot of my friends are dead.”
As she was headed to the gas station that day, King peered across an intersection at a police car. She was instantly nervous, a symptom of too many past run-ins with the law. When the light switched to green, she pressed the gas.
King didn’t know why at the time, but the Ottawa County sheriff’s patrol car with two deputies inside, made a U-turn and flicked on the flashing overhead lights. King pulled into the parking lot of a liquor store.
A deputy wrote in a report reviewed by MLive that King was stopped for having only one working headlight. Ottawa County deputies didn’t have body or dashboard cameras to record King’s stop, so a recounting of the traffic stop is limited to written police reports and her memory.
“I told Cara that I could smell marijuana in the vehicle, and she told me the last time she smoked was two weeks ago,” the deputy wrote. “Cara’s eyes were bloodshot red, which is consistent with consumption of cannabis. A strong odor of marijuana could be smelled from Cara’s driver-side window.”
Read more at MLive