Last summer, the South Carolina Supreme Court chastised the town of Mt. Pleasant for its ongoing failure to comply with a 1998 mandate that any DUI arrest in the state be recorded by a police dashboard-mounted camera. The ruling makes it clear that all suspects “must have his conduct at the incident site and breath test site video recorded.”
Towns did not have to use their own funds to install the video recording devices, as they were to request funding from the Department of Public Safety. Despite the ruling made over ten years ago, the town of Mt. Pleasant had so far failed to follow the state Supreme Court’s mandate. DUI arrests are a major source of income for the town, and Mt. Pleasant was the leading municipality for DUI arrests from 1998 to 2008.
The court took on the case from an appeal of a DUI arrest stemming from an auto accident. The Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s dismissal of the DUI charge because there was no video recording of the arrest. “We find the town’s protracted failure to equip its patrol vehicles with video cameras, despite its ‘priority ranking,’ defeats the intent of the legislature and violates the statutorily created obligation to videotape DUI arrests,” Justice Donald W. Beatty wrote for the court. Now in January, Mt. Pleasant is spending $95,000 to comply with the ruling and has moved forward to purchase cameras for 48 police vehicles.
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