Texas Will Set Aside 1,200 DWIs
October 11, 2009 by Mark Ellis
Filed under Business
The poor judgment of a contractor working for a Texas Department of Public Safety has left 1,200 driving while intoxicated convictions completely invalid and the contractor in prison for at least a year. Deetrice Wallace has been convicted of falsifying inspections records for several Houston police departments and was prosecuted for three counts of tampering with a governmental record.
According to the assistant district attorney in charge of prosecuting the case, Wallace failed to change the reference sample in the machines every month and instead chose to manipulate the machines, skimming $146,000 off the top for herself. Her actions will allow 1,000 additional DWI defendants to petition for a retrial, even if their cases were not directly affected by Wallace.
Wallace was able to continue manipulating machines and stealing money from the government from 2002 to her arrest in October 2008, signing off on around 4,000 test slips for at least seven different local police departments. However, DPS officials have had to invalidate all of the breath tests that Wallace handled because they have no way of pinpointing when Wallace began lying.
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