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Personal link helps lawyer defend client in DUI case

A public defender seeks a lighter sentence for a repeat DUI offender who again is facing DUI charges.

By JAMAL THALJI
Published November 29, 2005

DADE CITY - Tom Hanlon said he hasn't had a drink in 22 years. Not since Hanlon, the veteran assistant public defender, realized he was an alcoholic.

So he knows what recovering alcoholic Raymond Lee Smith, sober since a year ago today, is going through.

That very personal connection might help Hanlon persuade a judge to spare his client - a 58-year-old Vietnam veteran battling post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and alcoholism - a prison sentence for driving under the influence.

"He's up because he hit bottom," an emotional Hanlon said in court Monday morning. "He's a completely different man. Putting him in jail is like sending him back to Vietnam."

But Smith is also a repeat DUI offender whose convictions stretch back to 1970. His latest infraction came in April 2004, when the Florida Highway Patrol charged him with driving under the influence, DUI property damage and driving with a permanently revoked license.

In February, the State Attorney's Office amended the misdemeanors to felony charges. Smith came to court Monday and pleaded guilty despite facing the state minimum of 22 months in prison. To avoid that, his court-appointed attorney had to give the judge a legal reason to reduce or suspend his sentence.

But Hanlon also gave the judge an emotional reason, drawing on his own experiences and battles with alcoholism to beg for leniency.

"Sometimes in life you've just got to take a chance," Hanlon said. "I've never seen, in my years of lawyering, anyone make this kind of turnaround."

"A year is huge ... a year of learning how to live. ... Not many people do that."

A defense expert testified that if Smith went to prison, his sobriety "would probably do some backsliding."

Assistant State Attorney Phil Van Allen was not unsympathetic to Smith. But the prosecutor told the judge that Smith's long history of DUIs, and the chance that he could relapse, made him a danger.

"My congratulations to Mr. Smith," Van Allen said. "A year of sobriety is amazing. But, judge, we're not here for Mr. Smith. We're here for the law, and I know that the law finds that you cannot reduce his sentence because he's an alcoholic.

"For the protection of society, he should be put in prison."

Circuit Judge Lynn Tepper said Smith qualifies to have his sentence reduced. She may even suspend his sentence but delayed that decision until January.

It wasn't just Smith's sobriety that swayed the judge, but that this latest arrest prompted him to diagnose and treat all his disorders.

Smith said it started when he was an Army combat engineer in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. His canteen filled with alcohol, he was a 19-year-old watching friends die in combat. "A lot of stuff I didn't ever want to see," Smith said.

Now he is on disability and divorced, with three sons and five grandchildren. After the hearing, the Zephyrhills man clung to his girlfriend of seven years, who didn't want her name in the newspaper.

"I got to the point where I just didn't care," Smith said. "I even thought of just living in the woods like a lot of VA guys.

"She helped me. She gave me courage. She had faith in me. This feeling, I've never had this feeling before ... of clear thinking."

Which is why Smith was ready to plead guilty.

"The burden we have as alcoholics," Hanlon said, "is you've got to accept it and move on."

--Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report.

[Last modified November 29, 2005, 02:15:28]