It took less than one drink to get Shannon Wilcutt busted for felony DUI

She'd had only one glass of wine. She'd been the designated driver.

The crazy thing is that police knew that when they charged her. The breathalyzer put her blood alcohol content at 0.03, well below the 0.08 legal limit.

But the Scottsdale police were convinced Sifford was on drugs. Without evidence, the officer kept hassling her about whether or not she'd used cocaine at the concert, Sifford says. And when Sifford volunteered that she'd taken a Vicodin earlier in the day because she was still suffering the effects of surgery, they surely thought they had her. That's where the "driving under the influence of drugs" charge came from.

A urine test, performed by officers that night, revealed not even a trace amount of Vicodin. She'd taken the pill so many hours earlier that it had passed out of her system entirely. And, of course, there was no coke in her blood, either.

Diana Sifford wasn't drunk, and she wasn't high. She just drove too close to a parked car.

She was handcuffed, taken to the station, and booked. Her car was impounded. In great pain from sitting while handcuffed, with a tender back, and exhausted, she wasn't released until early morning.

A cop friend told her not to hire a lawyer and to tell the truth at her pretrial hearing and that she'd be okay. But the pretrial hearing was a cattle call — she had just five minutes with the prosecutor, who offered to drop the other charges if she pleaded guilty to the DUI.

Sifford was not about to do that. After the judge refused to listen to her story — refused to even look at the paperwork she'd brought — she knew she had to hire a lawyer.

It cost her about $3,000, but it worked. In January, Sifford pleaded guilty to a single charge of not staying in her lane and agreed to a defensive-driving class.

"I had to go through this ordeal for four months," she says. "Not sleeping. And it was basically a $3,000 traffic ticket."

But I was struck by something as I talked to Sifford. She begged me not to read too much into the police report — in the officer's account of her field sobriety tests, she was sniffing constantly, her pulse was above normal, and she swayed. Reading that, without the results of the urine test, you might assume she was coked-up.

But that's the thing about these reports. You can see it on Shannon Wilcutt's, too.

Shannon Wilcutt had a 0.02 blood alcohol content, but the police report notes a "moderate" odor of alcohol on her breath. How is that possible? It also says that her speech was "slurred" and she had dried blood on her lips. That couldn't possibly be related to dental surgery, could it?

And what about Diana Sifford's rapid pulse? Could it be that she was simply anxious about being pulled over?

The cops were building their cases; it was up to Wilcutt and Sifford to find lawyers willing to ferret out the truth.

The officers are only doing their job, but their job is to bust drunk drivers. That's what the Legislature wants, what the governor wants, and what the public wants. From the minute the cops pull you over, they assume you're drunk.

It's your job to prove yourself innocent.

Frightening. And it's also frightening to think how much overtime money, how many grants from the state and federal government, goes toward busting drivers like Shannon Wilcutt and Diana Sifford. Not to mention paying public defenders in cases where the defendant can't afford a lawyer.

Keeping dangerous drunks off the road should be a priority for all of us. If that means major penalties for a first offense, if that means mandatory Interlock for first time offenders — heck, even if it means yet another "public health" campaign plastering County Attorney Andrew Thomas' mug on billboards across town — it's hard to argue against it.

The problem comes when the focus shifts from stopping real drunks to punishing people who've had only a glass of wine or half a mimosa. It's also troubling, I think, when the punishment isn't commensurate with the crime. Studies have shown that drivers chatting on their cell phones are just as dangerous as those who've had a few drinks. So why should we want to slap three felonies on a woman who's had half a mimosa — when we give a mere citation to drivers impaired by their cell phone use?

Last year, Phoenix was one of the first municipalities in the Valley to pass a law banning text messaging while driving. Good move, right? But the fines and fees amount to less than $500 even in a case in which an accident is involved. Contrast that with someone who's had a few drinks and gets into an accident — you can bet that driver's not getting off without jail time, even though the damage is the same.

It all comes down to our attitude about drinking. Groups like MADD have done such a great job humanizing the victims of drunk drivers, but we forget about the bigger picture. ADOT statistics show that in 94.5 percent of all car accidents in Arizona in 2006 (the most recent year available), drivers involved had not a drop of alcohol in their systems. Six times as many accidents were caused by speed as by alcohol impairment.

But we still want to throw the book at tipsy drivers — even tipsy drivers who aren't involved in crashes. Thanks to new laws passed by the Arizona Legislature last year, DUI penalties here are among the toughest in the nation.

For a first DUI, even if the driver never hit anything and is barely above the legal limit, the penalty is still 10 days in jail, $1,500 in fines, and an interlock device on the car for a year. (It's worse if you're extremely drunk. Get popped with blood alcohol content of 0.20, and even if it's your first offense, you're looking at 45 days in jail, $6,300 in fines and fees, and an interlock device for 18 months.)

And what about Shannon Wilcutt? With a child under 15 in the car, her offense was automatically a felony. She could have faced up to $150,000 in fines and fees, plus jail time.

The possibility of such harsh punishment is having a serious effect on the system, and it's not necessarily what lawmakers intended. Karyn Klausner is a former municipal court judge who now handles numerous DUI cases as a lawyer at the Gillespie Law Firm in Phoenix. She says more and more defendants are choosing to pay for lawyers — and go to trial — rather than face the Legislature's mandatory minimums. And the defendants are winning.

"In many instances, people don't have anything to lose by going to trial," Klausner says. "So we fight like hell. It's inundating the prosecutors, costing the state lots of money — and they're losing. These are decent prosecutors, but in a trial, you never know what's going to happen."

And here's the sick part. Harsh penalties make defendants squirm, but studies show that they don't actually prevent drunk drinking.

It's way too soon to see what effect Arizona's new DUI laws are having. It'll be at least two years before we have any data that show whether there's been a change in accident rates.

If history is any indicator, though, we may be disappointed.

Alexander Wagenaar is a professor of epidemiology and health policy at the University of Florida. He doesn't share my views about social drinkers; he admits he'd like to see the United States set the legal limit even lower than 0.08, as it is in Europe.

But Wagenaar has made his name by studying what actually reduces drunk driving — and his results might surprise Arizona legislators. Mandatory jail time and heavy fines, his studies conclude, are not effective deterrents.

Far more effective, researchers have found, are immediate license revocations. If it happens quickly, and happens to everyone who's busted, revocation can be a serious deterrent, Wagenaar says.

"If you're arrested for a DUI, and a year later you end up getting a $1,000 fine and a weekend in jail, that's a lot less effective of a deterrent than sitting at the roadside at 2 a.m., watching as they tow away your car," he says.

The point of long jail sentences and fat fines isn't deterrence — it's punishment, Wagenaar says.