Arrested for DUI - need to be reported?

[EdFred]

No, I wasn't pulled over, or arrested for DUI, but this is what happened to a nephew of an acquaintance, and thought, "Holy crap this would suck if I had to report it"

Long story short because I don't have all the details:

Acquaintance's nephew does not drink at all, but for whatever reason was driving "erratically" one night and gets pulled over. He gets scared and nervous, and the officer orders him out of the car under suspicion of drinking. He gets even more nervous after he's out of the car, and ends up throwing up when the cop requests him to do the walk the line test. (Unsure if he actually did the walk the line test or not or when exactly the vomiting occurred if the test was done). The officer says, yep, you're drunk and arrests him. The nephew asks for a breathalyzer/blood test, and the officer says, "No need, you're obviously intoxicated." All of this is caught on the dash cam. The next day he's released, charges are dropped, and the officer was fired/dismissed as he had done this sort of thing before.

I looked over the 8500-8 under 19 and 14CFR 61.15 which say, "any conviction(s)." I thought I read somewhere that any arrest involving controlled substances needed to be reported, or am I just misremembering?

 

[Jim Logajan]

That the NTSB and/or the courts haven't noticed and/or commented upon on the idiocy and/or ambiguity of the phraseology demonstrates that they are just as idiotic and/or illiterate as the person who wrote and/or approved the phrasing and/or the form itself.

No purpose appears to be served by the use of the "and" part of the "and/or" in this case. Using "or" alone would have been unambiguously interpreted in the "inclusive-or" meaning because any attempt to interpret "or" in an "exclusive-or" meaning would yield the absurdity of excluding those who were arrested and then convicted. And a review of the text of 14 CFR finds "or" used exclusively in the inclusive-or sense.

According to citations in the Wikiepedia article on "and/or" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And/or ) "Courts called on to interpret it have applied a wide variety of standards, with little agreement." The Florida Supreme Court "has held that use of and/or results in a nullity." The article Wikipedia contains some wonderful skewering of the use of "and/or" in legal documents. (While the form uses "and/or" I'm guessing it wont be found anywhere in the text of 14 CFR.)

Also, the word "arrest" does not seem toappear anywhere in section 61.15 or Part 67. I'm not sure how any form, such as 8500, can be considered regulatory (in fact it lists the statutes and regulations that allegedly allow its questions.) Unless form designers get to make up any information request they like, I would think addition of "arrest" in 2008 to that form should have been preceded by a change in the regulations. It would not be the first time an agency over-stepped its authority during changes in its procedures and it took a few years for it to be contested and corrected.