Women Behaving Badly; Florida Driver Bribes Officer with Sexual Favors, Are DUIs Increasing Among Women?

January 15th, 2013    Posted in DUI News

Palm Beach County, FL-Everyday hundreds of people are arrested for drunk driving, the incidents are fairly routine and not always news worthy. However there are two DUI arrests involving women that caught our attention here at DUI Lawyers Now. And made us wonder if drunk driving among women is increasing?

Although it’s not nice to laugh at other people’s troubles, this story from Palm Beach County, Florida is kind of amusing. It involves a 53 year-old middle school teacher who tried to bribe her way out of a DUI over the weekend.

Sunday night Palm Beach pulled over Mary Maloney, who looks like your average mom or grandmother, because she rammed her van into a pickup truck in Greenacres and fled the scene, the Broward-Palm Beach New Times reported.

After locating and pulling Maloney over, the arresting officer noticed an empty jug of wine in her backseat and she smelled strongly of alcohol. When the officer informed her she was going to be arrested for impaired driving she tried to talk her way of the arrest.

Maloney asked the officer, “How much do I have to pay you to just let me go?” She then tried eliciting some leniency by informing the officer she was a teacher. But neither of those ploys worked so she stepped in up notch.

Maloney then allegedly offered to give the officer a blow job and let him feel up her boobs if he would just let her go. The officer however was not interested in taking her up on sexual favors and she added the charged of attempt to bribe a public officer to her other charges which included suspicion of DUI, fleeing the scene of accident and driving with a revoked license.

Upon further investigation, police discovered Maloney had a previous DUI conviction from 2009.

Had Maloney not attempted to bribe the officer with sexual favors, she could have kept her name out of the news and maybe kept her teaching job.

Also this week, a woman from Rhode Island was charged with DUI after leaving the scene of a collision. Not all that unusual, but what makes her case interesting is that not only was it her second DUI, but she’s also a DUI defense attorney—you’d think she knew better.

The Providence Journal reported that attorney Layne C. Savage was stopped on Sunday evening after she hit a parked car in the Providence.

Her litigation skills paid off with her first DUI because she managed to have the charged reduced because she said the officer didn’t have probable cause to pull her over because he did not witness her erratic driving, according to the Providence Journal. She obviously knows that is an effective defense strategy.

These are just two of the more interesting DUI arrests of late. If you pay attention to DUI news like we do you may have noticed that more and more offenders are women. It’s common knowledge that men take more risks than women, and as a consequence they have a tendency to drink and drive more. But impaired driving among women is on the rise.

In 2009, The Associated Press discovered that while the DUI arrest rate among men was declining, the arrest rate for women was increasing. According to statistics female impaired driving arrests increased 28.8 percent from 1998 to 2007, compared to a 7.5 percent decrease for men over the same period.

In 1998 126,000 women were arrested for DUI compared to 162,493 arrests in 2007. That’s a sharp increase, but it still doesn’t compare to the 626,371 arrests for men in 2007. But if the momentum persists we could see a 2.8 percent annual increase of female DUI arrests.