Matthew Baldwin is praising loopholes. An excerpt:
“This guy gets pulled over on suspicion of a DUI,” she said, “And it turns out that he only speaks Spanish. So the cop radios for a Spanish-speaking colleague. A second officer shows up, reads the driver his rights in Spanish off of a little card that all cops carry, and they administer the breathalyzer test. Sure enough, the guy is soused.
“We figure this case is a slam dunk. But a few weeks later the driver’s lawyer submits a motion to have the results of the breathalyzer voided, saying that the defendant didn’t understand his rights before we gave him the test. And we’re all, like, ‘Nuh-uh! We read him his rights. In Spanish, even.’“But the defense somehow got a copy of the Spanish language card that the officer read from, and noticed that the little squiggle was missing from above an ‘n’ in the sentence: ‘¿Tiene veinteuno años?’ In English that literally translates to ‘Do you have 21 years?’—in other words, this was just a routine question to make sure the guy was an adult. But without the tilde over the ‘n’, the word ‘años’ becomes ‘anos’—Spanish for ‘anuses.’
Read the rest of this sad story here.
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