ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: Senate Serves Up a Weak Mea Culpa, of Sorts

Friday, March 18, 2011

Senate Serves Up a Weak Mea Culpa, of Sorts

By Greer Gessler
UNM Student
           The article that I read the other day, "Senate Backs Lesser Penalties for Servers" by Deborah Baker, made me think: "How strange, I was one of those servers 'hauled off in handcuffs,' a few summers ago."
        Back then I wrote an op-ed column about my experience that was published in the Journal. Turns out, years later the Senate agreed that maybe they have been a little hard on people like me. Especially when drunken drivers don't face a felony charge until their fourth offense.
        So, it's worse to sell alcohol to minors than to drive drunk. One guy who was already in jail when we showed up that day said he wished he'd been charged with selling alcohol to a minor. I wish I had gotten a DWI!
        I asked myself, was that an experiment? Were we just a case study? Baker writes, "lawmakers agreed Monday that they went overboard a few years ago when they made it a felony to sell or serve alcohol to minors."
        It took them a few years to realize that they made a mistake, and we who were arrested are just trying to keep bill collectors at bay, feed mouths and pay our college tuition. It just seems unethical. By overboard did they mean they pushed us all off a ship and left us for dead? Because that's what it felt like.
        I was thinking that if the law will be changed to a first offense, petty misdemeanor, then what happens to the hundreds of us who have already been charged with our first offense when it was a felony?
        Maybe we could just do it backward, and our third offense could be the petty misdemeanor. I mean, we all have done time for it. Whether it was hours or days, they still fingerprinted us and took pictures of our tattoos. Our records show that we have been arrested.
        What about the fines and fees we paid our lawyers and fees we paid to the state through probation?
        Or who knows. I walked a tightrope between the District Attorney's office and a trial by a jury of my peers. Maybe some of those other servers did go to trial, did receive more penalty than probation for a year. Nobody even knows what happened to us.
        Then the Senate renegotiates and says, "Oops, we made a mistake?" It sounds like a Britney Spears song. "Everyone just go back to what you were doing."
        Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino said he knew a girl who apparently misread a birth date. Everybody apparently misread a birth date. Do they think we did it on purpose? What, for an extra two dollar tip?!
        Then "a few" years later we hear about how someone was wrong, or we had the wrong intel.
        Just for the record, we don't report felony arrests on job applications. They ask: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? That's not what haunts us; it's what we went through for the year or two after the arrest. The things that you don't know about haunt us.
        More important, Sen. Kent Cravens, R-Albuquerque, said "the bill rectifies the problem."
        Well, the bill doesn't rectify the problem, and for anyone to say that just means that they are living in right field soaking up the sun.
        I just want someone to know that a lot of us got screwed that summer. What about us?

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