The NFL season starts next week and while we can’t say how the Seahawks will do (The Athletic has them pegged at 9-10 wins . . . unfortunately, they have the 49ers at 11-13 but, hey, you never know) we do know that Gino Smith, the key to the season, won’t have any outside worries. His DUI from a 2022 arrest was tossed two weeks ago.
This is not, to my mind, a case of a famous, vital piece of a local team catching a break . . . it’s much more along the lines of what took so long?
Smith was pulled over on January 10, 2022, the morning after the last game of the season.
According to the state patrol report Smith was driving a 2017 two-door Rolls-Royce at 2 a.m. on I-90 when he passed an officer “at a high rate of speed,” he guessed was 96 mph. Apparently, Smith did not immediately pull over and when he did the officer said he was ‘agitated.’ Based on his ‘observations’ the officer arrested Smith on suspicion of DUI. He was processed and taken to a hospital for a blood test.
His blood alcohol level was .038, less than half the limit at which a driver can be determined to be legally impaired . . . unless, of course, in the arresting officer’s opinion a totality of circumstances indicated he was incapacitated. That opinion was apparently cemented when it was also discovered that he also had about half the legal limit of THC in his blood as well.
Initially, the prosecutors posited that the THC had a ‘compounding effect’ on the alcohol despite the rather thin scientific (and thinner anecdotal) evidence to back that up. (By the way, whenever I hear that argument I’m reminded of sunscreen: Google is thick with questions about combining SPFs. “If I combine SPF 35 with 15 will I get 50 protection?” I’ll save you the search, no, you get whatever the higher of the SPF you use, nothing more).
They, obviously, walked that back when they made their decision to not pursue the case. They stated that they “did not have evidence to refute likely explanations for his bad driving, and while they could show that he had alcohol and marijuana in his system . . . they don’t have evidence showing exactly what effect they had on Smith.”
Also, the prosecutors stated that in any event they couldn’t run any further tests on Smith’s blood samples because they “had been stored in a refrigerator that failed at the state crime lab and even though that didn’t affect the accuracy of the results, there’d likely be litigation.”
This, of course, begs the question, one I continue to ask the state labs: if not refrigerating blood samples doesn’t affect them, why refrigerate them in the first place? The answer so far . . . . crickets.
A lot of lessons here and good for Gino Smith.
Oh, and I’ll go on record here and now: Seahawks go 10-7, finish second in the West, and snag a wild card bid.
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