A Dreyfus of Drunks

When he is able to work, DeWitt Easter, 59, is a skilled plasterer who can earn $175 a week in Washington, D.C. But Easter is seldom out of jail and sober. An alcoholic whose father was an alcoholic, he has been arrested 70 times for public intoxication--a "crime" for which Washington arrests 44,000 people a year. While such police work tidies up the streets, the fact that 70% of the arrests involve repeaters like Easter suggests that Washington's anti-drunk laws are more punitive than preventive. And it is just this premise that has spurred some highly sober Washington lawyers to make Easter's latest conviction a national test case aimed at finding alternatives to the present practice of treating alcoholics like criminals.

Futile Sanctions. So-called public intoxication accounts for almost 50% of criminal arrests in U.S. urban areas--or roughly 1,000,000 arrests a year--and for more than 50% of the inmates in U.S. county jails. These statistics do not include arrests for drunken driving or assaults caused by drinking. Arrests for plain public drunkenness total about 26,000 a year in San Francisco, 66,000 in Chicago, 80,000 in Los Angeles--while chronic drunks travel an endless circuit from gutter to cell to gutter before their final trip to the morgue. "It is hard to imagine a drearier example of the futile use of penal sanctions," says New York's Chief City Magistrate John M. Murtagh. In New York, at least, the courts demand proof of actual disorderly conduct and the police thus arrest only about 15,000 drunks a year.

The glaring lack in nearly every U.S. city is effective medical treatment.

Washington's judges have the option of hospitalizing chronic drunks. Yet no such referral has occurred since 1962, for the simple reason that the law requires "adequate treatment facilities"--something Congress has not provided. The city's rehabilitation clinic has facilities only for outpatients; the city's general hospital has beds for only 30 acute alcoholics. As a result, Washington spends $2,000,000 a year tossing drunks in the workhouse along with thieves and gamblers; the money might better be used for a treatment center. The setup "stinks," fumes Washington Corrections Department Director Donald Clemmer. "The real alcoholic is not a criminal and should not bear the stigma of imprisonment."

Hopeful Strategy. With the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union, a young member of Dean Acheson's law firm named Peter Hutt is determined to find an escape from this maze by getting an appellate court to rule (as the Supreme Court did in 1962 regarding narcotics addicts) that it is unconstitutional to jail victims of a "disease' over which they have no control. As Hutt sees it, this might force Congres; to provide decent treatment facilities Unhappily for Hutt, Washington's Assistant Corporation Counsel Clark F. King believes that Congress will fail to act. If Hutt wins, says King, drunks "will be turned out on the streets, and the public, including women and children, will be exposed to them and their indecencies."

For the past year, Hutt has sought a Dreyfus of drunks on whom to build a case. Four times, he plucked sodden candidates out of the drunk tank, and each time, King foiled a trial by getting the charges dropped with a nolle prosequi (will no further prosecute). Hutt finally produced precedents saying that once a trial has begun, this tactic is not allowable without the defendant's consent. He then took DeWitt Easter as his client only after the police had rested their case. A few weeks ago, Easter was given a 90-day suspended sentence by Judge Edmond Daly, who is "absolutely in 100% agreement" with Hutt's goal.

Now the appeal is well under way. Defendant Easter, who has "craved liquor like a man craving water," may not live to see Congress provide the care that would make him Patient Easter. But his name may go down in law books as that of a desperate man who left hope for others.

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