Friday, Jul. 10, 2009

Giese owes public an explanation for his actions

WE EXPECTED BETTER from Barney Giese.

Unlike the solicitor across the river whose pathetic excuses for his own drunken driving charges (charges brought while he was driving a county car on a taxpayer-funded out-of-state junket) the intelligence of voters, or the former Richland County prosecutor who relied on slick lawyering of the sort that prosecutors rightly lambaste, Mr. Giese has never come across as someone who thumbs his nose at the law, who thinks there are different standards for himself and the people he prosecutes. He’s always been a stand-up sort of a guy. A prosecutor’s prosecutor. A man who has devoted his adult life to public service. A man of unquestioned integrity.

A man who knows better than to get behind the wheel of a car when he’s drunk. A man who knows better than to get behind the wheel even if he might have been drinking even a little bit too much — not just because of the political risk that entails, but because it’s wrong. And dangerous.

Mr. Giese is, by law, innocent until proven guilty. His defense attorney friends say there’s no way he would drive while he’s intoxicated — or even be intoxicated, for that matter. They say the case against him looks weak — even though the police report says he couldn’t count backwards or stand steadily on one foot or walk a straight line and pivot as instructed. You see, there’s no videotape of the arrest, which means it’s the police officers’ word against the word of Mr. Giese, who refused the breath test that could have given police something more than their word to put up against his.

Perhaps it’s naive of us to think that someone whose entire career has been prosecuting others for breaking the law — and trying to counter the defense attorneys who work to discredit police and plant doubt where none belongs — would avoid the tactics that people who are guilty (and well-informed) use to reduce their chance of being convicted. But we wish he had.

Perhaps it’s naive to expect that the chief prosecutor for the capital city would inform the public when he’s arrested on DUI charges, rather than waiting for someone to dig it up. But he should have. No, he wasn’t under any legal obligation to do that, but prosecutors of all people, who hold the public trust, have at least a moral obligation to go beyond the law when it comes to their own run-ins with the law.

A lot of Mr. Giese’s constituents, fed up with the personal shortcomings of public officials in general (see Gov. Mark Sanford) and drinking and driving solicitors in particular (see Lexington Solicitor Donnie Myers and the late Richland solicitor, Jim Anders), are calling for his head. Resign, they thunder. We wouldn’t go that far.

Unless there has been a horrible misunderstanding, or an astoundingly audacious fabrication on the part of Charleston Police, Mr. Giese made what can at best be described as a terrible error in judgment. An error of the sort that kills hundreds of innocent South Carolinians every year. One for which he should be punished. One for which he owes the public an explanation and, yes, as tired as we are of them, an apology. But given his heretofore solid behavior both personally and professionally, it’s hard to argue that he should have to resign. (DUI is not considered a crime of moral turpitude, so his forced removal is not at issue.)

Whether voters see fit to re-hire him for another four years is an entirely different matter. That should depend on how willing he is to come clean — or else demonstrate his innocence — and how well he manages to do his job, and reclaim his upstanding image.

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