Rare failure booted from DUI program

Although it meant saving himself a year in prison, an admitted drunken driver wasn't willing to follow the strict guidelines of Clark County's new Serious Offender Program.

Francisco Aguilar Lopez, 44, will now have two years behind bars to think about it.

He is only the fifth person to fail out of about 80 participants in the program during its first year.

The purpose of the program is to provide an alternative to expensive prison sentences for chronic DUI offenders, while protecting the community by addressing the defendants' alcoholism. Participants are kept off the streets through house arrest, intensive supervision and breath interlock devices on cars.

The district attorney's office initiated the experimental program in an effort to stop drunks who can't stay off the streets and continually get arrested on DUI charges, even after going to prison.

Dealing with DUI offenders in the community -- with controls that keep them from driving drunk -- already has saved taxpayers over $1 million because participants pay for their treatment and house arrest, according to the district attorney's office.

Deputy District Attorney Gary Booker said that by addressing the underlying alcoholism, the future benefits might be measured in lives saved.

But Lopez didn't buy into the program and at counseling sessions he was resistant or disruptive, Booker told a judge Wednesday.

When a female counselor was involved, Lopez often would leer or make sexually suggestive remarks, Booker said, adding that the counselor sometimes had to leave the room.

While the Serious Offender Program gives chronic drunken drivers a chance for leniency in criminal cases, it also requires that participants make a concerted effort.

The message in the Lopez case, Booker said, is that failure to seriously commit to the program requirements will result in getting the boot from the program, even if the person has stopped drinking -- as apparently was the case with Lopez.

When pushed to comply with the intensive steps of the program, Lopez often would say it was "a lot of trouble" and threaten to return to his home in Nicaragua, said Laurel Turner, the Serious Offender Program case manager.

"Everyone had a complaint with him," Turner said.

After eight months, Booker and Turner had enough and took Lopez back to court.

There a repentant Lopez said he was misunderstood and emphasized he never wants to return to Nicaragua. He vowed to do better, but District Judge Michael Douglas wasn't swayed.

Had Lopez completed the program, it would have knocked a year off his mandatory two-year sentence. He had pleaded guilty to drunken driving after his car hit a motorcyclist on Dec. 24, 1996. The motorcyclist, Octavio Savabia, suffered a fractured pelvis in the collision on Charleston Boulevard near Mojave Road.

Now Lopez will have to serve his time in a prison cell.

While Lopez was a rare failure for the new program, Booker has said that most participants have embraced the chance to address their alcoholism and only one has been caught driving while drunk, which earned that person a ticket to prison.

Turner said that while relapsing with an occasional drink won't get a participant ejected from the program -- although controls will be tightened -- drunken driving always will.

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