Posted on Sun, June 27, 2004

Drink. Drive. Go get Coffey.

With her billboards and brash style, Fort Worth DWI lawyer Mimi Coffey says she's fighting for justice. Or is she simply cashing in on the problem?

By Liz Stevens

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

You know Mimi Coffey.

She's the woman with folded arms staring down at you from her Airport Freeway billboard, near downtown Fort Worth.

She's the one telling you that it's OK to drink and drive.

She believes that. Passionately, she says.

And not just because it's her business.

Coffey is a DWI defense attorney. She represents drunken drivers. She also represents drivers arrested on suspicion of having a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) over the legal limit, most of whom, she argues, are innocent.

Coffey contends that the Driving While Intoxicated laws in Texas and across the nation have become Machiavellian in their single-mindedness. In the process of ridding the streets of dangerous drunkards, she says, these laws have unfairly penalized "social drinkers," sweeping them up like dolphins in a tuna net.

After all, she stresses, there's no law against drinking and then driving, as long as said driver isn't legally intoxicated.

Her latest billboard pulls no punches: "Drink, drive -- go to jail. Another government lie." Next to the text is Coffey's signature photograph: black suit, folded arms, confident closed-lip smile.

Sure, she wants your business.

But she also wants you to know she's on a crusade.

"I think the pendulum has swung too far," she says. "You can get to a point where people's constitutional freedoms and protections don't matter, and I think MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) has brought us to that point."

Don't get Coffey wrong, she says. She thinks most of what MADD does is terrific: offering support to victims of drunken drivers, lobbying for common-sense legislation that makes the roads safer. Drunken drivers who hurt and kill innocent people "deserve serious punishment," she says.

But, to Coffey's mind, the push for sobriety checkpoints and ad campaigns such as "Drink. Drive. Go to Jail." have whipped up "a mass hysteria" that has legislators passing unduly restrictive laws and has poorly trained police officers making arrests willy-nilly.

Worst of all, she adds, this "neo- prohibitionist" atmosphere has law-abiding citizens fearing for their liberty should they have a glass of wine with dinner -- and then get behind the wheel.

"My job is just to make sure that I defend the Constitution, that I defend those who are being charged with a violation of DWI laws, and that I do that to the best of my ability," Coffey explains. "And it's very difficult for me to bring justice to a citizen when the masses are saying that that person deserves no justice."

There are lots of Mimi Coffeys in the United States. Though no one keeps tabs on just how many criminal defense attorneys focus solely on DWI (or DUI, Driving Under the Influence, as it's called in some states), anecdotal evidence suggests their numbers are growing.

"Are more lawyers turning to DUI and even specializing in it?" says Jack King, public affairs director for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). "The answer is yes, they are."

Nine years ago, NACDL's first annual DUI seminar drew 150 participants. "Last year, we had 550," says Steve Oberman, a Tennessee DUI attorney who is the chairman of NACDL's DUI Advocacy Committee and lectures nationally on the subject. Oberman says the complexity of DWI/DUI law has drawn more attorneys to the seminar. But prosecutors also point out that DWI clients possess something that most other criminal defendants don't: money.

"You've got people who would never be in the [criminal justice] system except with DWI," says John Bobo, a former prosecutor and director of the National Traffic Law Center at the American Prosecutors Research Institute in Virginia. "They're doctors, lawyers, bank vice presidents, and they want to fight their DWI.

"Have defense attorneys flocked to where there is a lucrative market niche?" continues Bobo, whose organization trains prosecutors and police officers in DWI law. "You bet."

Coffey charges between $5,000 and $8,000 to take a case to trial, less for a plea bargain and less if a client chooses to pursue a trial with one of her associate attorneys.

She vigorously denies that her primary motivation is economic. Her pursuit is fairness, she says, both in the laws and their applications. And the 35-year-old attorney has a way of making clients feel that she understands and empathizes with their predicament. Each of them receives a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and each sees a videotaped presentation that ends with Coffey complimenting them on their "personal strength."

Her practice is flourishing.

Coffey's Fort Worth office takes up half of a small brick building off Airport Freeway, less than a mile from her billboard. On Tuesdays, and whenever necessary, she works from a 2-year-old Dallas office. The firm's 12 employees include several loyal office assistants (the office manager, Dan, was a client of Coffey's before he came to work for her) and Coffey's husband of four years, Jeff Cox, a former Arthur Andersen accountant who keeps the firm's books.

Coffey's client roster currently consists of approximately 80 cases in Dallas County and 150 in Tarrant County. Up to 20 percent of those cases are set for trial at any one time. As of the end of May, including hung juries, she had won her last three of four cases.

In person, Coffey is effusive. She's prettier than her billboard photograph and petite, even in the high heels she wears daily.

She's all Texan, too: brash one moment, self-deprecating the next.

"I can't understand why you're interested in me," she says.

"I don't like to lose," she says later.

Mostly though, Coffey's a DWI geek. She has completed the same DWI professional training courses that police officers and breath-test machine operators go through, as well as the state's mandatory DWI education class for offenders. She even volunteered to have the breath alcohol ignition interlock device (BAIID) placed on her car, just to experience, Coffey says, "what my clients go through."

She recently became the first woman to be board-certified by the National College for DUI Defense, a Houston-based organization formed by DWI/DUI attorneys in 1995.

As a result, she can talk for hours about the minutiae of DWI law and the -- flawed, she argues -- science and technology behind it.

Field sobriety tests? "Designed for failure."

License revocation hearings prior to conviction? "Wrong to the point of hilarity."

Texas breath-test procedures? "A joke!"

She's incensed that her clients cannot consult with an attorney before they choose whether to take a breath test. She's enraged over a state law that allows the Department of Public Safety to fine first-time DWI offenders $3,000, or $6,000 if their BAC (blood alcohol concentration) registered twice Texas' legal limit of .08.

This, even after they've been fined by a judge and made to pay court fees.

"That's double jeopardy," Coffey argues. "You don't want to get me started on that. That's a whole 'nother article."

It's true that the state's drunken driving penalties have grown much stiffer over the past six to 10 years, says Department of Public Safety spokesman Tom Vinger. But that's because the "public's patience with DWI is wearing thin."

Texas, after all, leads the nation in the number of drunken-driving fatalities.

"The bottom line is that people who drive drunk are going to find a lot of things they don't like about the system," Vinger says. "And the best way to avoid that is to not do it."

But Coffey sees malfeasance, not just stringency, in the system. Take the field sobriety tests that police officers give to DWI suspects. Walking heel-to-toe for nine steps and then pivoting on one foot, Coffey says, is hard to do for a lot of sober people. And what if the pavement is uneven, she asks, or a rock is in the path?

Coffey repeatedly stresses that she means no disrespect to prosecutors, or to MADD. But arguing that "impairment begins with the first sip," as anti-drunken-driving activists have, prompts her literally to roll her eyes.

She asks one of her office assistants to photocopy a chart from a textbook titled Medicolegal Aspects of Alcohol, Third Edition. The chart provides a list of the symptoms people exhibit at different blood alcohol levels.

"Nowhere in that chart does it show that intoxication begins with the first sip," Coffey says. "That's a far stretch."

In recent years, MADD has come under fire for what critics call an increasingly neoprohibitionist agenda. The National Restaurant Association, alcohol retailers, conservative policy analysts and even MADD's founder claim MADD is leading a movement to restrict access to alcohol and, potentially, to make it illegal to drink in any amount and drive.

Coffey agrees. She points as proof to a quote by MADD National President Wendy Hamilton from a 2002 MADD fund-raising letter: "Forget the limits on BAC," Hamilton wrote. "It's just not acceptable to drink and drive. Period."

"We've always said the safest driver is a completely sober driver," responds Hamilton, who has lost a sister, nephew, cousin and uncle to three drunken drivers. She calls the neoprohibitionist charge "ludicrous."

"I wonder who they're talking about," Hamilton says, "because I drink alcohol. I just don't drink and drive."

Coffey's own chart points out that a BAC as low as .03 can mean, for some people, "diminution of attention, judgment and control" and "slowed information processing."

In 2002, 12,344 drivers involved in alcohol-related fatal crashes had BACs of .08 or above, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. An additional 2,317 drivers in alcohol-related fatal wrecks had BACs between .01 and .07.

The Coffey Firm won't take cases involving deaths, says its namesake. Only a small percentage (about 14 percent) of its cases involve injuries. But Coffey sees many repeat offenders and clients with BACs that are far from borderline.

"There are cases that come through our office that really disgust me. There's no doubt about that," Coffey admits. "But I have to put my personal feelings aside."

Coffey is one of a new breed of DWI defense attorneys whose tactics have become increasingly tenacious.

"MADD and Madder," read a headline from the American Bar Association's weekly Internet publication, E Journal, in December 2002. "Today's DUI Defense Bar Is More Focused and Aggressive Than Ever Before."

This concerns MADD's Hamilton, particularly because alcohol-related traffic deaths, which declined 33 percent between 1980 and 1999, have "flat-lined" since then.

Coffey, Hamilton says, "is doing her job, you know. And she's good at it. Part of the problem in the system is that defense attorneys are so well-trained and educated on this that it really makes it more difficult on prosecutors."

Especially on new prosecutors, who are often the ones handling DWI cases.

"The [district attorney] has to start them somewhere," Bobo says, "and does he want to start them with murder, rape and child abuse? Or does he want to start them with what is typically in most parts of the country a misdemeanor: DWI?"

Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney Richard Alpert, chief of the misdemeanor section for the past 11 years, calls those concerns "misplaced."

His prosecutors, he says, "are winning and losing as many cases now as we were before," getting guilty pleas or guilty verdicts in "93 to 94 percent" of their DWI cases.

"When we start seeing dramatic declines in our conviction rate . . . I'll be worried," Alpert says. "I'm not."

Steve sits in the waiting area of Coffey's office, wearing flip-flops and jeans and fidgeting. Still in his early 20s, this is his second DWI arrest. On the walls around him hang Coffey's framed certificates and her three Fort Worth magazine profiles: Each consists of a full-page portrait of her juxtaposed with a short Dewar's-like profile. One notes that she's been called the "DWI Queen."

In a few minutes, Coffey sweeps down a short hallway and, with a gregarious welcome, waves Steve back to her office.

Here they'll spend the next hour watching the video of Steve's traffic stop and subsequent arrest. (Steve is not the client's real name. He requested anonymity because his parents do not know he has been arrested again.)

"Now, [Steve], don't be nervous," Coffey says. "This is a very horrible experience when you have to relive it again."

The grainy video shows Steve being pulled over by a police car for speeding and, a few minutes later, arrested on a DWI charge. Coffey takes notes on a yellow legal pad and intermittently stops the tape to ask Steve questions.

"Are you mad here? Are you confused?"

"Cold," says Steve, who isn't wearing a jacket in the video.

Coffey picks up the phone. "Jason, can you get me the weather Dec. 13, approximately 3 a.m.?"

Using two model cars on her desk, Coffey asks Steve to reconstruct the scene. Later, she stares intently at the screen as the officer gives Steve one of three field sobriety tests, moving a pen back and forth in front of his eyes.

"One pass, two pass. Too fast, too fast," she says. "The stimulus is way too close. Hold the pen and tell me how close he was," Coffey asks Steve. She measures the distance with the length of her legal pad. "OK, he was too close."

"It's really good that he asks you if you wear contacts," Coffey continues, still watching the video. "But he doesn't ask if you've ever had a concussion. He didn't ask if you were on any medication."

In the end, Steve and his attorney agree that it's best if he pursues a plea bargain. His breath test measured .21, and he told the officer that he drinks "every day almost." A jury might think he has a drinking problem, Coffey says.

"It's just the line of work I'm in right now," mutters Steve, who is a bartender.

Coffey says she'll shoot for labor detail (an alternative to jail time), but even that is "no cakewalk." She reminds him that a third DWI arrest in Texas is a felony. "Can you imagine spending four months in jail?" she asks. "And 10 years' probation?"

Steve shakes his head no. "I'm done," he says. "I've stopped drinking. I'm done."

In 2002 Coffey took a stab at politics, running for state representative in District 99. She lost to incumbent Charlie Geren, a Republican ("The Democrats just aren't voting," she laments). Her big issue was raising teacher salaries: Her three boys, ages 7, 10 and 11, all attend public school in Fort Worth, and her 3-year-old daughter, Mimi, will do the same.

Coffey, who calls herself "a social drinker," met her future husband in 1999, at a downtown Fort Worth bar. At first, she says, Cox was appalled that she defended people accused of driving drunk. "Basically, he thought I was doing Satan's work," she says.

"I don't know about that," Cox responds. "[But] I guess I didn't see both sides of it . . . [With DWI] it's easy to be wrongly accused and easy to be convicted."

They married in March of 2000, a month before Coffey opened her namesake firm and a year before her first billboard appeared off Airport Freeway at the southbound Haltom Road exit. It read, "Who says responsible social drinking is illegal?" and provoked angry letters and phone calls to her office. It became a topic of discussion during a local MADD support group meeting.

"I was kind of shocked, to be honest," says MADD member Barbara Shire. "I thought [the billboard] was disrespectful to the people who'd been killed or injured due to drinking and driving."

Shire is related to one of those people. Her 18-year-old son Michael was killed by a drunken driver in 1998, less than a month after he graduated from high school. Shire says she understands that Coffey has a right to earn a living, but the billboard still turns her stomach.

"I don't want to use the word sleazy," she says. "But that's how I look at it."

Nevertheless, Coffey's first billboard stayed up until the new one replaced it in March. The firm recently unveiled two more in Dallas, adjacent to Coffey's new office location off Stemmons Freeway and Inwood Road.

Coffey calls her highway advertisements "a public service announcement." Bobo asserts that "what she's actually doing is pandering to potential clients. [The billboard] speaks to the person who just got arrested for a DUI . . . and it also speaks to jurors."

Which is exactly how Coffey feels about the flashing highway marquees that read "Drink. Drive. Go to Jail" -- that they pander to societal fears and skew potential jurors against her clients.

"DWI," she maintains, "is the modern-day Salem witch hunt." And if her chosen profession means she's unpopular among certain constituencies, so be it.

"I feel good about what I do," Coffey says. "I'm not here throwing around snake oil. I feel like whenever I go to trial, I'm educating the public."

Drunken-driving statistics

•  In 2002, an estimated 17,419 people died in alcohol-related traffic crashes -- an average of one every 30 minutes. These deaths constituted 41 percent of the 42,815 total traffic fatalities.

•  Of the 3,725 traffic deaths in Texas in 2002, 1,745 (or 47 percent) were alcohol-related. Texas leads the nation in the number of alcohol-related deaths.

•  Forty-six states, including Texas, define drunken driving as a blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) of .08 or above.

•  All U.S. states and the District of Columbia have a minimum drinking age of 21. It is estimated that these laws have reduced traffic fatalities involving drivers ages 18 to 20 by 13 percent and have saved an estimated 21,887 lives since 1975.

Sources: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

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