Senator Gary L. Cammack - 2017
STURGIS, S.D. (KELO.com) – The attorney for South Dakota Senator Gary Cammack on Monday released a letter in response to a blog post that broke last week of his client’s arrest over a year and a half ago.
Nathanial Nelson of the Nelson Law Firm is Sturgis is the attorney representing Gary, and he wanted to update the public about what happened the night in question and the subsequent sealing of the document.
Nelson says Gary and his wife were traveling to the home of their son Reed who had been injured by a cow earlier in the day. A highway patrol trooper stopped the Cammack’s for failing to dim their high beam headlights and for traveling 9 mph over the posted speed limit.
The officer noted an odor of an alcoholic beverage on Mr. Cammack’s breath and asked him if he had been drinking.
Nelson says Mr. Cammack told the officer he had finished one whiskey and coke approximately 10-15 minutes prior to being stopped. Mr. Cammack consented to a Preliminary Breath Test, or PBT, which did not provide probable cause for his arrest. After being called to the trooper’s car, Mr. Cammack volunteered to perform field sobriety tests, to provide a sample of his blood for testing and a second PBT. When the second PBT was administered, it registered .082% – or two one hundredths of one percent above the legal limit to drive of point-oh-eight.
Attorney Nelson says the results of the second PBT, while not admissible in court, is strong evidence Mr. Cammack was under the legal limit at the time he was stopped and would have remained under the limit until he reached his destination had he not been pulled over. Nelson says, however, having been stopped, the alcohol from Mr. Cammack’s very recent drink continued to enter his bloodstream as he sat in the trooper’s cruiser. When Mr. Cammack’s blood was drawn, its BAC was .07%, with .004% margin of error – under the legal limit.
Rather than going to a jury trial, Nelson says Mr. Cammack decided to avail himself to the privilege of a suspended imposition of sentence by pleading guilty to speeding and careless driving. That would seal his record from public view. Nelson says it is a privilege every resident of South Dakota has.
Nelson says Cammack’s record was supposed to be sealed, but noticed on October 1 it hadn’t while performing a routine check of open files. He says he sent an email to the Meade County Clerk of Courts and while the state did not object to granting Mr. Cammack the immediate seal he was entitled to, the clerk responsible for correcting the paperwork snafu was unable to address the request until Monday, October 4th. On October 5th, apparently by sheer coincidence, a political blogger Cory Heidelberger of The Dakota Free Press discovered the record before it was sealed. The following day, the error was corrected and the record was sealed, as it should have been months before.
Nelson says while the coincidental timing of the events appear suspicious, they are not. He says that is the reason Mr. Cammack wanted to voluntarily share the private details of this private matter with the public.
(Gary Matthews, KBHB, contributed this report. Additional reporting by Todd Epp, KELO.com News.)
