Law

The Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) program is a federally funded law enforcement initiative that trains officers to recognize symptoms of drivers under the influence of illegal substances. It’s like a field sobriety test, but for harder drugs instead of alcohol. Proponents of the program argue that it's the best available tool to detect drugged drivers.

But various industry experts are criticizing the program for its questionable scientific basis and lack of consistent testing protocols. They are calling it a process that can be easily manipulated by officers seeking to make drug-related arrests.

Haley Butler-Moore, a nurse, experienced the controversial nature of DRE firsthand when she was pulled over in Colorado for speeding. Despite denying any recreational drug use, the officer insisted her eyes suggested otherwise. At the officer’s suggestion, Butler-Moore agreed to undergo a DRE evaluation, unaware of its implications.

After observing her behavior and vital signs, the DRE officer concluded she was impaired by a double dose of her prescribed depressants. Butler-Moore insisted on her sobriety, which was later confirmed by a blood test revealing no traces of drugs or alcohol. She said, “I just felt like I was another test subject for them, and that felt really unfair.” The attorney representing her in a suit against the arresting officers said, “It's such utter nonsense. A cop can use it to manufacture whatever conclusion of impairment they want.”

In 2012, a group of Maryland defense attorneys sued creators of the DRE program, presenting to the judge a group of cases that they felt was police misconduct under the guise of DRE. They called a number of expert witnesses. Judge Micheal Galloway ultimately ruled in their favor, saying that “the DRE protocol fails to produce an accurate and reliable determination of whether a suspect is impaired by drugs and by what specific drug he is impaired.”

Despite this ruling, the DRE program has continued to expand, training more than a thousand new officers every year.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God cares about justice for people; leaders who abuse their position dishonor the authority they have been given.

Tim Hogan is the founder and CEO SaferStreet Solutions, a development firm focusing on improving traffic safety and reducing pedestrian deaths. For years, he and his team were looking at ways to prevent the phenomenon known as distracted driving, which is statistically comparable to drunk driving as a culprit for traffic-related fatalities.

Inspired by the signs that offer real-time feedback to speeding drivers, Hogan and his team invented the SmartSign. The signs are designed to identify motorists who hold their phones while driving, and display a message warning them to stop: “PHONE DOWN.”

Matt Gregory is a reporter in Washington DC. When the SmartSign was implemented in his city, he was somewhat skeptical of the sign’s efficacy. Matt said, “So, I went for a drive with my phone in my hand. And sure enough, ‘Phone Down’!”

Hogan says the device works by using sensors to identify the unique combination of heat signatures that result from a human holding a phone. If the phone is cradled or resting elsewhere, the sign doesn’t light up.

Rick Birt from the DC Highway Safety Office says the goal is to introduce the signs to the public as a form of behavior intervention. “Last year nationally, 3,500 people died from distracted driving-related crashes. The goal of these signs is to provide instantaneous feedback to motorists so that they have that opportunity to make a better choice.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is faithful to remind us when we are veering off of the path given for us, but it’s up to each of us to respond in obedience.

Cole Mushrush does two things when he wakes up each morning at the family ranch: make up a pot of coffee, then fire up his laptop to see if any cows have wandered astray. Not many do, because electronic collars have been hung around their necks that give them a jolt if they try to cross one of the invisible fence boundaries created on a computer. The digital fence follows the contours of a pasture, and the collars are designed to keep the cows hemmed in without having to go to the expense of building a real fence.

He said, “The collars have mostly deterred cows from wandering past the no-go zone—although the animals don’t always behave as desired after a shock that comes following warning beeps. Some of them close their eyes and run. We don’t need that.”

The cows undergo a four-day training regimen which included a beep followed by shock, and playing around with the boundaries. There were a few rule breakers, such as when a cow might see her friend on the other side of an invisible fence. Mushrush said, “There are social cliques within a herd. Sometimes a cow will walk through the shock to be with their friend.”

If you are wondering what the shock feels like, it is reported to hurt less than a bee sting.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We know we have freedom in Christ but sometimes we need to be reminded or warned that we are crossing a line which God has placed there for our good.

What does it mean when the Bible says that we have been pardoned by God? Here are two classic definitions from American legal history:

First, in 1833, Chief Justice John Marshall, in a landmark decision, described a pardon as “an act of grace … which exempts the individual on whom it is bestowed from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed.”

Second, in 1866, the Supreme Court gave another famous definition of a pardon: “a pardon releases the punishment and blots out of existence the guilt, so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense … A pardon removes the penalties and disabilities and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity.”

Christian Philosopher William Lane Craig offers this as a marvelous description of a divine pardon. “‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation ….’ The pardoned sinners’ guilt is expiated, so that he is legally innocent before God.”

If you are the rare American who likes roundabouts, you have the British to thank. In 1966, they figured out what was going wrong. According to the original design of traffic circles, entering cars had the right-of-way, so drivers charged in at high speed without paying attention to vehicles already circling. Once inside, they had to both watch for their exit and avoid incoming drivers. If traffic was heavy, the entire circle filled up with cars and came to a standstill. The British realized they needed to reverse the right-of-way, giving priority to the cars inside the intersection. Entering vehicles then had to pause and make sure there was space for them.

Circulating drivers could focus on exiting safely rather than dodging incoming cars. Once the correct right-of-way was established, capacity went up by 10 percent and crashes went down by almost half. Americans still took a lot of convincing. We didn’t build any more roundabouts until 1990.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The story of the traffic circle is an example of coordination for the greater good of everyone. The drivers inside the circle aren’t more important than those outside it, but there has to be a prioritized sequence in order for everyone to get where they’re going. Everyone benefits, even though incoming cars may have to slow down momentarily to find a gap. The difference between an efficient driving experience and total gridlock is the application of appropriate right-of-way rules.

In 2020 Christian leader John Perkins interviewed the lawyer, Bryan Stevenson. Perkins, the son of a sharecropper, was born in poverty in Mississippi. Stevenson was born two years after Perkins’ conversion to Christ, in a poor, black, rural community in Delaware. Stevenson eventually graduated from Harvard law school and founded the Equal Justice initiative. He represents people who have been sentenced to death on flimsy evidence or without proper representation.

Stevenson told Perkins the story of his first visit to death row. As a law student intern, he’d been sent to tell a prisoner that he was not at risk of execution in the coming year. Stevenson felt unprepared. The prisoner had chains around his ankles, wrists, and waist. Stevenson delivered his message. The man expressed profound release. They talked for hours. But then two prison guards burst in.

Angry that the visit had taken so long, the guards reapplied their inmates’ chains. Stevenson pleaded with the officers to stop. He told them it was his fault they overrun their time. But the prisoner told Stevenson not to worry. Then he planted his feet, threw back his head and sang:

I’m pressing on the upward way,

New heights I’m gaining every day;

Still praying as I am onward bound,

Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

Everybody stopped, Stevenson said, “The guards recovered, and they started pushing this man down the hallway. You could hear the chains clanking, but you could hear this man singing about higher ground. And in that moment God called me. That was the moment I knew I wanted to help condemned people get to higher ground.”

In late May of 2023, U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins formally resigned her position after two federal oversight agencies launched wide-ranging investigations into her behavior. Those investigations concluded that she both lied to investigators and used her position to influence a local election.

Investigators say Rollins leaked information to the media for a story intended to sabotage Kevin Hayden, who was campaigning to replace her as U.S. attorney. The story contained the false accusation that Hayden was under federal investigation himself.

The initial investigations into Rollins’ behavior were sparked after she was seen at a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. This was a significant departure from the agenda of Rollins’ boss, Attorney General Merrick Garland, who repeatedly ensured that his agency’s top priority would be maintaining political independence. After Rollins was seen at the fundraiser, Garland barred any political appointees from attending fundraisers or other campaign events.

Rollins’ behavior was said to have violated the Hatch Act, a law that curtails political actions by government employees. Violations included an instance where she solicited 30 free tickets to a Boston Celtics game for youth basketball players, including a pair for herself.

According to the inspector general’s office in the Justice Department, Rollins’ behavior was among the “most egregious” in the history of the agency.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God cares about the delivery of justice, and doesn't look kindly on people who abuse their positions of power for personal gain.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently issued a voluntary recall for all Tesla cars equipped with the driver-assist technology known as FSD, which stands for “Full Self-Driving.” The technology is branded as a way to turn a Tesla into an autonomous vehicle, which means that it’s supposed to be able to operate itself without human intervention.

Yet, the recall was issued because the NHTSA found a significant pattern of vehicular failures in the FSD software. The report stated: “[FSD] may allow the vehicle to act unsafe around intersections, such as driving straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane.” It also listed other problematic behaviors, such as speeding, rolling through stop signs, and running yellow traffic lights “without due caution.”

Notably, there is no similar FSD recall in the European Union, because Tesla hasn’t received the green light to offer it there. Tesla CEO Elon Musk himself summarized the difference in transatlantic car regulations: “In the U.S. things are legal by default, and in Europe they’re illegal by default.”

For example, in the U.S. if a plane manufacturer is designing a new piece of software, the company must work closely with the FAA to get the go-ahead prior to deployment. But for autos, the U.S. has basically said to carmakers, “You’re good. We trust you.”

Former NHTSA senior advisor Missy Cummings believes that autonomous vehicles should be treated with the same stringent safety requirements as commercial airliners. She said, “Because cars are on the road every day, we think of them as less complex than planes. But cars with autonomy are extremely complex. The amount of code that goes into these systems is phenomenal.”

Industry analysts believe that the dangerous driving behavior of autonomous vehicles are the direct result of the government taking a laissez-faire approach to safety regulation.

Possible Preaching Angle:

When accomplishments are exaggerated and profits are emphasized there is the potential for danger. What is claimed to help, might in fact, be harmful.

An inmate caused a mild drama in the Nigerian High Court after a judge acquitted him of all charges against him, but he refused and demanded to go back to prison. Instead of the usual jubilation that follows any ruling of "discharged and acquitted," the inmate in question headed straight back to the prison. He was intercepted by a prison guard who reminded him he was free to go home. To the chagrin of eyewitnesses, he said he was going nowhere, demanding to be allowed re-entry into the prison.

The calm of the court premises was shattered by the freed prisoner's shouts and pleas to be allowed to go back to prison, as he thrashed about and struggled with several prison officials. According to eyewitnesses, it took the effort of over six prison officials, court workers, and policemen to get the freed inmate out of the court premises.

Possible Preaching Angle:

That's a picture of us all. We have been set free in Christ, but we often find ourselves returning to the prison of our old way of life and behavior. Healthy Christians remind themselves of their settled status in God’s courtroom. We have been "approved by God" (1 Thess. 2:4) and “set free” (Rom. 6:18-22).

In CT magazine, writer Dikkon Eberhart shares his personal testimony of progression from theological drifter to Orthodox Jew to a born-again experience with Jesus Christ:

I grew up in the Episcopal Church. But in my high teens and young twenties I drifted. At seminary in Berkeley, California, during the 1970s—I created my own religion. I called it Godianity. Certainly, I believed in the existence of God, hence the name of my religion. But I didn’t know much about that Son of God fellow, and the little I did know seemed impossibly weird.

Then something happened. I married a Jew who was an atheist. Then my wife became pregnant and nine months later, our first daughter squirmed in her mother’s arms. Here’s the sudden realization of an atheist: Such a perfect and beautiful creature must be the gift of God, not the product of some random swirl of atoms. My wife’s atheism bit the dust. Her new God belief was Jewish. My Godianity should have taken notice. “Listen up!” it ought to have heard. “You’re in trouble, too.”

That trouble came five years later. Our daughter and I were swinging in a hammock under a tree on a windy day. Normally an eager chatterer, our daughter fell silent and then said, “Daddy, I know there’s a God.” I was enchanted. “How, sweetie?” She pointed at the tree and its leaves. “You can’t see God. He’s like the wind. You can’t see the wind, but the wind makes the leaves move. You can’t see God, but you know he’s there, because he makes the people move, like the leaves.”

My heart swelled with love for this perceptive child, but then she crushed me. She continued, “Daddy, what do we believe?” Really, what she was asking was, “Mommy’s kind of Jewish. You’re kind of Christian. So what am I?” And despite my three advanced religious degrees and seminary employment, I couldn’t answer.

In that instant, I shucked my Godianity. Right away, my wife and I retreated into an urgent executive session. She was a Jew who was no longer an atheist. We resolved, we shall raise our children as Jews. And we did—as Reform Jews. Yet I still teetered on uneven ground, conscious of being an outsider. Then something else happened. During services on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, God spoke to me: “If you should desire to come to me, my door is open to you.” Right away, I knew I needed to become a Jew myself, and three years later my conversion was complete.

For some time, my wife and I had noticed something: While Reform Judaism respects Torah, many Reform Jews themselves were selective in their adherence to its strictures. But we objected. We wanted a faith that wasn’t in the habit of accommodating itself to the surrounding culture.

Across our rural road, there happened to be a small Baptist church. Some of our neighbors had invited us to visit, in case we Jews should ever want to know more about Christ. We realized that—oddly—these neighbors seemed concerned for our souls.

More than a year later, desperate for direction, I crossed the road to the church one Sunday morning. That day, the pastor was preaching from 1 Timothy. I was astonished to hear a Baptist preacher using Old Testament references within his message—and with accurate Hebrew nuance. The pastor and I began meeting each week and my wife frequented the women’s Bible study. She and I began devouring book after book, faster and faster, thrilled by each new discovery of seemingly impossible truths that were actually true.

Even as a Jew, I knew the Passion story. But it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, that story might be real—and if it were, then everything would need to change. Our Torah-based lives would be as dead and ineffectual as Godianity. Instead, we would give our souls to the personal love of the Incarnation, the God-man who dwelt among us. We realized that the Old Testament begged for the climax of the New Testament.

It took nine months, an appropriate duration for re-birth, before I committed myself to Jesus. My wife did the same three months later. Our younger two children followed soon thereafter. When God spoke to me in the synagogue all those years ago, inviting me through his open doorway, I had assumed he was summoning me into Judaism. Little did I know he was actually calling me to Christ.

A high school ethics textbook published by the Chinese government includes a revised version of John 8:3–11. In the Christian version, Jesus is presented with a woman caught in adultery and says, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (v. 7).

In the Communist revision, however, Jesus says the law has to be enforced and stones the woman to death himself.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This false translation represents the malicious teaching that Satan would have the world believe: God is merciless, harsh, and cold towards sinners who come to him. Satan does all he can to conceal the wonderful grace of God freely offered to all in the crucified and risen Christ.

Courtney Wilson and Shenita Jones had lavish plans for their pending nuptials. The venue they selected had it all: a swimming pool with a waterfall, a hot tub, sauna, tennis courts, gazebos, even a bowling alley. They were scheduled to have the ceremony on Saturday, and a catered brunch on Sunday. The one thing they didn’t have? Permission.

Property owner Nathan Finkel had met with the couple months prior when they posed as potential buyers of the property, which was listed for sale with a $5 million price tag. When they later asked Finkel if they could stage their wedding there, he declined.

But that didn’t stop Wilson and Jones from sending out invitations to guests to gather at the property. According to attorney Keith Poliakoff, who represented the upscale suburban locale, the couple made a critical miscalculation.

“The guy figured it was a vacant house and didn’t realize Nathan lived on the property in a different home. This guy had no idea he lived there. You know the shock that must have been on his face when he showed up at the gate and the owner was home?”

Indeed, once Nathan saw that Wilson had arrived to begin setting up for the wedding, he called police to compel them to vacate the property. Nathan told the 911 dispatcher, “I have people trespassing on my property. And they keep harassing me, calling me. They say they’re having a wedding here. I don’t know what’s going on. All I want is it to stop.” When police arrived, Wilson left without incident. No charges were filed.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Law; Rules; Obedience – We can’t ignore laws just because they are inconvenient to our plans. If we attempt to ignore them, God will use the consequences of our actions to inform our behavior. 2) Kingdom of God; Parable; Salvation – This reminds us of the uninvited wedding guest in Jesus’ parable. All who come into the wedding banquet of the kingdom must come according to God’s rules. No “party-crashers” are allowed.

In 2013, New York City narcotics agents announced an unusual indictment of five Brooklyn men. These types of indictments are, unfortunately, commonplace in metropolitan areas like New York, but this one did stand out.

The men who were charged were members of a Sabbath-observant drug ring. Though cavalier about New York’s drug laws, the group was scrupulous about observing the Sabbath. Text messages from members of the gang show them alerting their clientele of their weekly sundown-to-sunset hiatus.

Text messages, used as evidence against the group, included group chats to clients, “We are closing 7:30 on the dot and we will reopen Saturday 8:15 so if u need anything you have 45 mins to get what you want." The name of the NYPD sting operation that led to the drug bust: "Only After Sundown."

In his book Making Sense of God, Tim Keller writes:

When The Star-Spangled Banner is sung at sporting events, the climactic phrase comes to an elongated high note: “O’er the land of the freeee ….” The cheers begin here. Even though the song goes on to talk about “the brave,” this is an afterthought. Both the melody line and our culture highlights freedom as the main theme and value of our society.

Freedom has come to be defined as the absence of any limitations or constraints on us. By this definition, the fewer boundaries we have on our choices and actions, the freer we feel ourselves to be. Held in this form, I want to argue that the narrative has gone wrong and is doing damage.

Modern freedom is the freedom of self-assertion. I am free if I may do whatever I want. But defining freedom this way … is unworkable because it is an impossibility …. We need some kind of moral norms and constraints on our actions if we are to live together.

Modern people like to see freedom as the complete absence of any constraints. But think of a fish. Because a fish absorbs oxygen from water, not air, it is free only if it is restricted to water. If a fish is “freed” from the river and put out on the grass to explore, its freedom to move and soon even to live is destroyed. The fish is not more free, but less free, if it cannot honor the reality of its nature.

The same is true with airplanes and birds. If they violate the laws of aerodynamics, they will crash into the ground. But if they follow them, they will ascend and soar. The same is true in many areas of life: Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world.