KS Supremes overturn bartender's conviction

Interesting story about a Hutch bartender who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter because he allegedly served too much booze to a woman who later died. The Kansas Supremes have overturned it, though. Witnesses noted the woman drank everything willingly, David Klepper reports.

There was some confusion over whether there had been a drinking contest, which are illegal in Kansas bars.

Comments

[Nick]

ooohhh...the nanny state socialists are gonna be MADD!!!!

Look for a new initiative financed by the insurance industry and blessed by the hand of Princess Kathleen Carpetbagger, spouting many pages of falsified statistics.

I can't find the original story on Google, not on the kansascity.com website, but the original story said that there was a sort of drinking contest but it was with the legal limits. It also said that Goodpasture drank a lot more alcohol after she got home.

I'm reciting this from memory so I may not be completely accurate, but I seem to remember the article saying that the drinking contest was actually legal because it involved a limited amount of alcohol. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen someone write that something was illegal when it was actually legal.

http://www.courttv.com/trials/taped/scott/background_ctv.html

Some of this can illustrate how little evidence a court might be willing to go on to convict a person of a crime, and I have to wonder why it took months of investigation to come up with the idea that there was an illegal drinking contest, if it even was illegal. One thing that they leave out is the actual amount of alcohol in the Stoplight Challenge and the body weight of the drinker.

The Challenge was in drinking a mix of flavors that was likely to produce nausea. Hot Damn is mainly cinnamon. You can almost guess how much cinnamon from the name. The entire drink has about 2.5 ounces of alcohol in it, about the same as in a six pack of 3.2 beer. If I remember correctly the original story said that Goodpasture ingested a whole bottle of vodka after she returned from the bar. 2.5 ounces is enough to cause a 150 pound person to blow a .0475 BAC. To reach .36 percent she would have had to consume anywhere from 5 to 9 of the Stoplight drinks. Considering the mix of Bacardi and cinnamon, it would be hard to hold one of those down even if you removed the alcohol, especially if they had added the sour apple stuff.

Billy Scott was entirely innocent of wrongdoing and the prosecutors knew that from the start. This is why his name was finally cleared but any prosecutors, police department, and judiciary who let any sort of competence enter the building would have cleared him then, not now more than three years later. Someone owes him bigtime.

[b. scott]

Thank you for the support, if you cant tell from my name, I am the one involved and you have a lot of the facts exactly correct, however I do want to say that this was a terrible set of circumstances and it could have happened to any person anywhere, and I hope that it was to never happen to another person again.