MEAD GRUVER Associated Press writer | Posted: Friday, January 18, 2008 12:00 am
CHEYENNE - A state lawmaker plans to try again to change a law he says allows minors to drink alcohol as long as they don't get drunk.
"Essentially in Wyoming, it's not illegal for children to drink," Rep. Keith Gingery, R-Jackson, said Thursday. "It's illegal for children to drink to the point of excess."
Specifically, the law says people under 21 may not be "drunk or under the influence of alcohol" on "any street or highway or in any public place." Gingery's bill would change the law to say that minors can't drink, period, even in private.
One person who's worked to prevent underage drinking in Wyoming thinks Gingery's proposed changes to Wyoming's underage drinking laws are appropriate and overdue.
"Some of those statutes have been on the books since 1935. Some of those are working well. Some of those are working not so well," said Ernie Johnson, a former manager of Wyoming first lady Nancy Freudenthal's Initiative to Reduce Childhood Drinking.
To Gingery, a Teton County prosecutor, the current law could get troublesome when a police officer busts a house party - a private place - where minors have been drinking.
He said only minors caught holding alcohol could be cited. They would be charged with minor in possession of alcohol.
"The ones that are not holding a beer but maybe are fall-down drunk, unconscious on the floor, he can't cite them because being intoxicated has to be in a public location, not private," he said.
Gingery said in that case, charging the youths with possessing alcohol would be unfair.
"Just because I was dumb enough to keep holding on to the beer, and maybe be honest with the officer, I get cited," he said. "But my buddy who tossed down his beer bottle as soon as the officer walked up, doesn't get cited."
Still, Gingery said some judges have managed to crack down on underage drinkers who didn't happen to be holding a drink by saying alcohol in their stomachs constituted possession.
"I think that's sort of a stretch," he said. "But I can understand why the judges are doing it, because they're frustrated that the Legislature won't go back and fix this."
A co-sponsor of the bill, Sen. Bob Fecht, R-Cheyenne and that city's police chief, said the goal of the bill is to make the law clearer and do away with the "threshold of 'drunk."'
"If you're drinking, it's illegal," Fecht said.
Still, Fecht said that as a police chief, he's had no trouble cracking down on underage drinking, because Cheyenne has an underage drinking ordinance tougher than the state law.
In that sense, Gingery's bill resembles one banning open containers of alcohol in vehicles, which passed last year after several years of debate. Regardless of what Wyoming's law used to say, many communities around the state already had banned open containers. Likewise, many communities already have ordinances banning underage drinking.
This will be Gingery's third attempt to change the law. His bill last year got through the House but bogged down when the Senate Judiciary Committee debated allowing certain minors to drink in special circumstances.
"They had gotten into this issue of, if I'm returning or going off to war, I should be allowed to sit down with my father and have a beer. They were working on these amendments that if you're 18 and you're going off to war you get to drink with your parents," Gingery said.
This year's four-week session deals primarily with the budget. As a result, all non-budget bills, including Gingery's, will need a two-thirds vote to be introduced.