Opinion
July 6, 1967
Proceeding under article 78 of the CPLR to review a determination of the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles which revoked petitioner's driving license for refusal to submit to a chemical test to determine the alcoholic content of his blood, following his arrest for driving while intoxicated. Contrary to petitioner's contention, his arrest by a State Trooper for operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated (Vehicle and Traffic Law, § 1192, subd. 1) was valid under, and was in all respects in compliance with section 1193 of the same act providing that: "A police officer may, without a warrant, arrest a person in case of a violation of section eleven hundred ninety-two, if such violation is coupled with an accident or collision in which such person is involved, which in fact has been committed, though not in the police officer's presence, when he has reasonable cause to believe that the violation was committed by such person." Responding to a call reporting a motor vehicle accident on Route 23 in the Town of Windham, the trooper found petitioner behind the steering wheel of a car which had gone off the south shoulder of that highway and had come to rest in a ditch with the car headed to the north. The officer said that the right fender had been "banged" against the ditch and that there were streaks of dirt rubbed from that fender, as though by contact, although the damage was "negligible". When petitioner alighted from the car, his "speech was thick, he staggered about and he smelled of alcohol." He was arrested and thereupon declined the officer's request that he submit to the test. From these and the other attendant circumstances proven, the administrative agency was justified in finding a valid arrest, without a warrant, for a violation of section 1192, which had in fact been committed, although not in the officer's presence; inasmuch as an accident and collision in which petitioner had been involved were clearly demonstrated as was the additional necessary ingredient of reasonable cause on the part of the officer to believe that petitioner, while intoxicated, had operated the car from the highway into the ditch. In People v. Blake ( 5 N.Y.2d 118), the court held that the proof that police officers found defendant "seated alone in a drunken state in his automobile which was damaged and halted against a guardrail" (p. 119; emphasis as in original) was sufficient to establish the commission of the crime, without recourse to defendant's admission that he had attended a party and was on his way home. The proof was quite similar to, and no stronger than the evidence in the case before us. Petitioner asserts that the hearing officer's findings are insufficient, and they could, indeed, have been framed more precisely and in greater detail, but we find them, in context and under the circumstances of this record, adequate to permit proper review. Determination confirmed and petition dismissed, without costs. Gibson, P.J., Reynolds, Aulisi, Staley, Jr., and Gabrielli, JJ., concur in memorandum Per Curiam.