Judge Ian M. O’Flaherty of Fairfax County General District Court dismissed the charges against J. Randolph Babbitt, the former F.A.A. administrator, who resigned in December after he was arrested and accused of driving while intoxicated and driving the wrong way on a highway in Northern Virginia. Cutting the trial short on Thursday, Judge O’Flaherty said that the police officer who arrested Mr. Babbitt lacked reasonable suspicion for stopping him, Mr. Babbitt’s lawyer, Peter Greenspun, said Friday. Video from the officer’s dashboard camera that was played in court showed Mr. Babbitt crossing over double lines and into a northbound lane as he made a left turn, but not driving more
Florida polo mogul John Goodman, who notoriously adopted his girlfriend to shield his assets, has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for killing a 23-year-old motorist while driving drunk, according to news reports from West Palm Beach. Goodman, the 48-year-old, multimillionaire founder of the International Polo Club Palm Beach, was also fined $10,000. He was convicted in March of DUI manslaughter, vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of the February 2010 crash in Wellington, Fla., that killed Scott Wilson, an engineering student. The judge said that the sentence should not be a form of retribution and that he did not consider Goodman’s wealth. The maximum sentence for the charges was 30 years; the prosecutor asked for 20 more
A Judge in Fairfax, Va., Thursday dismissed the drunken driving case that had led J. Randolph Babbitt to resign as head of the Federal Aviation Administration. Babbitt, who had been head of the FAA since 2009, resigned in December after he was arrested in Fairfax. Fairfax City General District Court Judge Ian O’Flaherty dismissed the case after viewing a video of the traffic stop in which Babbitt was arrested and finding that a Fairfax City police officer had pulled Babbitt over on a “mere hunch,” The Washington Post reported. Babbitt’s lawyer, Peter Greenspun, had argued an initial sobriety test indicated Babbitt’s blood-alcohol level was 0.07, below Virginia’s legal limit of 0.08. A prosecutor said subsequent tests would show Babbitt was above the limit, but the judge threw the case out before those test results weremore
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