By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 9, 2002

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Some bad drivers may have gotten a free ride because of a Pinellas computer glitch that kept the outcome of 70,000 traffic cases from the eyes of state driver's license officials.

From 1996 to 1999, the Pinellas Clerk of Court's Office failed to send results of cases ranging from speeding to drunken driving to the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. The glitch wasn't corrected until this summer.

"We regret the mistake," said Eloise Pfeifauf, a chief deputy in the office of Pinellas Clerk of Court Karleen DeBlaker. "Yes, it's a big deal. Certainly these people who thought all their driving problems were settled are going to have a big disappointment."

As a result of the error, some drivers were on the road when they shouldn't have been. License suspensions were delayed. Judges may not have had the full driving history on defendants being sentenced for traffic offenses. Police may have been unable to confirm drivers' histories through highway safety records.

Drivers may even have benefited through lower auto insurance rates.

"It's shocking because we all rely on the system working properly to protect us," said Clearwater lawyer Tom Carey, an anti-DUI activist. "When it's broke, we're all at risk."

The office blames the failure on an undetected "computer glitch" in software used to send outcomes of cases to highway safety computers in Tallahassee.

In the past several months, the state has received correct data and is sending notices of suspensions or revocations to an undetermined number of drivers.

The 70,000 dispositions, ranging from convictions and dismissals to not guilty verdicts, are just a portion of the cases successfully sent to the state. Each year, about 200,000 traffic tickets are written in Pinellas.

Chris Connolly said that in late July, highway safety sent him a notice that his license was being revoked for five years.

Connolly was stunned. He had a valid license after suspensions for failing to pay speeding fines. Two years had passed since his last ticket.

He said he didn't have a clue why this was happening now. Turns out, the state should have revoked his license in 1999 after the third time he was caught driving on a suspended license.

Connolly won a concession from the state, which told him his revocation will be retroactive to 1999. Now he has to wait two years before getting his license back.

"They messed up years ago and now I've got to pay for it," said Connolly, 28, a St. Petersburg resident whose plans to become an emergency medical technician are possibly derailed unless he gets a hardship license.

"I would have dealt with it back in 1999," he said. "It would have stung. But I would have taken my medicine. I wouldn't have made all these plans."

The clerk of court's office and state highway officials cannot say how many of the 70,000 cases involve drivers whose licenses should have been suspended or revoked. Indeed, no breakdown of the outcomes is available.

Yet DeBlaker's office portrays the mistake as relatively minor, saying most of the 70,000 involve dismissals or drivers with relatively clean driving histories.

A failure to post dismissals or not-guilty verdicts with the state had no harmful impact on innocent drivers, they said.

The biggest problem may come with drivers who were about to earn an automatic license suspension when they were ticketed or arrested on a traffic offense.

Some of these drivers, who should have been off the road, were perhaps still driving until recently receiving a suspension notice, the clerk's office admits.

"It wouldn't affect everyone, certainly not," said Carol Heath, assistant director of the clerk's court services division.

Some judges say they are trying to work with defendants now caught with an unexpected suspension, especially if they've had a clean driving record in the years their suspension was delayed.

County Judge Henry Andringa said one man in his court recently should have had his license suspended two years before. But in the time since, the judge said, his record was clean. Even so, he now faced a license suspension.

"I went back and gave him a withhold of adjudication so the suspension wouldn't apply," Andringa said. "It seemed to be the proper thing to do."

The error was noticed by a few sharp-eyed assistant clerks in 1999 as they printed traffic records for defendants about to appear before county judges. Someone noted that local infractions weren't appearing on state driving records.

Workers in the county's information technology office discovered a glitch in the program used to send information to highway safety every Saturday morning.

Pat Broz, applications development supervisor in the office, said the program was designed to send cases in a database by specific date. But often, cases were logged days late and weren't sent. The bug in the program, Broz said, was that it didn't pick up these late files on a subsequent Saturday. They were missed entirely.

So case outcomes were available on Pinellas court computers, but not in highway safety records.

Once figuring out what went wrong in 1999, Pinellas had to wait until this year to send the old dispositions to the state.

The problem was that pre-2000 data could not be sent on computers reprogrammed to avert Y2K bugs. A fix was finally worked out.

"The bottom line is that the system is fixed and doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing," said Heath in the clerk's office.

Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender Bob Dillinger said DeBlaker's office warned him of the problem earlier this year.

But Dillinger and State Attorney Bernie McCabe said they thought the problem had little impact with their offices.

Indeed, Dillinger holds no regrets that some clients may have appeared before judges with part of a bad driving history hidden.

"From our point of view," he said, "this wasn't such a bad thing to happen."

St. Petersburg Times

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