By WMBD TV
PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD) — A Peoria County jury took about 30 minutes before finding Peoria Heights Mayor Matthew Wigginton not guilty of DUI after being arrested last April when he was found asleep behind the wheel of his SUV.
The trial at the Peoria County Courthouse went quickly. The entire trial, from start to finish, lasted less than eight hours. Wigginton, 41, chose not to testify.
At issue is whether the jury of 12 believed Wigginton was guilty of driving under the influence despite the car being off and Wigginton not trying to start or drive his Lexus SUV, which was in the parking deck of the Hotel Pere Marquette.
The vehicle was on the third floor of the Hotel Pere Marquette parking deck. The mayor had been at the hotel that night for the annual Gridiron dinner.
During her closing statement, Assistant State’s Attorney Hanna Kong argued Wigginton had the “physical ability” to start the car. She told jurors that Illinois law holds that a person doesn’t have to be driving to be guilty. Rather, she said, they have to be able to start the car and get it moving.
Defense attorney Kevin Sullivan countered that such an assertion was “ridiculous” and ticked off a list of situations that could land someone with a DUI. What if a person was sleeping in an RV after driving, and the keys were in the vehicle, he asked.
Or, what if a person had their fob outside the car and could start the car? Was that a DUI? The attorney urged jurors not to punish his client for making the right choice and not moving his vehicle. Instead, he chose to use his SUV as a “shelter,” which was on the third floor of a parking deck.
Kong, in her rebuttal, fired back, saying that wasn’t the law and she urged people to use their common sense. She pointed to body camera footage from police officers, which showed Wigginton disoriented and at times incoherent.
The evidence consisted mostly of the body camera footage from police officers who arrived at the scene, as well as one from the hospital.
When the officer arrived at about 2:30 a.m., April 17, his camera captured Wigginton, whose forehead is on his left arm, which is resting on the wheel. Officer John Harris, a former Peoria Heights firefighter turned Peoria police officer, opens the unlocked SUV’s door.
Wigginton is mumbling and eventually glances at the officer. The officer asks for his ID; Wigginton asks if he wants to speak to someone who wasn’t in the vehicle.
Within a second, Harris recognizes the mayor, introduces himself, and asks Wigginton to lean back in the driver’s seat.
In the footage, Wigginton appears lethargic and disoriented. For the most part, he’s cooperative and calm. A few times, he seemed to get irritated, especially when paramedics told him he’d have to be transported to the hospital for failing a mental capacity test.
Such a test is given to determine if a person is coherent enough to refuse medical treatment. Wigginton failed because he couldn’t remember a phrase given to him at the beginning of the exam.
Then, at the hospital, Wigginton was seen on an officer’s body camera undergoing the various field sobriety tests. One of them was the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus test, for which an officer testified Wigginton failed, missing six out of six clues
Then was the “walk and turn,” which showed “two clues” of impairment. Officer Lantez Carpenter said that if a person makes one or two mistakes, it doesn’t mean a person is arrested. The test, he said, is to test a person’s ability to remember and then follow instructions.
He did pass the one-legged stand, Carpenter said. After the tests, Wigginton was arrested for DUI and taken out to the Peoria County Jail. He was released several hours later.
Carpenter also testified that surveillance cameras in Downtown Peoria captured Wigginton walking north on Main Street and then heading to the Zoo nightclub at around 12:15 a.m. About an hour later, the hotel’s surveillance cameras caught the mayor walking through the lobby. It appears he comes close to walking into a wall.
In the end, Wigginton’s attorney said the jury “applied common sense” to the case. “The verdict was just, and justice was served, Sullivan said.
WMBD TV first reported this story. You can read the original story online at CIProud.com.
