Alcoholics and Public Drunkenness

Abstract

The widespread problem of indigent alcoholics trapped in the "revolving door" of public intoxication arrests should be rem edied by construing alcoholism as a legal defense. The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to issue a federal constitutional mandate requiring all fifty states to provide such a defense through the Eighth Amendment, but that decision does not fore close such a constitutional defense in the future if the proper factual situation reaches the court. Moreover, each state can remedy the incongruous imposition of criminal sanctions on helpless and sick alcoholics by creating a common-law defense of alcoholism to the charge of public intoxication. Such a de fense has substantial precedent to support it in the evolving mens rea standard of criminal responsibility increasingly relied upon in state court decisions. More important, common sense supports the creation of this defense to alter the continuing spectacle of skid-row alcoholics being punished for a condition— public intoxication—which they cannot control.