$100 fine is sole penalty for local attorney Richard Taff Wren

Posted Tuesday, February 25, 2020 10:39 pm

Georgia Superior Court Senior Judge Richard C. Sutton found Richard Taff Wren — a sitting Cartersville City Councilman and local attorney — not guilty of driving under the influence in Bartow Superior Court Tuesday afternoon.





Nor did Sutton, who was standing in for Cherokee Judicial Circuit Judge D. Scott Smith, find Wren guilty of the misdemeanor offense of failure to stop at a stop sign.





Ultimately, the only offense Wren was found guilty of was a tag light violation — the penalty for which is a $100 fine.





“He may have been drunk, and he may have been driving drunk,” Sutton said before issuing his verdict in the non-jury trial. “It’s kind of a close case, I guess everybody would agree with that.”





Wren was arrested around 3 a.m. on Nov. 5, 2017, by then-Cartersville Police Department officer Marcus Flowers.





Dashcam and bodycam footage from the stop and subsequent arrest was played in court.





Flowers pulled Wren over after the defendant allegedly ran a stop sign at the intersection of Terrell Drive and Old Mill Road.





On video, Wren told Flowers he had “a few beers,” later indicating that he had three 12-ounce beers.





At that time, Flowers said the defendant’s eyes were bloodshot and glassy. He described the odor of alcohol on Wren’s breath as “strong,” but said he had “no major concerns” about his patterns of speech or movement.





At one point, Wren told Flowers he was on prescription medication for attention deficit disorder (ADD.) He refused to take a field sobriety test.





“My name is Taff Wren, I’m a city councilman,” he told the arresting officer. “I’m going to tell you right now, I’m not going to do any of that.”





Wren asked the officer to contact Frank McCann — the City of Cartersville’s chief of police — while he was being handcuffed.





Flowers also said he saw “curbing” on the driver’s side wheel of the vehicle — which he said was not registered in Wren’s name — indicating that an object may have recently been struck.





“There was actually significant brake dust on the wheel except for that one portion, which appeared very fresh,” Flowers, who is now employed by the Smyrna Police Department, testified.





With no breathalyzer data or blood tests available, Cherokee Judicial Circuit Assistant District Attorney Adam Wilkinson acknowledged the State “did not have a wealth of evidence” in the case. At one point, he sought to submit evidence of a “similar transaction” during the trial — a driving under the influence conviction for Wren out of Cobb County from 2010.





Defense attorney Lance McCoy argued that such evidence was irrelevant.





“If the reason for admitting this evidence is because you don’t have enough evidence in the case you’re prosecuting the man for, I think that ends it right there,” he said.





Judge Sutton responded.





“In real life, we all know he has an earlier DUI, period,” he said. “That being the case, I don’t really need to know any more about it.”





On the lesser charges, McCoy said he believes that Flowers “lost the line of sight” of Wren’s vehicle as it approached the stop sign.





Sutton asked for the dashcam footage to be replayed in court several times. He ultimately sided with the defense, stating that he believes the video evidence does not conclusively prove that Wren failed to stop.







“We have an admission that he consumed some alcohol — we don’t know when, we don’t know what time,” McCoy said. “This isn’t a case where there’s any slurred speech, no stumbling, there’s no other problems, there’s no other issues … I would present to you the evidence just isn’t here to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Wren was impaired or under the influence of alcohol to the extent he was less safe to drive, which is the legal standard.”





McCoy said the Cartersville Police Department could have obtained a search warrant to conduct “some type of testing” of Wren, but failed to do so.





“Basically, they cuffed him and went in,” he said, “and that was the end of the case.”