A judicial haven for accused drunk drivers

“No, I can’t drive drunk,’’ the 24-year-old Buzzards Bay resident told a paramedic, in a memorable summary of his sorry state.

In the real world of drunken driving enforcement, Maddaus should have been - would have been - in a load of trouble.

But this was not the real world. It was Plymouth County. He couldn’t have crashed in a safer spot.

As the Globe Spotlight Team reported last week, when judges in Massachusetts hear drunken driving cases in bench trials, without a jury, they are overwhelmingly inclined to find defendants not guilty. The statewide acquittal rate exceeds 80 percent, a finding that moved the Supreme Judicial Court to announce Monday it had appointed an investigator to review the pattern of verdicts.

If there is an epicenter for that judicial leniency, it is Plymouth County.

No county for which data are available holds a greater proportion of bench trials in drunken driving cases. And two judges there have been veritable magnets for savvy defense lawyers, with acquittal rates of more than 90 percent.

In the roughly 1,700 Plymouth County trials for operating under the influence from 2005 through 2010, three-quarters of motorists asked judges to render a verdict without a jury, the Globe review found. Judges in bench trials acquitted 86 percent of defendants; juries, a little more than half. That disparity has alarmed and outraged public safety officials, but their complaints to judicial officials have had no effect.

“The term that I hear from officers when they come back from court is that it was a bag job,’’ said Taylor A.B. Mills, who retired from his post as Hingham’s police chief in April after 34 years on the job. “These judges are just inherently lenient.’’

One Plymouth County prosecutor began to track verdicts in 2006. The trend was unmistakable, the numbers “off the charts.’’

“Almost all of the OUIs seemed to be going jury-waived and almost all of those jury-waived OUIs were resulting in acquittals,’’ said John E. Bradley Jr., the deputy first assistant district attorney.