Alcohol anklets detect drinking in Vegas court program

Robert Fry has a dirty little secret shackled to his ankle.

It sits above his work boot, right where the construction worker sweats, right where his buddy could see it and snicker -- Fry's little Big Brother, an alcohol monitoring machine that detects any drinks he sips by analyzing secretions of his skin.

Identical anklets are strapped to about 60 Clark County residents, men and women whose problems with alcohol have landed them in court.

They're people who have agreed, as part of a pretrial promise not to drink, or for a reduced bail, or in lieu of jail time, to wear the black plastic devices, called SCRAM, short for Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor.

Have a drink and SCRAM can tell. Try to take it off and SCRAM can tell. Try to rig the system by slipping something between the sweat sensor pads and skin (one person tried a slice of bologna) and SCRAM can tell. And will tell, tattling to the judge.

Alcohol Monitoring Services Inc., the Denver-based company that makes the device, has seized on Las Vegas as one of its brightest booze monitoring capitals, a jewel box of drinkers and drivers where 98 people were killed in alcohol-related car wrecks last year.

Company officials hope to increase Clark County's monitored men and women to as many as 300 by year-end.

Fry practically pickled himself last summer. Married and divorced in the same month, diagnosed with diabetes and grieving the death of his parents, the

40-year-old Las Vegan was drinking his way out of a dark place and ran right into the law.

He was arrested for driving under the influence twice within a few months. His blood-alcohol levels were measured just short of five times the legal limit of 0.08 percent.

Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Nancy Oesterle ordered Fry to wear the anklet late last year. It indicated Fry hasn't had a drink since.

"I guess sometimes you have to be hit over the head," he said.

How it works

The anklet detects alcohol consumption by testing the wearer's sweat once an hour for ethanol vapor. The wearer uploads the results once a day to a home modem that transmits data to company headquarters in Colorado. If SCRAM detects alcohol, employees contact Aaron Fleisher, who oversees Clark County's SCRAM operation. Fleisher outfits people with the device and informs judges when someone fouls up.

In certain circles, Fleisher is known as the "SCRAM man."

"Plenty of people try to circumvent it," he said, holding the 8-ounce anklet with both hands. The device resembles bulky battery packs strung on a synthetic band. It sits snug to the skin like a watch.

SCRAM senses and reports any indication of tampering to company headquarters.

Certain products can cause the machine to detect alcohol even of the wearer isn't drinking.

Perfumes, colognes and generally anything that is applied with a propellant -- hair spray, for example -- can cause SCRAM to misfire.

But sweat analysis ultimately differentiates between a beer and a beauty product. The body's alcohol burn-off rate of the two is different. "No swimming," he said.

The device has been on the market for more than two years, and the company has outfitted more than 32,000 people nationally. The technology has been challenged in court, but SCRAM data have been ruled admissible with few exceptions.

Testing it out

Judge Oesterle, an early Clark County SCRAM adopter, has used the device in her courtroom for a year. Initially, she was skeptical.

The judge doesn't drink, so her test of the technology was to have intern Bill Partridge, a motivated student of drinking age, wear the anklet for an evening and imbibe. The test was successful.

"My law clerk made sure he was intoxicated," Oesterle said. "He was still under the influence when he came for his internship the next day, and he did very little work."

An hour-by-hour analysis of Partridge's experiment shows that when the intern arrived at work, his blood-alcohol content was almost 1.5 times the legal limit. Partridge's alcohol level had spiked with an early morning Bloody Mary.

Oesterle has since ordered

12 defendants to wear the anklet. The wearer pays a

$100 hookup fee and then $12 a day for the duration of the monitoring, which is determined by the judge.

Tony Sardis had three DUI arrests in seven years.

The 36-year-old Las Vegas food handler would get off work and start drinking. Generally, too much.

Now he's wearing the anklet, and he, like all wearers, doesn't know when it's coming off.

"If you're in this program," Sardis said, "you have a drinking problem."

Las Vegas Justice Court handed 7,017 misdemeanor DUI cases last year. It's routine for Oesterle to hear several cases a day involving people two and three times over the 0.08 limit.

Fry was embarrassed when a friend spotted the anklet peeking out from under his jeans. Perhaps more than anything else, shame has sobered the single father.

His son is unaware.

"I go out of my way to hide it from him," Fry says. "But if he asks, I'll be honest."

RGJ