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Kern County DA's Felony DUI unit closes 1,000th case last week

Posted at 2:53 PM, Mar 12, 2018
and last updated 2018-03-12 17:53:19-04

The Kern County District Attorney's Felony DUI and Homicide Vertical Prosecution Unit closed its 1,000th case last week.

This unit was formed in October 2010 with the intention to prosecute felony DUI's and say that since then they've been able to prosecute a felony DUI every 2.7 days.

These efforts focused on repeat offenders for the most part and report that 93 individuals were killed and another 661 were injured since the program's inception.

This number, however, does not reflect the number of impaired drivers who lost their lives and could not be prosecuted as a result.

The prosecution unit was also able to convict twelve people in cases where the defendants received life sentences and obtained the first murder conviction for cannabis impairment in California.

According to the unit, there were 4,788 DUI's filed in Kern County and that number dropped to 4,120 in 2017.