North Dakota Man Convicted Of Drunk Driving A Zamboni

Source- A Fargo man who admitted operating a Zamboni while drunk has been convicted after the judge rejected his lawyer's argument that the ice-resurfacing machine didn't meet the definition of a vehicle under city code.

Twenty-seven-year-old Steven James Anderson was arrested in January during a girls' high school hockey game in Fargo. Witnesses complained he was driving erratically and crashing into the boards. Police say his blood-alcohol content was nearly four times the legal limit for driving a motor vehicle.

Defense attorney Lindsey Haugen said during the bench trial Tuesday that the law is not clear whether a Zamboni is considered a vehicle, or whether it is illegal to drive the machine on the ice while drunk.


Oh, come on, we are going to get mad at a guy in his late twenties for indulging in an adult beverage or two? Look, if you were giving the ice a scrape between periods of a girls hockey game in North Dakota you would probably need to take the edge off too. Wait, what's that you say? He was four times the legal limit? Okay, yeah, maybe it's not best to have him around kids. I'm all about drinking on the job. You want to head down to the local pub and suck one back on your lunch break then have at it. Hell, if you're feeling froggish maybe even dial up an encore cocktail. However, the one thing you can't do is come back acting drunk. You can't smell like a brewery and be completely incapable of whatever it is that you do. Not only was this zamboni driver guilty of drunk driving, he was guilty of setting the schedule back. You had one job man. Cut yourself off while you were still able to see straight and you failed to pull it off. Any sentence you are given is well deserved.

You know you fucked up when your lawyer is trying to argue the semantics of what is or isn't a vehicle. When your lawyer realizes that you were so drunk it's a lost cause so she'll just try to dumb down the legitimacy of what you were driving. The only defense she could think up was basically "I would rather have a drunk driving a zamboni around an ice rink than his Ford pickup down the freeway". Unfortunately that doesn't make it less of a crime. When a bunch of people that have never driven a zamboni before realize that you are doing a terrible job of it then you must be doing a really, really terrible job of it. Any combination of being piss drunk, around children, in anything that has a motor and wheels is likely to get you a guilty sentence. At least wait until the beer league games start Steven. Hell, those guys might even ask you to play. You had to do with parents present and now your lawyer can't even come up with a reasonable defense for you, and I certainly can't either.