Single Glass of Wine Immerses D.C. Driver in Legal Battle

Bolton didn't. She balked at the $400 fee and the 24 hours of class time required to attend the "social drinker" program.

"I think it would have been fine if I'd done something wrong, but I didn't," she said. "I had a glass of wine with dinner."

Instead, she hired a lawyer. In August, after Bolton made several fruitless appearances in D.C. Superior Court, prosecutors dropped the DUI charge. But then she had to battle the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles, which warned that it would suspend her driving privileges at the end of this month unless she went through an alcohol prevention program.

As Bolton remembers it, it was early morning May 15 and she had barely gone a few hundred yards before she was pulled over on K Street NW. The officer, Fair, asked her whether she realized the headlights on her Acura MDX sport-utility vehicle were off.

"Oh, man, am I going to get a ticket for this?" she remembers saying to him jokingly.

Then he asked her whether she'd had anything to drink.

"Not really," she said. And when he asked her again, more firmly, she answered that she'd had a glass of wine with dinner at Cafe Milano.

He asked her to recite the alphabet. In his report, Fair wrote that he had asked her to start at the letter D and stop at X. Bolton said she thought he had asked her to stop at S and tossed off the alphabet quickly and accurately to S.

As a result, Fair noted in his report that she had "jumbled" it.

Then he asked her to get out of the car.

Fair asked her to walk a straight line and then stand on one foot to the count of 30. He looked into her eyes to check for jerkiness. Bolton, dressed in black silk pants and a pink shirt, took off her pink high heels to be more sure-footed. She said she thought she had aced the tests. "All that yoga really paid off," she thought.

But in the police report, Fair wrote that she swayed as she walked and lost her balance -- which Bolton disputes. He told her she was under arrest.