In N.H., a Beer in the Belly Can Get Youths Arrested

But, the lawyers ask, is the same true of being drunk, meaning the processes that occur once the alcohol is in the bloodstream.

"Intoxication is an involuntary act," said Gabriel Nizetic, a Plymouth defense attorney. "Your body's going to absorb it, whether you want to or not."

The difficulties of carrying out the current law were apparent one recent morning here in Durham District Court, where several defendants were from the nearby University of New Hampshire. Often, these cases sounded less like by-the-book trial proceedings and more like a set of worried parents, parsing the words and actions of a possibly drunk kid.

"The defendant responded, 'I don't know, I guess I had too much to drink,' " a university police officer testified in one case, recounting a late-night conversation in a dorm room where no alcohol was visible. He said the freshman defendant, 18, also seemed to forget his own age and spoke with "a thick tongue."

"Did you ask him if he had taken any illegal drugs?" Joanne Stella, the defense attorney, asked the officer, trying to introduce doubt that alcohol was behind his behavior. No, the officer replied.

Still, the student was found guilty. "What else could he have meant by, 'I've had too much to drink'?" Judge Gerald Taube asked.

In the next case, an officer testified that the defendant, whom he approached on a roadside late at night, "was swaying. Her eyes were bloodshot and glassy."

But, though the officer said he smelled alcohol, on cross-examination he said he wasn't sure whether he had asked the girl whether she had been drinking.

The girl got off, just as Zukerman did later the same day. But, in his ruling on her case, Taube said he was conflicted: "It's close to the line," he said.