Casper man gets prison sentence for DUI with 0.3% BAC, child passenger

CASPER, Wyo. — A Casper man was sentenced Wednesday to four and a half to five years in prison for a fourth-in-10-years DUI charge.

Cody Lee Edwards, 44, had a 6-year-old passenger and a blood-alcohol concentration almost four times the legal limit when he was arrested by Natrona County Sheriff’s Office deputies last March, according to the affidavit. Edwards also pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child endangerment before Judge Dan Forgey last August.

Around 2:24 p.m. Tuesday, March 19, a caller reported to dispatch that a truck was swerving all over the road and had struck mailboxes. The deputy caught up to the vehicle on Poison Spider Road near the intersection with 10 Mile Road.

The vehicle did not yield to emergency lights and sirens for over a minute and drove consistently over the lane line before finally pulling over, the report said. The child passenger was distraught, the report noted.

Edwards, the driver, refused to take field sobriety tests and deputies had to catch him from falling face-first onto the ground, the report said. Edwards gave one breath test that showed a .31% blood alcohol concentration. The legal limit is 0.08%. Deputies learned that Edwards had picked the child up from Pineview Elementary.

District Attorney Dan Itzen said this was Edwards’s seventh lifetime DUI. The first was for a rollover crash on Interstate 25 in Casper that killed his passenger and resulted in an aggravated vehicular homicide conviction in 2005.

That conviction was overturned by the Wyoming Supreme Court because the defense had been barred from admitting evidence to support its theory that the passenger had grabbed the wheel. Itzen, who prosecuted the case along with then-District Attorney Mike Blonigan, told Oil City News that Edwards ultimately pleaded guilty in that case and got a 54- to 108-month sentence.

Edwards will get credit for time served since his arrest on March 19.

The court record for the current case includes a letter from a family member of Edwards asking for the maximum sentence, saying that they believed Edwards would continue to drink if released.