You can't get a DWI on a horse in North Carolina. But why?

There's a viral video where a man (correctly) states you can't be charged with drunk driving on horseback. It wasn't always this way. Blame, maybe, a chaotic Christmas parade and a wily lawmaker.

The Horseback Legend of Mint Hill

Folks, here is some legal advice from a man on horseback who’s holding a Miller High Life:

@cbreeezy95Look it up

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The man, who is talking to some people at a gas station across from the ABC liquor store in Mint Hill, loudly and confidently states that “You cannot get a DUI on a horse in the State of North Carolina.” Then, to hammer the point home, he shouts: “Look it up! Look it up!” Axios Charlotte did just that. And it’s true! Reporter Laura Barrero talked with a law firm that, among other things, defends people in accused of driving while intoxicated (In North Carolina law, it’s technically DWI and not driving under the influence or DUI). They pointed her to the relevant state law that says, for purposes of a DWI, a horse is not considered to be a vehicle. This makes North Carolina a bit of an outlier. Police in several other states have charged people with riding horses while drunk, including Kentucky, Georgia, and Florida. Even FLORIDA says you can’t do this!

But back to this man. In my experience, many people who shout some version of “I know my rights!” usually think they have more rights than they actually do. It doesn’t matter how many times you can shoot out the dead center of a 1040 form at 50 yards with a bolt-action hunting rifle, you still have to pay your taxes. And yet this man, named Mitchell, is absolutely correct. He goes on to say that if he was riding in a buggy pulled by his horse, that he could be cited for DWI. That’s also true! A buggy is a vehicle! The horse, by the way, does not confirm this (he’s a horse). But, if I know my rights, I think he’s nodding in agreement.

This video has more than 20 million views on TikTok. It was shot in 2019 by Christian Braswell, who just got around to posting it on October 28 of this year. The very next video shows Christian riding the horse around the parking lot. Apparently the horse is named Coin. Obviously, he is a very good horse.

As for Mitchell, I’ve tracked him down but I haven’t been able to contact him. The numbers I found for him have been disconnected, and he didn’t reply to my Facebook message request, and I live too far away from Mint Hill to casually swing by his house. I will say: Mitchell is a longtime Mint Hill resident who lives on a plot of land with enough acreage for a horse, just about a mile from where the video was taken. He’s helped out at the annual Mint Hill rodeo, and has posted other videos of himself riding around town on both his horse and in a horse-pulled buggy. I sort of wondered whether a man who knows his horse DWI rights may have learned them after being pulled over on horseback, but the Mint Hill police say no. One captain told me he’s known about Mitchell for the entirety of his 20 years in town, but that Mitchell hasn’t run into any trouble. Anyhow, this man appears to be the real life version of The Stranger from “The Big Lebowski,” and if by chance I hear back from him, I’ll let you all know. Christian, the guy who shot the TikTok, told me that Mitchell hangs out at a local dive bar. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that.

Here’s the thing though: It’s not possible to get a DWI on a horse in North Carolina now, but that’s not always been the case. So because this is the Rabbit Hole, and even though this affects very few people (Possible exceptions: The entire towns of Tryon and Love Valley), I decided to find out when and why lawmakers would go out of their way to protect drunk people on horses. What I found was a chaotic Christmas parade, a case that the state Court of Appeals had to decide with straight faces, and a wily state senator who may have slipped in a change at the 11th hour.

The Christmas Parade That Ended In A Police Chase

Downtown Lincolnton, the scene of North Carolina’s most notorious horse DWI case (Photo by Brian Stansberry via Wikimedia Commons)

About halfway through the 1983 Lincolnton Christmas Parade, a police officer named Jerry Hallman noticed something that made him a little edgy. There were about a half-dozen guys riding horses near the back of the procession, and one of them kept kicking his spurs into his horse’s side. That horse would spin and buck, and then run sideways and rear up with its front legs in the air. “He was just out of control,” Hallman told the Charlotte Observer. “He’d be right against the crowd, and one time when he spun around, he was a foot and a half away from me. All it had to do was kick.”

Hallman ordered the man to get down, and pulled him over to a side street. The man said he couldn’t get control of the horse. Also, he was drunk. A Breathalyzer showed the man’s blood-alcohol content was .18, above the legal limit of .10.

The rest of the riders kept going. After the parade, they rode up on the sidewalk on East Main Street. One horse broke a plate-glass window at Belk’s. When the police arrived, the riders took off. Five squad cars chased them through the back streets of Lincolnton. A roadblock didn’t work. One horse ran into the back of a police cruiser but kept going. Another horse sank knee-deep into an old lady’s front yard (quicksand?!?), but was able to get out. All of them got away.

Except for Darrell Dellinger. The 29-year-old man who’d blown .18 was charged with DWI, and had his driver’s license suspended for ten days. For what it’s worth: Dellinger was not the first apparently drunk horseback rider to run into trouble at the Lincolnton Christmas Parade. In 1979, one horseman was so blitzed that he couldn’t walk after he got down from his ride, and two other riders had to hold him up. A few years before that, a horse got loose and jumped into the crowd. After Dellinger’s arrest, though, the parade’s organizers decided they were done with horses for a while.

Dellinger went and got a lawyer who started looking closely for statutes that addressed horses on the road. Dellinger’s license was initially taken away, thanks to a tough new set of laws called the Safe Driving Act of 1983. Drunk driving had been illegal in North Carolina since 1937, but back then, there was no objective way to prove it. Officers then had to rely on things like slurred speech and the smell of liquor. You know, vibes! By 1963, technology had made it possible to test blood-alcohol content reliably, and lawmakers set a legal limit of .10. In 1973, the law changed and made the results of a blood-alcohol test the only thing required to charge people with DWI. Even so, judges, prosecutors, and juries tended to be lenient when it came to drunk drivers.

In the early 1980s, many organizations, including Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (M.A.D.D.) really pushed authorities nationwide to crack down, so the governor appointed a task force to figure out what to do. Their recommendations led to stricter rules that were laid out in the Safe Driving Act of 1983. A report later said the new law was successful in keeping people from driving drunk and giving them clear and harsh consequences if they did. The data showed DWI arrests went down and the conviction rate went up.

But Dellinger’s lawyer, Tim Harris of Gastonia, talked about something that he didn’t see in any drunk driving laws: Horses. Sure, there was an old law that defined animals (and animal-drawn carriages) as vehicles, but Harris said that law went into effect before North Carolina had rules defining drunk driving. Also, the new law specifically included things like bicycles, but said nothing about animals. “If the state legislature intended the Safe Driving Act of 1983 to apply to horses it would have included horses,” Harris told the Observer in an interview. He also noted the frivolity of taking Dellinger’s driver’s license away, since he didn’t need one to ride a horse.

It didn’t work. In January 1984, the judge said a horse was a vehicle, suspended Dellinger’s license for a month, and ordered him to pay $135.

It wasn’t over, though. Dellinger appealed the ruling, and the Court of Appeals decided to take up the case. Dellinger’s lawyers argued that a horse was not a “device” and therefore could not be a “vehicle.” The judges looked back at prior decisions, and couldn’t find another case in North Carolina of someone being charged with DWI on a horse. But they did find other decisions from other states like Kansas and Louisiana with similarly-written laws that did call a horse a vehicle when it was on a public street. In April 1985, all three judges ruled against him. State v. Dellinger had made clear: You could get a DWI on a horse.

At least for four more years, anyway.

Equine Protection under the Law

In 1989, lawmakers were again talking about drunk driving, and a state senate judiciary committee started looking at ways to get tougher. They ended up creating and passing a bill, as did the state house, but they didn’t have enough to time to iron out the differences between the two versions. On July 11, lawmakers said they were too far apart. A tougher drunk driving bill would not become law that year. M.A.D.D. was mad.

But then, something weird happened. When the same senate judiciary committee met the next day—July 12, 1989—they took up a different bill that required people on mopeds to wear helmets. (State officials said that, actually, this was a roundabout way to punish drunk drivers? Somehow? “Many of these people riding mopeds … are people whose drivers licenses have been taken away for another practice and you all know what it is,” the state health director said in May 1989.) During that meeting, the committee added an amendment that specifically exempted three things from the state’s DWI laws: Bicycles, lawnmowers, and horses.

The reaction before the full senate was like, um, okay. One senator said it may not be safe to allow drunken lawnmower and horseback riders on public roads, but the bill passed unanimously anyway and went into effect on October 1, 1989.

Lawmakers changed the law again in 2006 and removed the exemption for bicycles and lawnmowers, meaning that yes, you can now get a DWI while riding a Cub Cadet. But the horse provision stayed in, at least where DWIs are concerned. Horses are still vehicles in every other way, meaning you can get a reckless driving citation on horseback. But you can be completely shitfaced and laugh at a police officer who wants to give you a Breathalyzer. You know your rights!

Still though, why horses? Who was behind this? How did this change slip through with relatively little fanfare? To find out, I asked for help. Sage Gaska, who runs the NC Politics account on Bluesky, volunteered to go to the North Carolina Legislative Library in Raleigh and pull the minutes of that judiciary committee meeting from 1989. I hoped it would provide a clue. I didn’t get much, except for a name: Senator Swain.

Next, I looked up all of the members of the Senate Judiciary I Committee that would have been at that meeting in 1989. Only one is still living: George Daniel, who’s still a practicing attorney in Yanceyville. When I called his law office and told an assistant that I wanted to ask him about his role in getting rid of DWI by horse, she laughed. But she also said he’d remember it.

Well, turns out he didn’t remember it. When I got Daniel on the phone, he told me that he was well acquainted with the quirks of North Carolina’s BOATING while impaired law, which states that if you’re drunk and operating a “vessel” that’s “underway,” the police could charge you. Technically, a vessel is a life jacket, an inner tube, a raft, or other things that float. “If it’s not secured to the shore or the bottom, then you are underway,” he told me, meaning it’s possible that you could be cited for BWI if you shotgun six beers and then jump into a river with a pool noodle.

But the horse thing. Daniel was the vice chair of that committee. Records show that he was there when they amended the bill. But it didn’t ring a bell. At least not until I told Daniel what I knew. I asked if Senator Swain was the one behind the horse DWI exemption. Daniel thought for a second. “Yeah,” he said. “This is a Bob Swain thing.”

The Potential Patron Saint Of Inebriated Horseback Riders

Robert Swain of Buncombe County was the chair of the Senate Judiciary I committee in 1989. “He was a heck of a good lawyer,” Daniel said, “and he was not a fan of the Safe Roads Act.” He thought some of the punishments, which mandated jail time for many offenders, were too harsh. In 1987, Swain said one of his drug-using clients tried to commit suicide after she was pulled over for impaired driving. She survived, went to rehab, and got clean. But she was still prosecuted for DWI, and a judge was mandated to give her a week in jail. Psychiatrists told the court that the sentence would cause her to start using again, which is ultimately what happened. “And that’s just one instance,” Swain told the Associated Press. “It is multiplied by the thousands over the state.”

Also! Swain could drink. Daniel, who considered him a friend, would sometimes act as his designated driver. He told me of a story he’d heard once—more like an old wives’ tale—in which Swain ran his car off the road in the mountains. “He was possibly drinking,” Daniel said. “Possibly.” When the troopers finally showed up, Swain had an excuse: Well, I was sitting here and I got bored. I got drunk waiting on you.

Swain was a conservative Democrat who first got to the state senate in 1976. He was persuasive. He was the guy who got a law passed to make the Plott Hound the official State Dog. When he spoke, his fellow lawmakers listened. And he generally did not like change. Once, Daniel said, there was a bill going through the legislature that would have outlawed cockfighting. Everyone thought it’d pass. “Bob Swain stood up and opposed that,” Daniel said. “He told a story about when he was in the army and watched a cockfight. This big rooster he had been watching had really beat down this other little rooster. The big rooster stood up to crow, and the little rooster got up, pecked him in the neck, and killed him.”

Swain reached his crescendo. “You don’t crow until you know the job is done,” Daniel remembers him saying. The bill didn’t pass. At least not while Swain was around.

In 1990, not long after his committee helped outlaw DWI via horse, Swain died of cancer at age 69. At his funeral, his preacher told the crowd that he once asked Swain if thought he’d go to heaven. “Absolutely,” Swain had replied. “At least there I won't be bothered by Republicans.”

Sen. Bob Swain. Sometimes there’s a man.

It’s impossible to confirm, for sure, if Bob Swain was the one who made it possible to dodge a DWI charge on horseback in North Carolina. But according to Daniel, it sure sounds like something he’d do. “This is probably Bob Swain’s parting shot,” he said. As for why? Who knows. “If you’ve been drinking on a horse,” Daniel guessed, “maybe you can trust the horse to get you home.”

But, as an attorney like Daniel would point out, all of this evidence is strong but circumstantial. We’ll never know why this law exists. But we know our rights. And yes, it is your right to slam a half-dozen daquiris before you ride a Shetland pony down the city street of your choice. Look it up, you can proudly tell the cops. Look it up.