Jury finds mayor's daughter not guilty of DWI

Jurors yesterday found Mayor Bill White's teenage daughter Elena not guilty of her DWI charge, saying video of White taking field sobriety tests when cops pulled her over July 31 didn't seem to show that she was intoxicated.

During the trial, high-powered defense attorney Rusty Hardin focused on mistakes the officers made when they pulled White over; in his closing arguments, he referred to the cops as "the three stooges," KHOU reports. Harris County Deputy Constable Nicholas Derkowski testified that White slurred her speech and smelled of alcohol the night she was arrested, and Deputy Constable Michael Bilbrey said she didn't do so well in a field sobriety test, but it was hard for jurors to tell because video of the arrest, taken from a camera mounted on the dashboard of a patrol car, was at times obscured by someone standing in front of the camera and at other times by the glare of a floodlight. "I think in the end, the evidence and the video was probably the most importance piece of evidence, and I think [jurors] would have liked to see more footage," prosecutor Suzanne Elmilady told KPRC. "We respect their verdict."

Mayor White and his wife, Andrea, were in court Wednesday for the verdict: "I expect law enforcement, prosecutors not to give sort of important people, including myself, any special breaks under the system," he said.