Kerry Kennedy pleads not guilty to driving under the influence of drugs

Initial tests show no drugs in Kennedy’s system, but Kennedy may have taken Ambien

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LAURA BRYN SISSON,

IrishCentral Intern

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Kerry Kennedy

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Kerry Kennedy pleaded not guilty last night to driving under the influence of drugs, while a court document released a few hours before her hearing says she was swaying and slurring her speech when police arrested her, the AP reports.

Kerry was arrested Friday after she hit a truck on Interstate 684 and then fled the scene, according to the AP.

According to the document, a police officer’s deposition, Kennedy failed both a standing-on-one-leg test and a walk-and-turn test when she was arrested Friday, the AP wrote.

Kennedy’s speech and motor functions were impaired, but she successfully remembered the alphabet, according to the AP.

In the document, Officer J. Thomas wrote that Kennedy said, “she had a thyroid medication and a sleeping medication (believed to be Ambien) and it is possible she took the sleeping pill instead of the thyroid pill.”

The Kennedy family said in a statement on Friday that Kerry’s voluntary breathalyzer, blood, and urine tests had all come back clean.

Further toxicology tests- which could reveal whether Kennedy took Ambien before the accident- are still being processed, according to ABC.

“The charges were filed before the test results were available,” the family said in the statement.

Kerry’s cousin, former Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy, told ABC that the incident was “out of character for Kerry.”

Patrick Kennedy himself was charged with driving while intoxicated in 2006. The intoxicant in question proved, for Patrick, to be Ambien.

But unlike himself, Patrick Kennedy said, Kerry Kennedy has had no past problems with mental illness or prescription drug abuse.

In an interview with the New York Post yesterday, the driver of the 6,000-pound truck Kerry hit described his “first impression” as “that she was really, really drunk, half asleep or very, very intoxicated.”

On impact, “she woke up a little bit, not a lot, not the way you’d wake up if you’d just hit a 6,000 pound truck,” the driver, Rocco Scuitello, told the New York Post.

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