Special Plates For Dwi Offender

A man with six drunken-driving convictions must hang a modern version of a scarlet letter on his license plate: a sign that reads “CONVICTED DWI.”

The punishment imposed by Nassau County Judge Marc Mogil on Roy Letterlough of Hempstead was unanimously affirmed by a panel of judges from the state Appellate Division in a decision made public this week.

“I would never impose this on a first offender,” Mogil said Thursday. “But this is a 56-year-old man and after six times, he’s just about spit in the eye of society. So I had to take some measure that protects innocent people that walk along the street.”

But Barbara Bernstein, who heads the Long Island Civil Liberties Union, called the sentence “a scarlet letter.”

“This is a violation of his constitutional right to free speech because it compels him to say something that he doesn’t believe in,” she said.