I can tell you why - first , it’s because for some reason, people in general want to reward good luck and punish bad luck. Just in this thread, I recall someone, ( not sure who) pointing out that this man has never killed anybody in decades of driving drunk as if that meant he was unlikely to kill someone if he drove drunk in the future. So driving drunk without killing someone is not as bad as if you killed someone when you drove drunk and an unsuccessful attempt to shoot someone is punished less than a successful attempt and if I punch someone in the face and I leave a bruise, I will be punished less than if that same punch caused the person to fall down , hit his head on the pavement and ultimately caused his death. Even though in every case the actions were the same.
Now, why people believe that, I don’t know- but it tends to matter in legal systems. The thing that astounds me however, is that with drunk driving, there’s a different way to account for the results - if a person injures or kills someone by driving drunk, there’s usually some other crime they can be charged with - some type of assault/battery or some flavor of homicide.
But the second reason is probably more important - apparently a huge number of people have driven while impaired (including those who make and enforce the laws) And they don’t want to go to jail if they drove after having one drink too many.
Sure, but someone convicted of 17 violent crimes is obviously not a candidate for him. The fact that he’s never managed to kill anyone doesn’t mean that he’s nonviolent; it means that he’s been thankfully unsuccessfully in his violence.
I once saw someone on this board argue that the .08 legal limit was too strict, because it caught not only the real drunks, but also the casual drinker who just stops at the bar for five or six beers on his way home from work.
Majority of people are not very impaired at .08 and don’t feel like they’ve had too much to drink. I have never stopped someone with DUI being the sole RS for the stop and the driver blew a .08 or .09. Almost 100% of my DUI cites are in excess of .10 with .14 being the average. Some of the ADA’s are issuing deferred prosecution to people who test below .10 as long as an accident wasn’t caused any there were no minors in the vehicle.
I notice @Chronos casually calling DUIs a “violent crime” somewhat highlights what I call the exaggerations of the MADD-era. It’s also why DUI is one crime for which the police and prosecution can so easily trammel on cherished constitutional rights, as the courts have found that there are “DUI exceptions” to several such rights that do not exist for other crimes.
The justification for treating DUI offenders as worse than regular misdemeanants has always been a strange one to me, and I can only assume it is based on the emotion-laden and fact-free campaigns of groups like MADD.
I also notice @Kimera757 sloppily saying “DUI is a serious crime”, then linking to an article about a crime much more serious than DUI–DUI causing death (a separate crime.) DUI is much less serious than causing death because simple DUI means no one was injured or killed, DUI causing injury and DUI causing death, or variations on that terminology, are separate, much more serious crimes in every state. No one treats DUI causing death as a traffic offense, because it isn’t.
But treating DUI offenses that do not cause immediate harm as legally or even morally the same is highly questionable because you can’t know all the specifics involved. For example many people arrested for simple DUI likely were in decent enough state that they weren’t imminently going to kill anyone. How do I know that? Because people drive drunk on average more than 100 times the number of times they are arrested for it, and all those times they don’t get caught no one is dying.
That certainly doesn’t mean it’s “okay.” But it does mean if you want to think about DUI using the emotion laden, fact-free thinking of the anti-constitution MADDers, you need to treat speeding the exact same way. Also distracted driving. Also sleep-deprived driving. Speed is like the most common factor in NHTSA reporting on fatal auto crashes, across the board, yet speeding except in extreme cases isn’t even treated as a misdemeanor, but a non-criminal traffic citation.
So is first offense DUI in my state. Unless there are other factors such as an accident, testing more than twice the legal limit or there is a minor in the vehicle, first offense is a non-criminal ticket. Which I think is fair. The per-capita rate drops like a rock after the first one. Even though it is just a traffic offense it’s still expensive. Fines, court costs, attorney fees, sky rocketing insurance premiums, license suspension. All add up to thousands of dollars. It’s the hard core cases that get multiple DUI’s that are the most dangerous. Many others learn a costly lesson and stop after the first.
The fact that he hasn’t killed anyone yet is not much of an argument. Normally, I oppose unnecessary incarceration. But if what is reported here is correct, he is utterly incorrigible. The only thing that can keep him off the road is prison. For life.
The question of how much alcohol is sufficient to constitute impairment varies quite a bit by jurisdiction, and is obviously a subjective tradeoff with public safety. The criteria you cite would be considered extremely lenient by the standards of many other states and provinces. Here in Ontario, for instance, beween 0.05 and 0.08 BAC is a “warn” range that results in an automatic 3-day license suspension and a pretty serious black mark on your record. Anything over 0.08 is a 90-day license suspension, 7-day vehicle impoundment, and hefty fines and costs. The driver may also end up being practically uninsurable except through a facilities pool at enormous cost. And despite being administered provincially, DUI is also a criminal offense under federal law.
I mean that simply isn’t factual. They are separate crimes. Firing a gun into a crowd is not punished the same as firing a gun into a person and killing them in any of the 50 States, nor probably most countries on earth. Actions and effects matter. We do not generally penalize people the same for creating risk of bad things as we do for actually causing actual bad things to happen. I go back to speeding–speeding is the number one factor in all traffic accidents that lead to fatalities. In fact, most “alcohol-related” traffic accidents that result in fatalities co-occur with excessive speed. There is a powerful argument that speeding, particularly excessive speeding, is the single most depraved and dangerous thing regular people do on a regular basis, in terms of the risk it creates for other humans. In some ways I even thinking speeding is more morally offensive than driving while drunk.
At least some portion of drunk drivers are hopeless alcoholics with poor impulse control and wrecked brain from a lifetime of abusing it with alcohol. We obviously do not, and should not, excuse DUI because alcohol impairs good decision making–the onus is on the drinker to make sure their drinking does not harm society. But virtually all people who speed, including those who speed excessively, do it for trivial reasons like impatience, aggressiveness, or a desire simply to have “fun” while driving. These are poor reasons to put other people’s lives at risk. And yet, as mentioned, speeding except in the most egregious of cases is treated as a non-criminal traffic offense. Speeding that results in a car accident is usually treated as a misdemeanor. Speeding that results in a traffic accident-causing death is frequently treated as a felony.
It could even be a three year sentence or something similar, given his history.
This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if the prison he could be sent to could be basically not that bad, but keep him away from endangering others. The odds of him going to that sort of prison for this offence are low.
Incarceration should always be about two things: punishing people to discourage others, and keeping dangerous people away from those they endanger. The latter is the most important one.
This dude is lucky not to have killed anyone yet on the occasions where he was caught driving drunk. Doesn’t mean he never killed or severely injured anyone but didn’t get caught for it. Actually it seems unlikely that he never at least injured someone while driving, but didn’t get caught that time.
If you want to argue that chronic speeders who refuse to stop endangering others even after they’ve had their licenses revoked and anti-speed devices installed in their cars should to to jail after 16 arrests, I would not argue.
I think it’s a shame that our prisons tend to be miserable places to be. But there are people who need to be locked away from the rest of society, and he’s shown himself to be one of them. And hey, he might dry out in prison, too.
While I don’t want prisoners to be brutalized, I can’t help but think prisons will always be miserable places. You eat what and when they feed, go where and when they tell you, and generally have very little control over your own life. As nice as we can make a prison be I think they’ll always be miserable places.
I think a lot of people who are keen on seeing fewer people incarcerated don’t really know what to do with habitual offenders. This guy has demonstrated that he will continue to drink and drive and won’t be dissuaded by little things like not having a license. While I’m more than happy for the judge to decide whether incarceration or house arrest is in the best interest of the state, I wouldn’t object to this man being imprisoned nor would I have any sympathy for him.
What “rights” would those be? Surely you’re not saying there’s a “right” to DUI? Hell, there’s not even a “right” to drive in the first place, drunk or sober!
The guy is rather ill and I mean beyond any substance abuse problem. More like PTSD, oppositional defiant syndrome, some combination and/or other things too, perhaps.
But I don’t know about “locking him up for life” in prison. I think he belongs in a hospital on a locked ward without the freedom to come and go as he pleases (but eventually allowed modest trips outside if under appropriate supervision). He should have to stay there until he gets better. If we can do that for a guy who tried to kill the president, we can do that for this guy. He needs help, not prison.
