While I completely agree with the sentiment that driving plowed is bad, I am weary of growing pro-MADD, kill-the-drunk-drivers hysteria.
I understand the anger at the growing number of alcohol related incidents, and often paltry punishments assigned to offenders, but the definition of “alcohol related incident” as defined by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is increasingly broad, and not all such incidents are created equal. Most people would cite the NHTSA as their source to measure such incidents, and their definition of alcohol related driving incidents includes any incident where the police were notified in which drivers, passengers and non-passengers (pedestrians, for example) with a BAC of .01 or greater. Persons with a BAC of .10 or over are considered to be intoxicated. Yes, this does mean if a sober designated driver is in a car accident and the police are called, this is classified as an alcohol-related incident. Similarly, if a sober driver hits me with his car as I’m walking home from happy hour, this is alcohol related. This also means if a driver with a .02 BAC, well below the legal limit and for most people (NHTSA’s own definition included) well below intoxicated, gets into an accident, this is alcohol related. Whether or not the driver is at fault is irrelevant. Am I okay with a mild penalty for this .02 driver? Sure. What does that even translate to, a beer at the game? I don’t care if you have a beer at the game, then drive home. I do care if you’re shitfaced and drive home.
Let me be clear. I’m not here to advocate drunk-driving. I don’t think anyone is. But I do want to point out that these conversations about everyone needing their keys taken away make me nervous. Stopping drunk drivers is an easy cause to get behind; do you want a guy who just got through funneling Tequila shots down his face getting behind the wheel of a car and endangering everyone? I sure as hell don’t. But I don’t get behind the random breathalyzing, and the zero-tolerance, or the idea that all alcohol-related offenders need to be sentenced to prison forever.
Which is why mandatory sentencing (as proposed here by many people) sucks. We are meant to trust our judges to exercise discretion, that’s why we make them judges. Otherwise, why don’t we get rid of the position and have judging by computer?
There is a difference between different types of drunk driving. The person who drives home after a day’s hard drinking at the bar should be treated differently from the person who gets a cab home, has his friend drive him back to his car the next morning, and drives into work while still just over the limit, though not realizing he is in that condition. I don’t see how automatically imprisoning the latter person is of any significant benefit - a person who showed that responsibility (the cab home I mean) will likely be scared crapless by the brush with the law and never come close to doing it again. The driver after a 14 hour binge? Less likely.
DUI is one of those crimes where common sense gets tossed out the window. In Florida (and most states, IIRC), you can get a DUI if you realize you’ve had too much to drink, pull over, and toss the keys into the back seat.
Why wouldn’t that be the case. You committed the offense. Unless you are suggesting that a person needs to be apprehended in the act of committing the crime, I don’t see the issue here.
Now yes, common sense should prevail with regards to sentencing in this instance - I would support a judge going lighter on someone who made the decision to stop committing a crime in the middle.
I don’t see what’s so hard about the concept of “If you drink, don’t drive”. It shouldn’t even need to be a judgment call. Lots of people seem to think that because alcohol has become the defacto legal social lubricant that there should be some exception carved out in the law for a few drinks. Well I call bullshit on that. You wouldn’t dream of making a similar case for someone who only snorted a line or two of coke, or a bowl of marijuana. Alcohol should be no exception. If you drink, don’t drive, period.
Yes I would. One line of coke? Please, I’d say you’re fit to perform open-heart surgery. That’s not even high yet; that’s the precursor to getting high. And again, I’m not saying driving drunk is okay because, hey, everybody does it! What I am saying is there is a clear distinction between having a glass of red wine on a date then driving home (not drunk), and staying at the bar from happy hour to close (drunk), then driving home. The former is fine, the latter is not. I’m also saying that MADD is full of shit, and their numbers are absurdly inflated. Nobody brought up MADD here, but I’m bringing up because I believe they’re the driving force behind the zero tolerance bullshit.
The problem I have is that I’ve heard stories about people going straight to their car to sleep off the drunk till they were sober enough to drive, and then getting arrested for DUI even though they had no plans to drive at all. That is something I have a problem with.
There have been times I’ve gone out to drink, and my ride plans fell through. My emergency plans have always been to go sleep in my car. I’ve heard too many stories about people doing just that and getting arrested for DUI (Thats why I’ve changed my plans to lock my keys in the trunk if I ever have to do that, can’t arrest me for driving if I don’t even have keys!).
According to this NHTSA document (PDF), 13,470 people were killed in alcohol-impaired-driving crashes in 2006.
And, in the same document, they define alcohol-impaired-driving fatalities in the following way:
So, in contrast to your claims about pedestrians and 0.02 and whatever other issues you raise above, this 13,470 number constitutes fatalities from crashes where the driver of the vehicle has a BAC of 0.08 or higher. That’s drunk driving. Period.
Also, i don’t know what your paragraph has to do with the issue at hand. I never advocated any penalties at all for someone with a BAC of 0.02, because that is, by definition, not drunk driving. My point was about people who specifically were caught with a BAC over the legal limit.
Sorry, but if you drive with a BAC over 0.08, you need to have your keys taken away for a while, because you’re a hazard to every other road user, and a selfish asshole.
See, your manner of framing the situation, in which a drunk driver can only be envisioned as “a guy who just got through funneling Tequila shots down his face,” precisely misses the point. It implies that the only really bad drunk drivers are the ones who get behind the wheel when they’re so shitfaced they can barely stand. But the fact is that even 4 or 5 drinks over a couple of hours can significantly impair your coordination and reaction time, and there is a considerable amount of time before falling-down-drunk that you still shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a car.
A pub i used to drink in when i lived in Sydney, Australia (where the drunk driving limit is 0.05, and enforced very strictly) had a breathalyzer machine that you could use to test yourself. A few times i tested myself after an evening of solid but not really heavy drinking, and the reading came up at 0.12-0.14. At the time, i was carrying on perfectly intelligible conversations, felt lucid and in control, and was a very long way from falling-down drunk. But if i had got behind the wheel in this state, it would have been just as criminal and irresponsible as a guy who was falling-down drunk. In fact, at some level i probably would have been even more wrong, because i was still lucid enough to recognize that i was over the limit and should not be driving.
I agree with this, and i don’t want mandatory sentences. But i do think that people in the legal system, both prosecutors and those behind the bench, need to get much more serious with the serious offenders, and especially with serial offenders.
Perhaps, but the fact is that a person driving with a BAC of, for example, 0.10, is just as dangerous if they’re driving home after five beers as they are if they’re driving to work the morning after a 15-drink bender. The blood alcohol level is the source of the impairment, and the danger to other road users is the same whether it’s in the evening or the morning. Hell, you could argue that it’s more dangerous on the packed roads of the morning rush hour than it is on deserted roads at 3am.
I think intent is important, so i do agree that the person in your example should be treated more leniently. But i don’t think he should be let off without any penalty at all.
This is what gets me, too. If we’re going out, and both of us want to drink, we don’t drive. If we drive, one of us will make sure that we drink nothing more than a glass of wine with dinner.
I think that’s what get me about the whole thing: driving after drinking is so easy to avoid, either by not drinking or by not driving. It’s not even something like speeding or accidentally running a red light, which can sometimes result from a moment’s inattention. It requires forethought, and an active, conscious decision to put other road users in danger. Fuck those people.
Ok, I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole there because I too would make the same case. My point is that the law doesn’t. Further human beings are horrible at risk assessment; and further still due to sex, size and personal history, the effects of alcohol differs. The only way to treat all these people fairly is to treat them all the same. Would I really want to throw a first time offender in jail for thirty days, probably not, but there has to be a better way than we’re currently doing things, and unfortunately that does probably mean being more punitive on first offenders
I hope I wasn’t giving the impression that person should be let off unpunished. What they have done is still an offense, and should be treated as such. But the idea that some people have of a one size fits all, mandatory jail time regardless of the situation, punishment is one that I don’t think is necessarily warranted.
mhendo, I was not referring to fatalities; I was referring specifically to the very broad term “alcohol related” accidents, which I understand the OP was not about.
Who said otherwise?
I agree. You think I ain’t never tippled before? I used the Tequila-funneling example to draw a distinction between drunk and not-drunk. A lot of drinking that is done in public is not for the purpose of getting drunk, and does not result in drunkenness or impaired coordination. Maybe the distinction I should have drawn was between the guy who has a beer at the game, and the guy who hangs out at the sports bar across the street for a few hours afterwards.
I’m mainly with this. I don’t suggest we get into some bizarre game of trying to gauge everyone’s intentions, or how good they felt at the time, but I don’t know if treating first time offenders the same as the multiple-DUI-assholes is the answer.
Perhaps I’m hijacking the thread here, so I’ll end this little tangent in a moment. Drunken, reckless driving is wrong, and my intention was never to disagree with that point. I’m mainly unnerved by the hysterics that people in general seem to get into about anyone getting close to a vehicle if a drink was consumed within the past 12 hours. We have a legal BAC limit for operating a motor vehicle. It’s in place for a reason, and it’s fine. I also say that random breathalyzers are bull, and MADD is run by crazed neo-prohibitionists.
I fully agree that serious repeat offenders ought to be dealt with extremely strictly. (Certainly more seriously than many/most drug offenses IMO!)
But I’m personally not a fan of overly strict penalties for a first offense of driving while over the legal limit - provided no injuries or serious property damage resulted, and if no minor passengers were in the car.
I tend not to be a huge fan of most bright lines, and I tend to support progressive discipline. And I will not necessarily agree that every individual who is over .08 (or whatever the legal limit is) is more impaired than people talking on their cellphones, fiddling with the radio, eating, overtired, or any number of distracting activities while driving.
There is a world of difference in my mind, between a guy who has a couple of beers and gets in a relatively minor accident while driving home, and the guy who repeatedly drives blind drunk.
So yeah, I think that any time anyone is recorded by the cops as having been behind the wheel exceeding the limit, there should be a permanent record to ensure that should a next time occur, penalties will be harsher. Also, even if it is the first offense, I believe penalties should be considerably harsher if injuries result, or minors are endangered.
But the mere act of exceeding the limit is not so serious in my mind that an offender ought not be allowed to learn from their mistake and change.
I readily admit, tho, that being sober nearly 5 years now, it is of some relief to know I will never blow on a breathalyzer!
But herein lies the problem, especially in a country like the United States where the libertarian bent against random breath testing makes it hard to catch drunk drivers.
In the absence of a program of pre-emptive enforcement involving random breath testing, or something similar, in many cases the first time a drunk driver is caught is the time he or she blows through a red light or wanders into the oncoming lane and kills or seriously injures someone. We’re left with a situation in which many people think it’s unfair to punish someone harshly for a first offense, and in which we only begin to take punishment seriously after the real damage is done, after someone ends up in a wheelchair or in a box.
One issue, i guess, is the extent to which drunk driving is a habitual practice, or a one-off, unlikely-to-be-repeated incident. In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, the former is more likely than the latter. I’ve known a couple of people who said something like “Wow, i drove home drunk last night. That was really stupid, and i’m never going to do it again.” But i’ve run into quite a few people, in various countries, who make a habit of driving home well over the legal limit, and who rationalize it with bullshit about how they drive slowly, are always in control, and “anyway there’s no-one else on the road so i’m only a danger to myself.”
And i believe the same about alcoholism as i do about other addictions like drugs: i recognize that addiction is an illness, and that addicts need as much help as possible to kick the habit. But when the addict’s habit becomes a danger to others, then society needs to do something.
I don’t care if someone takes heroin or crack. That’s their decision, and i don’t even think they should be imprisoned just for taking the drug. But if they stick a gun in my face and demand my wallet to support their habit, than that needs to be punished. Same with alcohol. Drink all you want, but if you insist on getting in a car under the influence, you’re a menace to everyone else, and should be punished.
If you’re talking about the Adenhart case, it could very well work. One of the standards for charging a drunk driver who kills someone with second degree murder (as opposed to manslaughter) is whether or not the defendant knew the consequences of driving drunk (paraphrased badly but that’s close). Having a previous DUI conviction usually meets that standard, and young Mr. Gallo does indeed have a previous DUI conviction.
My cousin’s fiancee was killed by a drunk driver who had 4 previous DUI convictions, no drivers license, a deportation for having no legal papers, and was back in the US on the sly working for a company driving their truck. Yeah. :mad:
I am not a do-gooder by any means- I’m actually a former habitual drunk driver with a DUI conviction (30 days in jail but only did one night, no license for 30 days, restricted license for six months, informal probation for seven years, $1000 fine- this was in 1990). However, I have no problem with reasonably harsh sentences for first-time DUI convictions, and absolutely no problem with harsh sentences if someone’s drunk driving results in injury or death to another party (including in their own car).
In my mind, having multiple DUIs is not merely a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings- it is an indication that, for whatever reason, a driver is not capable of operating a vehicle responsibly. Driving is a privilege, not a right.