I volunteer to sneak into Rex’s house and rearrange his furniture which will be fine as long as he doesn’t catch me. Of course, if he breaks his neck tripping over the ottoman, it’s his own damn fault.
Incidentally, when did taking preventative action (i.e. doing spot checks for drunks) become old-fashioned? News to the vaccination industry, to be sure.
Well… Don’t we generally believe that speeding and following too closely is okay as long as we don’t get caught? Both are just as illegal, yet most of the poeple you talk to actually brag about their speeding adventures.
Don’t speeding and/or following too closely factor into more serious traffic accidents that alcohol? Why do we demonize alcohol impaired drivers and not the speeders?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think impaired drivers should be on the road. It just seems to me that there is a political element in what police are allowed to do when it comes to drunk driving (and drugs, for that matter). Roadside sobriety checks always felt “iffy” to me although the Supreme Court thinks it’s just fine.
You have GOT to be kidding.
reprise, a few US cities DO have “red light cameras” (video enforcement). One of the arguments against, here, is that the fine is issued to the car’s registration, as opposed to the specific individual that was operating it – in these jurisdictions they get around it by making the running of the red light w/o causing injury an “administrative violation” instead of a criminal misdemeanor.
jrd
RexDart, your “consequentialist” ethical analysis is absurd. You miss a key element - a drunk driver can cause injury when he/she did not cause the accident. If a (perhaps sober) driver runs a red light and crosses the path of a drunk driver, the drunk driver’s slowed reaction time or impaired judgment, or both, could cause him/her to fail to take the appropriate evasive manuevers to avoid an accident.
The fault lies with the driver who ran the red light, but but for the alcohol, no accident would have occurred.
Sua
This brings up another point. When you hear a statistic about drunk driving, who is to say that the accidents could have been avoided if the person had not been drinking. Now obviously this does not count the guy that goes out and gets wasted and decides to drive home at 110 MPH, but for someone who has just enough drinks to put them over the legal limit an accident is just as likely to be caused by some other factor and then counted as a DUI statistic.
Back to my other question, why should you not be allowed to turn around if you see stopped traffic and flashing cop lights ahead? If I saw that and I was in a hurry to get somewhere, I would want to turn around and take a short cut. Or what if you realized you forgot something at your house and turned around? Just because there is a roadblock you no longer have a choice about where you are allowed to drive?
John Stuart Mill has basically stated that “Its ok to drive drunk as long as I don’t get caught because it’s too much of a hassle to take a cab to my house and then pick up my car the next day”. Does a consequentialist ethical system take into acount possible outcomes or only actual outcomes? The way you phrase it, it seems like anything goes as long as you don’t get caught or do any damage.
A better way to look at it is this way: If I drive home drunk, there is a risk I may crash and/or kill or injure myself or someone else. There could be a significant cost in terms of jail time, loss of car, fines, loss of license, and possible damage to my psyche over having killed another person or maiming myself. Now, if you happen to know the probability of these events, you can figure out if it is worth the benefit of saving $40 and a 20 minute drive to pick up the car.
Now I am a realist. I know that many people have a couple of drinks and drive home. Most of the time, nothing happens. That still does not make it any less dangerous.
Sweet Willy - So many jokes…can’t…contain myself. I’m sorry, but you have to see the humor in that story. I would probably be more embarrassed by my friends being in the car than by the encounter with the police. I feel your pain though. I have a brother who sometimes drove around without pants when it was too hot and the AC wasnt working. One of these day’s people like your friend and my brother will be able to celebrate their God given right to drive with no pants, free from persecution.
As for DUI roadblocks. I don’t know. I don’t think they trample on peoples rights. After all, if you are driving at 3:00am there’s a pretty good chance you just came from a bar. On the other hand, there really aren’t a lot of people on the road at that hour to have an accident with anyway.
Maybe it would be better off having 2-3 am be “Free-for-All” hour where anyone can drive as drunk as they like.
**
In my state (Michigan), failure to blow into a breathalyzer is Operating Under the Influence of Liquor. They call it OUIL per se, and treat it exactly the same as if you blew over the legal limit.
And while I’m here, let me add my abhorrence to drunk-driving checkpoints. It flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment. Yeah, I know, they say it is “reasonable.”
Now we’re getting into the realm of fortune-telling. You’re right – we don’t know whether every accident where one of the participants had been drinking is necessarily caused by that drinking. Nor do we know that, had John Wilkes Booth not shot Lincoln, that the President wouldn’t have slipped getting into his coach on the way back from the theater and broken his neck. What we do know is that the vast majority of people who have alcohol suffer from decreased reaction time and impaired judgment. Two very dangerous things to have when operating a two-ton block of steel at any speed.
**
Imagine you’re a police officer, charged with protecting the public safety. To this end, you have established a perfectly legal checkpoint to prevent drunken drivers from wresking havoc. You notice someone turn around in sight of the checkpoint. Do you
A) assume that the person has a perfectly valid reason for not wanting to pass through the checkpoint and ignore it,
B) assume that the person is drunk and shoot at the car, or
C) investigate further, by pulling the person over and checking?
I think the answer most would give is C. Why? Because if they pick A, and that guy ends up being drunk and killing someone, it’s their fault. If they pick C, and the driver isn’t drunk and had merely forgotten his cell phone at home, then what harm is done besides the person being delayed by a couple of minutes?
Bugger bugger bugger. “Wreaking havoc.” I know how to spell that, dammit.
I do agree that alcohol impairs judgment, and may have played a roll in many accidents, but I feel that most accidents counted as DUI would have occurred anyway. I know that I feel safer in car with someone who has had a few drinks but drives safely as opposed to someone that is sober, but weaving in and out of lanes, tailgating, and speeding.
As far as the other thing…I guess that is what the debate is. I don’t like the idea of being pulled over because I didn’t do anything wrong other than not want to wait in a line of cars to get somewhere.
Character evidence, or evidence about habits or prior acts, is all inadmissible to show that the accused acted in conformity therewith.
It might be admissible in rebuttal, however - if the accused testified that he couldn’t possibly be guilty of DUI because he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since 1957, the Commonwealth is entitled to impeach that testimony with people that say he drinks like a fish.
Most? That’s a pretty hard-core belief, dude.
As for which I’d feel safer in, I gotta go with “neither.” Each is dangerous, in its own way. A drunken driver can be driving along at a perfectly reasonable speed, taking extra care, looking all around him, when WHAM – some idiot (drunk or sober) comes out of a cross-street without seeing the stop sign. All other things being equal, a drunken driver will not be able to react to that as fast as a sober one. A sober driver would have enough time to slam on the brakes and miss the idiot. The drunk, on the other hand… well, let’s do the math.
When you’re driving a car at thirty miles an hour – a perfectly reasonable speed almost anywhere in a city – you’re covering 44 feet per second. That means that a quarter-second’s response time (approximately the time it takes to say “SHIT!”) makes an eleven-foot difference in stopping. ELEVEN FEET. If you missed another car by eleven feet, you wouldn’t even think you’d come close.
I think you just eliminated the entire law of attempts, including attempted murder, as well as the offence of conspiracy. I think you’ve also severely weakened the underpinnings for offences such as public corruption, where it is usually impossible to point to a harm to a specific person.
Yes, I did eliminate them. I don’t think a “guilty mind” should lead to criminal culpability absent harm to another person. My Criminal Law professor left the question open as to whether or not we should have criminal culpability for attempted crimes, he didn’t seem to think it was so outrageous a notion when I came down on the side of eliminating those laws.
I definitely don’t think conspiracy should be illegal, since it is almost exclusively utilized by prosecutors to classify another individual as a co-conspirator and make their conversations admissable.
Right, so if I whip out my pistol, yell “I’m going to kill you, RexDart,” shoot at you and miss, I’ve committed no crime.
You’re certainly consistent in your analysis, but I think that you’re so far off the accepted model of criminal liability that it severely weakens your credibility when arguing your point. Just IMHO, of course.
The United States Supreme Court is pretty much a sick joke. I don’t know why we don’t simply abandon it and have nine citizens vote on each of the issues. Why we need to pretend that this is “constitutional law” infuriates me. Like Lincoln, I’d prefer my tyranny straight.
I’ve been pulled over at a DUI checkpoint. It was quite a hoot. The probable cause? I was driving late on a Saturday night.
The SCOTUS is a joke? Hey, I’ll admit they make some pretty ridiculous decisions when they’re in “activist court” mode. Turning an 1890 Harvard Law Review article into constitutional grounds for rejecting a state anti-abortion law was not their high point in following real “constitutional law”, whatever you think of the outcome. However, there are still a few people on the highest court, most notably Scalia, who tend to demand a Constitutional basis for decisions. The trend in activist courts has been to use “legislative intent” heavily to bend the meaning of statutes, and Scalia has been a staunch opponent of that practice.
Having 9 citizens vote on everything would be disasterous. Some people, especially parents, tend to be far too willing to sell out liberties for security (the relevant quote from “Clockwork Orange” just eludes me.) With laymen deciding legal issues and without even the pretense of following the Constitution, our liberties would be erroded away within months.
For better or worse, the SCOTUS doesn’t interpret the Constitution as meaning that federal interest is paramount. Federal issues, like those involved with the roadside stops, are always balanced against state interests. That leads to decisions that seem bad sometimes, but it’s better than having no such court at all.
Our Supreme Court has upheld road-checks, both at a roadblock and floating stops. Although the checks are an infringement of the right not to be arbitrarily detained under section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Court has upheld the stops as a reasonable limit on that right, under section 1 of the Charter.
The three leading cases are R. v. Hufsky, R. v. Ladouceur, and R. v. Wilson.
In Hufsky, a seven member panel of the Court unanimously upheld roadside checks at a fixed spot. They declined to follow the U.S. requirement for articulable cause, found in Delaware v. Prouse. Instead, under section 9 of the Charter, they held that there was an abitrary detention, but the detention could be justified, in the context of a fixed roadblock.
Two years later, in Wilson and Ladouceur, the Court considered floating stops, where the officers stop someone while driving, without a formal roadblock, to check the driver’s licene, registratin and insurance, and so on. By a 5-4 split in each case, the Court upheld the stops under section 1 of the Charter.
So, in Canada an officer can stop a motorist at any time to check driver’s licence, registration, state of the vehicle, and state of the driver. The rationale is that your right to be let alone by the state is different when you’re driving a car weighing a ton or so on public propety, than when you’re walking down the street. The risk of harm to others caused by drunken driving is qualitatively different from the risk of harm to others caused by drunken walking.
In response to the OP: yeah, I’m okay with that.
Well, first of all, what you “feel” about what may or may not have happened is largely irrelevant. Unless you were in the car, or even inside the head of the drunk driver, you will never know. All we have to go on are statistical correlations between blood-alcohol level and reaction times etc.
Furthermore, someone who has had too much to drink and then drives is, by definition (in legal terms, and in terms of studies conducted regarding the consequences of alcohol for driving ability), not driving safely. Do you get it? It doesn’t matter if that person is being as careful as possible; if a situation arises that requires a fast reaction, he or she will most likely be far less able to res[pond adequately than if no alcohol had been consumed.
Of course, some people probably drive more dangerously when perfectly sober than others do when quite intoxicated. But unless you’re willing to overhaul the whole licencing system (not a bad idea, in my opinion) then you have to accept that drivers’ skill levels will vary considerably. But, as a few people have pointed out, the attitude of most Americans that a driver’s licence is a right rather than a privilege means that stricter standards would probably get even less support than do DUI roadblocks.
It’s very interesting following debates like this among a group made up largely of Americans. As an Australian studying American history at grad school in the United States, i am constantly intrigued by the strong hold that the rather Lockean/Smithian classical liberal doctrine of natural rights and minimal state intervention has on public discourse in this country. It seems to me that, in many respects, Australians are no less concerned about their rights than are Americans, yet they are considerably more willing to allow government intervention in certain areas of life when it is generally agreed to be in the public interest. Random breath testing of drivers is, in Australia, a rather unproblematic issue and one that has been a great success in reducing drunk-driving (we call it drink-driving in Australia) and that has no doubt been at least partly responsible for reductions in road fatalities and injuries over the past couple of decades. Canadians, from what i have seen, are generally closer to the Australian position on this than they are to Americans.
For most people, the main influence of random testing is simply to act as a deterrent. In about ten years of driving in Australia, i was pulled over twice by random breath-testing (RBT) units. I was never asked to show my licence or any identification; once i had blown into the device (a matter of about 10-15 seconds) i was allowed to drive off. I realise that the definition of what is “reasonable” in terms of the fourth amendment is a rather subjective issue, but this level of interference with my daily life (i.e. about 1 minute of inconvenience in ten years of driving) was one that i considered “reasonable” in terms of the state’s desire to reduce traffic fatalities.
In saying this, i am not poo-pooing the classical liberal position that desires to keep the government and the police out of people’s lives. I realise that any legislation allowing such things like random breath testing is open to abuse by the authorities, but so is plenty of legislation that many people find totally unproblematic. Also, i have no time for the attitude to excessive law-enforcement and outrageous surveillance levels that says “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” All i am saying is that, when the benefits are weighed against the potential drawbacks, i, personally, think that DUI roadblocks are not an “unreasonable” imposition.
Of course, there are some obvious retorts to my position. The first might relate to the issue of “public interest” that i raised in my paragraph about Australia. No doubt many on this thread opposed to roadblocks would say that they also have the public interest at heart, and that preventing unreasonable search and seizure is just as important as preventing drink-driving. At a fundamental philosophical level, there is considerable merit to this argument. It might come down to how one defines pragmatism and idealism. I remember being asked by a libertarian on this message board some months ago (the issue was gun control) whether i would not be willing to modify what he called my “pragmatism” with some more “idealism” regarding the maintenance of people’s natural rights. Well, in the context of this debate, i consider my desire for safer roads and fewer fatalities to be an idealistic as well as a pragmatic concern. The fact that my ideals may differ in focus or substance from those of other people does not make my ideals simply “pragmatic.”
Another possible retort is the “slippery slope” argument, whereby DUI roadblocks could be considered the first step towards a “police state.” This argument has been made, in more or less oblique form, by a few people on this thread. But, at a fundamental level, this argument could be applied to any aspect of law-enforcement. The simple fact that police can arrest citizens could, on the face of it, be taken as the first step in a slippery slope towards a police state. The one depressing thing about being in the US right now is that many people in this country (including some on SDMB) seem willing, in the name of “security,” to tolerate violations of people’s rights that are much more severe than being asked to submit to a random breath test for alcohol. Despite the fact that we tend to debate such issues in isolation, it is worth remembering that any attempts to assert or circumscribe “rights” occurs in a broader social and political context, and that context should be taken into account when we are trying to balance our “idealism/s” and our “pragmatism/s.”
I realise that much of what i have said here amounts to little more than a defence for my own personal opinion, but i see little evidence that this can be avoided in such debates. I am interested, in closing, to ask another question that is tangentially related to this thread. That is, in looking up some websites on drink-driving, i came across a quote (i can’t find it again now - typical) by a senior NHTSA figure saying that state Age-21 drinking laws were one of the greatest contributors to road safety in the country, and that he couldn’t believe that some legislators want to lower the drinking age (i’m paraphrasing here, but you get the idea).
The question i want to ask, as someone who comes from a country where the voting and legal drinking ages are congruent (i.e. 18), is whether people on this board see any infringement of Americans’ rights in keeping the legal drinking age at 21 when political majority is attained at 18? And, if you do support the higher drinking age, is it consistent or is it hypocritical to condemn DUI roadblacks as an infringment of one’s rights? And why?
Some people, of course, will say that the two issues are totally separate and that there is no point in trying to connect the two, but i’m not so sure. I’d be interested to hear what people have to say on the issue. And, because i don’t want to hijack this thread with my own question, i have started a new thread here.