Should drunk drivers get the death penalty if they kill someone?
Why don’t you just go back and read the thread you started in April on this very topic?
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=874356
I think they should be convicted of pre-meditated murder. But death penalty is a bit much as well as outdated.
Anyone drunk driving should similarly lose their license and driving ability for life… and their car confiscated as a dangerous weapon. There is 0 reason to be drunk driving any longer. If they need a car for their location, they are welcome to move rather than walk.
So while I agree strongly that most drinking and driving offenses need to have greatly increased penalties, killing someone is never the right solution.
No, but because I oppose the death penalty in general not because I think “That’s too harsh of a punishment” just for this *specific *crime.
Nobody should get the death penalty.
If they have driven drunk repeatedly before, ***and ***have a long history of legal trouble because of it, ***and ***have already harmed pedestrians before while driving drunk, ***and ***are unrepentant about DUI ***and ***say they’d do it again, no remorse - then maybe, yes.
Thing is, you’re driving on a dark stormy night, changing the radio station, and someone wearing dark clothing emerges from the bushes and runs across the street. You hit that person and kill them. It’s a tragic accident. Do the exact the same thing, and blow a smidge above the per se limit, and it’s a vehicular homicide.
Is that “difference” worth another life?
I’m glad you vote against the death penalty for drunken drivers who kill someone, but I’m sorry, a premeditated murder charge is also wrong. Premeditated murder means the perpetrator planned to kill someone. I do not believe drunken drivers plan to kill their victims. Yes, they are aware drunken driving can kill someone, but that’s not the same as malevolently planning to kill a person.
Sure, as long as we also execute people when people cause a deadly accident and had been:
- Texting
- Changing the radio station
- Stressed after a long day at work
- Operating with less than a full 8 hours of sleep
- Yelling at the kids in the back seat
- Over the age of 60
In all these cases, there is a clear reduction in driving performance compared to the baseline and yet the driver chooses to operate heavy machinery anyway. Clearly, they deserve the death penalty if they choose to put other lives at risk for their own convenience. Or not.
I do in fact think that extra penalties are deserved (including loss of license) when a person shows a willful indifference to the safety of others through actions like drinking and driving. And that the same is true of people that text and drive, or drive when underslept, etc.
I would argue that someone texting and driving is more culpable than the drunk driver. We could argue that the drunk driver made bad decisions because of alcohol. The texting driver has no such excuse; fully sober and deciding not to drive anyway.
That last one makes no sense, because drivers in their 60s have the lowest accident rate of any age group. Even drivers over 80 have lower accident rate than teenage drivers.
All others you list (and drunk driving) should be prosecuted as 2nd degree murder, in my opinion. But I oppose the death penalty for any crime.
I wouldn’t give them the death penalty, because the vast majority don’t set out to kill people. I think reckless disregard for human life is generally second degree murder.
Lowest by what metric: total accidents per age group, or accidents per mile driven? If it’s the former, 80-year-olds drive a lot less than teenagers so…
60 is a bit low, I’ll grant. But the data you presented doesn’t reject the hypothesis that age by itself is a risk factor. Those 60-69 year old drivers are almost certainly engaging in fewer risky activities than teenage drivers, including other items in my list. Looking only at the overall accident rate by age would be double-counting those items.
That the 70-79 bracket starts going up again supports the idea that somewhere in this range, inevitable deterioration in factors like reaction time, eyesight, and snap judgment start to overtake factors like experience and risk avoidance. They are not at peak physical performance, just as someone with even mild sleep deprivation or has had a single glass of beer is not at peak performance.
I provided a cite, it’s right there. Crashes per mile driven in the age group.
If physical performance is the concern, we should test every driver every couple of years and take away their licenses if they fail. If someone drives without a license and kills someone else, that should be treated as murder. I’m all for that.
A person can avoid being drunk much more easily than they can avoid being 60, 70, or 80. And losing the ability to drive is losing a huge part of being a typical American. I think the law should be much more accommodating about aging than driving under the influence. That could include being more lenient on senior drivers who cause accidents, which may or may not be appropriate, but it could also include lots of other elements of traffic and vehicle design. In any case, using older drivers as a data point for lenience on driving intoxicated isn’t entirely fair.
What would be ideal is if driving under the influence was very likely to incur stiff penalties, so the downside was more predictable. I think the great majority of drunk driving episodes don’t cause accidents or penalties. It’d be great if there were more technological fixes for this, like greater vehicle intelligence to detect alcohol vapor around the driver, driving behaviors, and the like.
When people die as the result of other people’s actions, there will often be consequences. Drunk drivers who kill should face bad things. I don’t like the death penalty for anything, though.
Many times part of the penalty for either first or subsequent conviction (depending upon state) is the requirement for an interlock device that must be installed & blown into before the vehicle can be started.
Now imagine that this was a required device on all new cars, & maybe even required to be retrofitted into older cars after x years. Drunk driving will be virtually wiped out within one generation of new cars. That many more devices will drive the cost down, probably to under $100 each. That’s a fraction of one percent of the cost of a new car.
As a parallel, look at seatbelt usage which has gone up dramatically in a generation.
The big difference is that your seatbelt usage, or lack thereof, has very low impact on my injury/survivability outcome for an accident in which I’m not in your vehicle. The same cannot be said if you’re driving impaired.
That’s a horrible idea. You’re going to punish 99.99% of innocent people. Those devices still have to be serviced. And, they’re not easy to operate.
In the Times today someone wrote that part of their job was blowing into this device for their boss, who always got drunk at work (I think it was food service) and drove home. So not quite foolproof.
Since cars already recognize erratic driving, such as drifting out of a lane, a better idea would be to program new cars to recognize drunk driving, and produce some kind of beware signal - and maybe even call 911 if it got good enough.
8 hours of sleep is the average (more or less) required. Some people need more, some less. So, really bad item.