Should drunk driving be a crime?

Great Debates
181

Sorry, I missed your post, so allow me to respond to it.

An apt analogy for a democracy would be two wolves and one sheep deciding what to eat for dinner. That being said, I’m not an anarchy proponent. Rather, I think by engaging in these types of conversations we can arrive closer to a better society. I do believe that a government who governs least, governs best.

I’ve read some material on privatizing roads, and I’m still up in the air about it. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not committed to it yet. The competition would be beneficial, but it could prove financially burdensome on customers.

My argument is not that we should embrace chaos, but rather that we should achieve order through private agreement, contracts, and general common sense. Granted some people lack common sense, but no one should lack liberty. I prefer to err on the side of individual freedom. There’s no law on walking in a straight line in NYC and not caring who you bump in to. Yet, most people seem to get along reasonably and are polite enough to make sure they can travel freely without interference or causing interference to others.

There’s been no referendum, so I can’t speak as to whether the populous would support DUI laws. A better question would be: “Does the public support DUI laws* as they stand now?*”

Traffic laws are not unconstitutional, but a monopoly is in place. If you owned a private road and said “You cannot drive a Toyota Camry on this road.” that is the law. I realize that is a bit extreme, but it helps to make my point.

Since the federal/state governments have a monopoly on travel, should we choose to use that means of transportation, we must obey those rules.

The problem for me exists with the Federal government coercion. The BAC of .08 was not a law. It was not passed by consent of the governed. Rather, it was a condition for receiving Federal highway funding, which no state can do without under our current system. This was also done a time back with the 55mph national speed limit. We all know there are many highways where you can travel safely above 55mph.

Would you find DUI laws being left to the state level, at most, to be unreasonable? Perhaps in rural Wyoming, there may be no standard. Perhaps in NYC, the standard is .05. Do you see my point? Shouldn’t people be able to determine the laws that govern them at a local level, rather than an all-encompassing national one?

182

I think your complaint about the keys in the ignition is splitting hairs. The car’s in drive mode even if its parked. If a person doesn’t want to be arrested on that charge, don’t put the keys in the ignition.

He should be charged with DUI because he actually drove. You said it yourself, charge them for their actions, not the possibilities. So even by your standards, the person deserved to get charged with DUI since he 1) was driving and, 2) was drunk. If he hit someone, he’d be charged with an additional charge. Drunk driving is a crime because the person IS responsible for his actions, he was drunk and driving. Any damage he does while drunk driving adds additional penalties

Yes there should be a larger difference in punishment, but not the way you think. They shouldn’t lower the guy who’s simply sleeping it off, they should increase the punishment for the guy who hits something

183

If a lot of people agreed with you, they would elect people that would execute their will.

If states have too many individual traffic laws, you’d need a state drivers license and a federal one, too.

184

You think a person sleeping with the car in park is the same as someone weaving and running off the road at speed? I agree that is the law, to your point “if you don’t want to be charged…” However, we’re not arguing that. We’re arguing if that is the correct form of law.

Do you care to address my comments in the last five paragraphs?

185

In a purist form, you’d be correct. However, do you believe politicians accurately represent their constituents, or do they better represent their party’s goals/beliefs/demands? Personally, on both Dem/Rep sides, it seems to me they care more about the party than their citizens they should be representing.

You wouldn’t need a federal license. Much as you do not today. California honors a South Carolina license, etc. Besides, my point is to less laws, not more.

186

You would if the traffic laws varied enough that being qualified to drive in Wyoming did not mean you were qualified to drive in New York. Not more, not less, just different.

187

Again, I can see where you’re coming from.

That being said, states today have different licensing requirements. Their licenses are still honored in other states. I mean in terms of qualifying and testing to obtain said license.

In terms of law, NYC does not allow right turns on red, yet a PA driver’s license is still valid.

GA has speed limits of 80mph, but honors MD licenses where no such speed limit exists.

I don’t think you would need separate licensing just because laws vary.

188

Thought of another point…an international driver’s license. Laws between countries vary widely, but an arbitrary piece of paper granted by some agency/government makes you legally allowed to drive wherever you go.

189

The last 5 paragraphs where you replied to other people?

I think a person can pretend to be asleep in the car should be charged with less than the full DUI charge and can be let off with a warning. DUI sentences aren’t uniform, so I’m fine with a varied range of punishment. But your arguments seem to skew in the direction that the punishment is too harsh, while I skew in the opposite. Having the key in the ignition is a measurable line when accessing DUI. What if a person is drunk and just wants to move a few feet in the parking lot? If we didn’t have the sleeping drunk DUI charge, then he can argue he’s not really driving, but moving his car to a better sleeping area. Since judges have leeway to sentence someone, I have no problems with charging this guy with DUI and giving the judge the authority to believe his story and assign a lesser punishment, or disbelieve it and assign a harsher one

190

Justifying laws. My view of what government is and should be. Hmm. Let’s see.

First of all I don’t think that an arguement about one law should devolve into a broad, amorphous discussion on how laws get made and what government should be. That’s diverging from the point, unless the point is to have a cool discussion that doesn’t really have any intention of reaching consensus.

There’s never going to be a law addressing driving impairment due to alchohol that fits all situations perfectly. And even if such a thing could exist, it would still not make us safe. There would still be drunk drivers causing destruction, injury, and death and some of them would even be getting away with hit and runs.

So the effect of a law can never be perfect safety or perfect justice. And no government will ever perfectly represent my individual needs and opinions or the averaged needs and opinions of any particular group or subgroup. I accept that as a given. Perfect safety, perfect justice, and perfect representation are not pertinent to a discussion on any particular drunk driving law.

Perhaps specific history is pertinent, though. I’m old enough to remember when cops had to prove that a drunk who had been driving was a clear and present danger. It was much harder to get a conviction unless someone was bleeding or dead. Scratch that. It was hard enough to get a conviction that they’d usually be charged with the more obvious parts of the accident, with the DUI tacked on if there were enough half-empty bottles in the car.

The law wasn’t changed because the government decided to interfere with peoples’ freedom and individual rights, although as technology changed, governments took a shot at using breathylizer tests to support impairment charges. The law was changed because of a vocal lobbying group. MADD gained widespread support from people who had lost cars, skin, and relatives to drunk drivers only to see them not only out and about, but drinking and driving and causing more accidents with no noticable time out.

If you want to blame a group or an amorphous process for strict DUI laws, blame previous drunk drivers and the previously weak laws that let them keep driving. That was what created the mounting pressure of pissed off that lead to laws based strictly on blood alchohol levels.

You may argue that it was an over-reaction and that we’d be better served by less stringent laws. I’d listen to that argument. But arguing that “they got away with it this time, no harm - no foul” isn’t going to fly. If you can point to numbers that say State A raised the BAL to 0.12 and the number of accidents and deaths didn’t go up, I’d concede that you might have a point. Ditto for letting drunks sleep it off in cars.

Nitpick. There is no evidence that certain breeds of dogs are more dangerous than others. Yes there have been laws that curbed the ownership of specific breeds due to Safety Theater. I would not be in favor of those laws. There are other laws that restrict dogs that act or are known to be dangerous. I can go along with those.

Possibly a nitpick or digression. Feel free to ignore. The current cutoff for regulatory purposes is about $2 million per life. Of course, most businesses will voluntarily make changes that cost up to $2 million per life, if the change has been proven publicly to have that ratio. In the case of government regulations, there’s a formula. In the case of businesses, that’s the break-even point once people start suing.

For toddlers, the cost per life is a little different. For government regs, toddlers have no dependents to be thrown into poverty to become a drain on the public purse. So they’re worth significantly less. For businesses, if their products are marketed to families or children, the possibility of PR problems could make them more willing to spend.

191

Too late to edit.

You also commented on the safety of driving over 55. The 55 mph speed limit was pushed by the federal government during an oil crisis. It’s purpose was to save fuel. That’s why people hated it.

192

ah. i thought it was from the cracked article, since it was posted previous to “your” post, and quoted verbatim “your” ideas.

but then i realized you just cut-and-pasted your entire post from this article.

193

That’s not “apt”; that’s just a phrase used for demonizing democracy in favor of either tyranny or anarchy. Nor do I think you could have much of a society in the first place if the majority of people are “wolves”. And if you want a more accurate analogy, democracy is generally more a matter of a hundred sheep and ten wolves voting on what is for dinner, while the tyrannosaur the sheep have hired for security glares at the wolves.

Only if you enjoy being stomped all over by non-governmental organizations and rich individuals, and left to die when bad luck or bad people strike.

There wouldn’t be any meaningful competition, and the result would be more money paid for worse roads. Like a lot of infrastructure, road networks are “natural monopolies” where competition won’t work well or at all.

These two goals are contradictory. Achieving agreements by private agreement and contracts very often involves massively imbalanced power between the people involved. Involving the government is often the best means of insuring liberty.

Nonsense. If we bought that logic then we’d have to legalize driving around randomly spraying gunfire, because as long as it’s unaimed it’s “only probabilities” whether or not someone gets hit.

It has more to do with a justifiable distrust of the motivations behind such profiling, and the fact that it’s worse than useless. Racial profiling decreases the likelihood of catching an actual criminal.

194

Well, it’s certainly not the first time this meme has come up, and it’s no surprise to me that it’s outright plagiarism.

But it’s stuff like this:

. . .that more research is showing to be a fatuous myth.

Driving drunk is like blindfolding yourself and then going hunting–or using a shooting range. The act itself is a de facto threat to others–whether you actually crash or injure someone or not-- because of the inescapable way that alcohol effects the brain–everyone’s brain. Nobody has a magic brain that is immune to that effect.

195

CommonSense1983, regardless what you believe about laws concerning driving drunk, this message board has a very strong antipathy to violating copyright laws. Posting an entire article taken from another site and then posting it without attribution violates the spirit and the letter of copyright.

Do not do this again.

[ /Moderating ]

196

A fine instance of Seventeenism!

Am I wrong to suggest that the “driving is automatically endangering lives” line of thinking is based on the false premise that we let just anyone hop in a car and drive? The fact that someone is driving a car on the road means that they have, at some point, adequately demonstrated to the state their ability to safely operate a vehicle - they spent time educating themselves in operation of the machine itself as well as observing the laws and etiquette that all drivers depend on having in common, and have earned the liberty to drive by demonstrating respect for the level of responsibility to oneself and other drivers and pedestrians that such a convenience demands (in theory, of course). This leads me to two conclusions about why drunk driving must necessarily be a criminal action:

  1. First, intoxicated driving, including drunk driving, should be illegal for the same reason it’s illegal for a surgeon to be drunk in the OR. One would be hard pressed to argue that intoxication doesn’t significantly inhibit motor skills, spatial reasoning, judgment, and the like - in other words, the credentials on which the driver presumably earned that license, no? Thus impairing oneself becomes an act of criminal negligence.

  2. Along similar lines, it’s essentially a social contract thing. The process of earning the liberty to drive instills in us the idea that the traffic demimonde is mutually dependent on following the rules, being alert, exercising judgment, and all that - one person needlessly inhibiting themselves automatically increases the potential for grievous - and entirely preventable - damage to people and property.

I’ll try not to say much more as I’m sure I’m fast becoming repetitious. But the underlying principle, in my mind, is that Righteousness and Absolutes are not the same, and it’s not the goal of Law to treat them as such.

197

So, laws passed by Congress and signed by the President are not laws? Federal laws are not passed by consent of the governed?

President Clinton Signs Federal .08 BAC Drunk Driving Law

198

It’s a debatable point. Should a state have to bow to a more powerful government when it is pretty much a given that drunk driving laws are state functions? In other words, if Wyoming wishes to have a .15 BAC level, but their meager number of representatives in Congress can’t persuade other states to not impose a financial penalty on them, are Wyoming residents functionally governed by their own state representatives in the legislature when they enact a .08 law under duress?

199

That’s a point of federalism and federal theory.

I was responding to the assertion thar the federal mandate was not a law and not been enacted through normal law- making procedures (presumably implying some federal bureaucrats dreamed it up in the backrooms and imposed it on the people without their consent).

200

To reply to the OP:

There is a value in driving. A useful service is rendered, at a considerable benefit to the ecology, believe it or not. Prior to autos, the amount of horse manure piling up was a huge problem for any metropolitan areas or even medium-sized cities. Displosing of it (even as fertilizer) was fraught with issues, including ecological and health issues.

The advent of the automobile made it possible to clean the cities up and get rid of the horse manure. Yes, cars are dangerous (but not as dangerous as horses, I believe) and an ecology problem (but not compared to what they replaced). Plus they increase productivity by permitting faster transit to arbitrary locations.

Until you have a reasonable proposal for what to replace cars with, we’re stuck with the fact that driving is necessary to the US economy. True, states all treat it as a privilege, but only because it didn’t exist when the founding fathers wrote the constitution, and because by treating it that way they can force us to insure them (a good thing IMHO) and get revenue from the in license fees. The argument that driving is a privilege is a good legal one from licensing point of view, but is a non-starter from an pragmatic one. Make driving illegal today and what happens tomorrow? You won’t be able to get where you’re going on a bus, or get food, or do any of the things you need, which depend on people who depend on cars.

Get off your high horse and be real! :wink: