This is Nick Adenhart, the LA Angels rookie pitcher killed by a drunk driver. The driver’s BAC was .24 — that’s at least a 12-pack and maybe more if he was “coming down”. I spent a large portion of my active legal career making life hell for drunk drivers. One area where I agree with the move toward criminalization is the lowering of BACs to .08. I’ve seen the results of these accidents, seen the science, and broken the laws myself a few times back in law school/college so I know the limits there. I’m really glad the survivor/driver has the liberty to drink alcohol and the privilege to drive. Too bad Nick Adenhart and his 2 (and may be another) friends don’t have that liberty anymore. And pretty soon the driver/survivor will lose his liberty as well.
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“I spent a large portion of my active legal career making life hell for drunk drivers.”
Good.
I always thought we should shoot them in the leg, the one they use for acceleration, right there on the highway when they don’t pass the breathalizer. My grandfather, who I loved dearly, and was a fabulous person otherwise, used to drive drunk all the time. I still wished someone had just shot him in the leg, right above the knee, on the few times he got caught. Might have helped us all.
You know this makes me sick. Sick. Anyone drunk driving who gets arrested, yeah that means you Rick Sanchez (not only did he get arrested for drunk driving he killed someone while driving drunk) of CNN who was bad mouthing both Beck and O’Reilly and blaming them for the shooting deaths in New York and PA should have to spend some hard time in jail with no plea bargins. Make people be responsible for the bs stuff they pull.
Of course I realize the potential for the abuse of power makes my solution completely impractical, but I am remembering when granddad broke his ankle and couldn’t drive. The family was all so relieved because we knew for the next few weeks, for sure, that we wouldn’t get the call we all dreaded. To this day I can’t figure out why the other adults in the family didn’t *do* anything, other than joke about it. And no one ever thought about getting him out of the alcoholism, just of breaking his ankle again.
Why didn’t the rest of the family do anything, Tracy? This is gonna sound cold but I think it’s true: Granddad’s idiotic drunk driving didn’t affect them, so why should they take it seriously, why should they care? So many people in so many walks of life have absolutely no ability to exercise our God given moral imagination.
‘Hmmm,’ wonders the guy handing the drunk his next drink, ‘I wonder if that guy’s had to much? Aah, who cares. I’m not going home with him. Why should I give a shit?!?’
Because if that drunk kills or maims someone on the way home, YOU’LL be looking at jail time to … BUDDY!
Okay, so my rant bends justice a smidgen or two, but a lot of people interacted with that drunk driver while he was getting his ‘drunk on’ before he destroyed so many lives.
Then again we can’t make stupidity illegal. Otherwise San Francisco would be a ghost town.
Really hope that max of 55 years gets rounded up severely.
You are 100% right. I was just a kid, but the rest of the adults just basically decided it was too much work. There are usually lots of people involved on the way to the car, by the time most drunk drivers have sat in their car to drive, they’ve encountered others on the way. Now, it’s not other people’s responsibility solely, the drunk’s the moron who decided to start down that road them self, but I watched my family enable and coddle him literally to death.
so, are guillotines still around?