I suspect this will yank a lot of our readers off, but there is another side to the driving while intoxicated issue. Floyd argued the legal blood alcohol content for motorists should be standardized to 0.08 in this post. Perhaps. But there are other principles at stake here and we don’t often talk about them. Nobody is “in favor” of drunk driving, but there are other forces at play that deserve attention. A columnist I know penned an eloquent piece describing those issues back in 2007. It was a compelling piece. Oh wait – that was me!
A column that I wrote for The Examiner, back in November 2007:
Imagine that we were trying to solve a problem and the solution involved the following measures:
•Laws that ignored the principle “innocent until proven guilty,” by starting the punishment the moment a person was accused of the crime, rather than when the person was convicted of the crime.
•Rules that prevent a defense attorney from reviewing the case against his client until the day he walked into court, thus forcing the defendant to choose between: 1) the time and expense involved with prolonging the case (while continuing to be punished under the “guilty until proven innocent provision”), or 2) taking a chance with a half-prepared defense.
•Vigalante groups of extra-legal court watchers who go to court and report on judges’ behavior, urging voters to reject judges who don’t, in their view, convict enough suspects.
•Judges so intimidated by the court monitors that many of them refuse to make prosecutors prove that the scientific instruments used in evidence were properly operated and calibrated.
Does that sound a bit over the top? Does it sound something like a police state?
Before you answer in the affirmative to those questions, understand that we are not discussing the rights of enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay. This issue hits much closer to home, for I have been describing DUI law as practiced in the State of Illinois.
Privately, many of the people in the system will express deep-seeded reservations about the form and function of DUI law in this state. That includes not only defense lawyers, whom one would expect to attack the system, but a growing number of prosecutors, police and judges as well.
In this one area of the law we have designed and enforce a system that routinely tramples an individual rights, presumptions of innocence and due process. And this state of affairs is not unique to Illinois. Every state in the union employs draconian measures like these, to one extent or another. They do so for one reason: because our elected representatives are running scared.
Care to guess whom the biggest and most powerful lobby in Springfield is?
It’s not the National Rifle Association. It’s not the American Federation of Teachers. It’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or “MADD.”
Legislatively speaking, whatever MADD wants, MADD gets, no matter how outrageous the demand. Legislators do not oppose MADD, for to do so would be-in the public’s eye-to be “for drunk driving.”
That’s a ridiculous standard. Nobody supports intoxicated motorists. And if you are a member of MADD and you are tempted to write a letter to this publication claiming that this column supports drunk driving, you are hereby put on notice: you will be mocked. Nobody, not even your humble correspondent, would suggest that impaired driving is a good thing.
But while we stubbornly protect the rights of the accused and demand strict adherence to rules of evidence in every other area of the law, we turn a blind eye in this case. It is no exaggeration to say that the system is more fair to an accussed murderer than it is to a driver accused of DUI.
MADD routinely justifies their agenda with the claim that over 40 percent of automobile fatalities are caused by drunk drivers. This is patently untrue. It’s a manipulation of statistics, in which the organization counts every fatality as “drunk driving” even if the driver was stone cold sober, but one of the passengers had a bit too much to drink.
In fact, about 84 percent of automobile fatalities involve drivers who have nothing to drink. About 5 percent of fatalities involve drivers with Blood Alcohol Contents of less than 0.14. The hard core drunks-the drivers we should be targeting-account for the remaining 11 percent, with Blood Alcohol Contents of over 0.14.
No one would minimize the death of a loved one, for any reason. But, in the scheme of things, shouldn’t we distinguish between the driver who has a couple glasses of wine at dinner and the driver who’s been pounding shots and beers for eight hours?
The first group is involved in about 2,000 fatalities on the road per year, and how many of those are actually caused by alcohol is an open question. Those 2,000 fatalities were much less than the number of deaths caused by accidental poisoning, drowning, choking and work-related injuries. Yet we dedicate an enormous amount of law enforcement resources toward finding and punishing these 2,000 drivers, motorists who present-at best-a very, very minor risk to society.
But, even if you’re OK with that, even if you say that the police and the courts should spend a huge amount of time and effort toward preventing these 2,000 deaths per year, do those fatalities justify trampling on our rights? We are so quick to defend the liberties so dear to us when other crimes are involved, but when MADD pushes an agenda that would have made the Gestapo blush, nobody dares to oppose them.
Perhaps that sounds like good government to MADD. From this vantage point, it smells like an old argument: the ends justify the means. But you know what? Once you resort to that logic, you’ve already admitted that you’re wrong.
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Trzupr,
I didn’t read Floyd’s post until a day or two later, and all the commenting had tapered off so I didn’t comment, but I agree with your stance. Unfortunately, the nature of alcohol is such that the more of it you have in you the less likely you are to care about legal limits. I am definitely not advocating an increase in BAC levels, but I think we’re attacking this problem in the wrong direction. Some of the folks touched on this in their comments. The only real solution I see is to make others feel responsible for keeping others from driving when they should not. Alcohol impairs judgement. It’s awfully hard to convince impaired people of anything.
At driver’s license renewal time (hopefully at least once a decade) you ought to have to sit through some cold, hard movie footage of really, really bad accidents and some of those accidents should center on drunk driving. A reminder of just how big and inflexible automobiles traveling at high rate of speed are would be good for all of us. Then, MADD should spend most of their money on ad campaigns encouraging/teaching others on what to do when they see someone who is intoxicated and is about to drive. In most European towns if you are drunk and leave a bar one of the patrons will call the cops if you are about to drive a car. We’ve got to appeal to the sober. Appealing to the drunks is a fool’s errand and tougher laws just address the issue after the horse has left the barn. Let’s prevent accidents, injuries and deaths.
A personal perspective on drunk drivers, Candy Lightner & MADD.
First full disclosure: My personal history with this issue. My sister suffered traumatic head injury because she got in a car with her friends and the driver was drunk; it is very likely that they were all drunk. The driver crashed the car, doing about 70 around a 25 MPH corner and slammed into a telephone pole. My sister’s boyfriend died about a week after the accident due to internal hemorrhaging from injuries suffered in the wreck. My sister’s suffered brain damage from the head trauma and can never care for herself. The driver, like a lot of drunks when they crash, suffered bumps, bruises, and a few cuts and scratches; nothing serious. He was thrown clear of the wreck and, literally, walked away. My family was devastated, that wreck radically transformed (to put it mildly) more lives than just the people in that care.
That was on November 1st, 1979 when my family lived in a Sacramento suburb. About 6 months later, in another Sacramento suburb, a driver got in his car after doing what he’d done many times before – drinking till he was drunk – and killed Candy Lightner’s daughter, Cari.
My mother tried to reach out to Candy Lightner, since my family and the Lightner family were practically neighbors. Candy Lightner couldn’t be bothered. She was too busy become a media darling. She and the media just didn’t have time for a brain damaged teenage girl whose injuries, when looked at objectively, was partly her own fault.
Before the moment when that drunk driver tragically took Cari Lightner’s life, Candy Lightner did care one bit about drunk drivers. Like a lot of people who suffer from the “Do Something” Disease, she didn’t care about it until it affected her personally. And when it did hit her house (no pun intended) she turned it into her personal crusade. She was going to get these guys, and nothing was going to stop her.
If you read my other comment in the thread on drunk drivers then you can tell that I got no love for drunk drivers. I do, however, have a big problem with MADD, and MADD offsprings like Students Against Drunk Drivers. For some reason I’ve always thought of justice as, you know, Just; not informed by personal revenge or vigilantism. MADD’s motivation strikes me as nothing short of vigilantism against drunk drivers. A drunk took Candy Lightner’s daughter, so Candy Lightner was going to get drunk drivers. Period.
Do I want drunk drivers punished. Oh, you betcha. Do I think every tree in the forest of justice should be cut down in order to get them? No. I wish Candy Lightner had the insight to understand this scene from “Man for All Seasons”, but I somehow think it would be lost on her and her ilk:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Rufus,
You make a interesting suggestion on sitting through films about traffic accidents. I don’t, however, think it would have any impact, when torture porn horror flicks make millions in today’s pop culture. I got my license way back in 1980, and I remember everyone talking about the “blood and asphalt” movies shown during the classes, and those movies didn’t stop my sister and her friends from getting in a car with a drunk driver. And it didn’t stop the drunk fool who killed Candy Lightner’s daughter, unknowingly creating the whole MADD phenomenon.
Ideas that pop into my head: Make people involved in this crime to spend time (3 months? 6 months?) caring for brain damaged, paraplegic & quadriplegic individuals whose injuries were caused by drunk drivers. Make folks feed and clothe a 48 year old woman who had the entire world in front of her but now needs others to make sure she washes herself. Spend time lifting a quadriplegic in and out of wheelchair for a few months or cleaning out their colostomy bag. Let’s see if that changes folks perspective on the issue.
On the other hand, I may be devolving into the ‘let’s get even’ mindset. Maybe I need to recuse myself, due to my personal history, from the issue.
Daniel,
I am very sorry to hear about your sister. I don’t think there is a solution that will completely eliminate the problem. The ignition devices that require a breathalyzer before the car will start might go a long way towards reducing accidents, but that penalizes and inconveniences all the sober folks and teetotalers. Maybe we could make them optional for kids 16 – 30. Have insurers offer a nice discount for anyone in that age bracket who voluntarily has one installed. But eventually there will be a case where someone is trying to flee a predator but is delayed by the device and loses their life due to that delay.
A lot of states are changing laws for kids 18 and under; curfews, limiting the number of peers in the car… I think those are good ideas. Again, I think the trick with drunk driving is legislation is after the fact. The definition of being drunk is not acting rationally. An irrational person isn’t thinking about laws. Aside from mechanical impediments on the vehicle that render it inoperable by a driver who is intoxicated the next, best solution is getting the public to take a proactive stance when they see somone making a dumb decision.
Good points, both Floyd and Tzrupr.
Radley Balko has a piece on it:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,171383,00.html
I think part of the reason I get so mad about this is the fact that a good portion of these guys have broken this same law several times. The people I knew who drank and drove did it all the time. I understand that we can’t do away with due process, nor do I actually think it’s a great idea, but I still wish someone had stopped my grandfather. The truth is, he drove regularly from his house to ours, 3hrs, so drunk he didn’t know where he was. We found tickets in his truck, so he was pulled over, but never arrested. I prayed then and now that he never took away some kid on a bikes due process on one of those trips.
My father had a lot of similar episodes, but the police didn’t prosecute this crime often, back in the day. Just have the guy call his old lady and have her take him home. As Floyd wrote it’s much, much different now. The police are very, very serious about prosecuting drunk drivers now. Also, I think most courts escalate the punishment for repeat offenders rather quickly. I would bet almost all 50 states have a mandatory 3 to 6 month suspension for first time offenders and if you’ve been caught two or three times you are probably looking at at least a year in prison. If you’re lucky you may get the option to travel to and from your job during the day and return to lock up at night.
I don’t think the current issue is a lack of bite in the law. I think the issue is drunk people don’t think too clearly. Most of the repeat offenders who cause problem are likely not even driving on a valid license. Incapacity is no defense in the law, but prosecution after the fact doesn’t help the innocents injured or killed. MADD should continue to fund their ad campaigns encouraging designated drivers and they should also fund campaigns targeting young people and encouraging them to get involved if they see a peer about to make a stupid decision while drunk.
Candy Lightner is like that woman who became a Congresscritter who’s sole reason for running was because Colin Ferguson killed her husband and a bunch of other people on a Long Island RR commuter train. For some reason, these “activist” types feel the need to punish everyone else for their loss. We’re all guilty because of the foolish or evil choices made by a few.
What’s worse is that MADD has transformed itself from an anti-drunk driving campaign into neo-Prohibitionists, who want to ban alcohol everywhere. Like the gun-control nuts, they’ve found it easier to attack objects instead of behaviors. (I just looked at the Balko link, and he makes the same neo-Prohibition point, but better.)
Rare is a social cause that doesn’t stray from it’s original purpose or find new ways to live on long after it achieved its goals (March of Dimes and polio is a classic non-political example.)
So, strictly statistically speaking, I’m more likely to have an accient sober than I am drunk. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies & statistics.
Actually stats are worthwhile if you use them correctly. In this case I believe the point that was trying to be made was the amount of effort being given to combat (statistically speaking) a small portion of the overall accident rate.
Nobody is for drunk driving except the drunk trying to get home…and upon sober reflection not even that guy would be for it. I agree that MADD should continue educating people about designated drivers and the responsible consumption of alcohol.
I think Candy Lightner actually left MADD in 1985 due to the fact that she felt it became more “neo-prohibitionist” than she had planned. (according to wikipedia)
I got a well-deserved DUI twelve years ago. I didn’t deserve it the night I got it, but because of too many Mr. Toad Wild Rides up to that point that I needed the payback for. I had two drinks the night I got the DUI and at first I was just mortified by the injustice of that instance, but later figured I had it coming. Legal BACs are baloney. If you’re pulled over for not signaling or something, and you’re honest about having a beer when asked if you’ve been drinking … they got you. All of a sudden, you’re not signaling is because of the one beer and not just because you’re an idiot. The UI in DUI is incredibly flexible and its boundaries are at the whim of the arresting officer. They will determine how much you were under the influence, not a breathalyzer (you know, those things asthmatics need). It’s their word against yours, and a judge will side with them to get MADD points. They’ll argue that some people are light-weights and must have been affected by the alcohol regardless of what the BAC reading was.
Daniel, sorry about your sister. This is a responsibility issue. Conservatives rail against condoms and abortion by stating that people need to be more responsible, rather than having tragic safety nets. I think the same goes for lowering the BAC level which isn’t going to do anything anyway as I’ve mentioned above, or have angry organized mobs.
Don’t forget, the real stat is accidents per mile driven. Many, many, many more sober miles are driven than drunk ones. There is no question drinking impairs your judgement, reduces your reaction time and limits your coordination. If you know you’re going out drinking take a cab or public transportation or arrange to travel with a friend who will be sober and responsible. Or, stay home.
Daniel,
Sorry about your sister.
You must be young,Tzuper…in the pre MADD days,people could get into a car drunk out of their skulls,and get slapped on the wrist for it.They could get into a car and kill people and get probation.Almost 20 years ago my own little sister got into her car,too much to drink,and crashed.Fortunately,she only hit a street lamp,and broke her arm(didn’t kill anybody).She went to jail for 48 hours,and to this day she has never set foot in a car with alcohol on her breath,driver or passenger.That is my MADD story.
A lot of great, thoughtful responses here guys. This is why I love Threedonia.
(And yeah Scott M. I remember – I am ashamed to admit that I was one of those guys. Not defending the old days buddy, just asking the question: where do the interests of public safety begin, and the protection of rules of evidence end with regard to this issue?)
Daniel – I too am sorry about your sister. Your thoughtful, insightful comments on an issue that hits so close to home are much admired and appreciated.
I also agree with the importance of not abusing our fundamental, legal principles to try to fix an outcome, no matter how desirable, but I think the crux of this issue goes beyond that. Alcohol is a legal substance abundantly available in our society that has the explicit effect of impairing the drinker’s judgement. I’m rather a fan of the stuff myself, but that’s besides the point. If you want to reduce drunk driving fatalities, injuries and accidents you’re not going to get much results by toughening legislation. Drunks aren’t thinking about legislation. They are uninhibited. That’s why the stuff is so popular.
Tougher laws help limit repeat offenses, which is good, but it doesn’t help the first offenses, which can be just as dangerous. This is similar to our approach to air safety. Mark Steyn writes on this quite a bit. We can instill a sense of responsibility in our citizens and raise Americans who will take care of their surroundings for themselves, or, we can keep throwing legislation and money at the back end. We have tens of thousands of security people inspecting passengers in airports when all we need is a few civic minded passengers with the courage to beat the crap out of anyone who tries to light his shoe or mix chemicals on an airplane. I can promise you nobody is going to do anything stupid on a plane that I am on. I will personally pummel him with an inch of his life.
Tell patrons of bars to tackle a drunk if you see him unlocking the driver’s door of a car. Tell people to call a cab for friends who are too drunk to drive home and if the friend refuses the cab make the next call to the cops. For heaven’s sake, people, take care of yourselves! Don’t wait for attorneys or legislators to protect you, that’s how we got here. Protect yourselves!
I know,Trzupr..sorry for being so strident