Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Drunk Driving Overhaul

I’m sure everyone has their opinion on the perfect way to spend your Columbus Day. Some people hit up parades and rallies in support of Columbus and what he did. Others go out in protest against the way our society praises him for what he did. Others have to go to work knowing they’re missing out on a free day of fun, however you decide to generate that fun. The one thing we can probably all agree on is that a poor choice for your Columbus Day would be rear-ending the chief of the Massachusetts State Police at a red light at 11:45am … while driving drunk … for the 5th documented time.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/10/12/driver_faces_oui_charge_after_hitting_cruiser/
This is now her 5th DUI charge. 5th!! They already suspended her license and probably have collected a pretty good pile of money in fees from her. If this was an isolated case I’d brush it off as just a random moron. No matter what you do, there’s always a moron that just refuses to obey the laws. However, this is far from an isolated case. You often see reports of people getting caught for driving drunk with previous DUIs. I don’t have any hard numbers, but it’s pretty common. This to me says the system is just not working. The punishment is clearly not serious enough to serve as a legitimate deterrent. And the potential effects of the crime are severe. If drunks would confine themselves to single-car crashes I wouldn’t really mind. Even if they had a passenger. If you get hammered, decide to drive your car, and wrap it around an oak tree and kill yourself, that’s none of my concern. If someone was foolish enough to get in the car with you while you were in that condition, that’s also none of my concern. The affected parties did something stupid and paid a price for it. However, that is not always the case. Drunks usually take an innocent person out with them when they go. I’m not saying that drunk drivers usually kill a person every time they drive. That’s stupid. I’m saying that when they do wreck their car while driving drunk, they rarely go solo.
Unless someone can think of a way to keep drunks from killing innocent people, we need to find a way to keep people from driving drunk. And find a way that actually works. I think Mark and I came up with a pretty good solution today. First step is really just taking the current penalties and harshening them up. After you first DUI, you lose your license for a year. After your second, you lose it for good. But now is where it gets fun, and where Mark and I diverge. Clearly just suspending a person’s license isn’t sufficient. The woman that triggered this story was driving on a suspend license. And you’re dealing with people who have no concern for the DUI law, so why would they care about the license laws?
Mark’s solution is for every time you get caught after your 2nd DUI you lose a finger. Feel free to keep doing it if you want; you’ll just want to have a good priority list so you know how many, and which ones, you can afford to lose. Eventually people will either lose too many fingers to keep driving or they’ll finally get down to the fingers they can’t afford to lose.
I’m okay with going the non-mutilation route. If you get caught driving on a suspended license, whatever car you were driving, and everything in it, is now the property of the state and will be sold at auction. Assuming of course that the car wasn’t stolen. But before your buddy tries to claim it stolen before you get busted, know that you’ll then be charged with grand theft auto and will be facing some additional prison time. The prison time for the DUI offense will go up exponentially every time you’re caught. 3rd time, 2 years; 4th time, 4 years; 5th time, 8 years. Etc, etc, etc. And if we can find a way to sneak an extra clause into the law, the cops each get to take 1 shot at you when they pull you over starting with offense #3. Anywhere except the head, and with anything they normally carry with them. The no-headshot part pretty much rules out pistol whipping, but taking a baton to the ribs ain’t no picnic. Butt of the gun to a kneecap? That stings a bit. Or just a good old fashioned kick to the gut. But I doubt there’s any legal way to get that in there. And since I’m not a total monster, the state would offer discounted home breathalyzers for a short time after the change was announced. That way everyone could just keep one in their car and check real fast before they drove off. It also removes the argument that people had no idea they were over the limit of 0.08%.
This solution fixes so many problems. First and foremost, I have to believe this would put a sizable dent in the number of people driving drunk. But it also would generate extra revenue when the state gets to sell off a bunch of cars full of stuff. Think of all the bonus goodies that are common in cars. After-market stereo equipment, GPS units, CDs, iPods, laptops, cell phones. Everything in the car becomes the state’s and gets sold for profit. Genius! I think we all should start lobbying our politicians now to get this reform put in place. The Chauncey Michaels Statutes are the new future!!



1 comment:

tim said...

Oddly enough, that whole "drunk drivers usually kill an innocent stranger" argument isn't really true statistically. I can dig it up, but the statistics of "alcohol-related motor vehicle deaths" are skewered pretty heavily. And even then, it's greater than 50% of those who die that are either the drunk driver or in the car with the drunk driver......which is pretty bad unless it's like a kid or something who isn't in a position to do something about it. And they count all sorts of other instances like drunk pedestrians/cyclists or cases where someone involved in the crash had alcohol in their system but wasn't drunk and alcohol wasn't actually ruled a factor in the crash.

Not that drunk driving is good or anything (it's great!) but I get irritated when certain lobbying groups with clever acronyms ending in "A.D.D." just blatantly twist statistics.


http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-driving-statistics.html

Even going by that stat, it's 30-40% of "alcohol-related" fatalities that actually involve someone having a BAC over .08

http://www.duiblog.com/2004/10/23/a-closer-look-at-dui-fatality-statistics/