I have enjoyed various alcoholic beverages for all my adult life and occasionally have a beer when I eat out and then drive home and never really gave it a second thought. But then I have been pulled over several times under the suspicion of DUI. For various reasons I have lost a great deal of coordination in my legs and obviously people have seen me walking to my truck and driving away from Kroger or wherever and called to report me as driving drunk which has resulted in my being pulled over and given the drunk’s rush. After the first confrontation I taken it on myself to quickly insist that the DUI officer immediately come to the scene and test me and I refused to get out and walk a line, etc. Needless to say I have blown 0.0 on every occasion and have since gotten a handicapped license plate which has eliminated being mistakenly reported. While I do see the necessity to pull suspected drunk drivers over and if they are drunk throw the book at them but law enforcement is intent on dealing with suspects as being guilty until proven innocent and some officers are much too overloaded carrying their badge, gun and swollen head at the same time.
I was pulled over by a deputy when I was 18 and coming out of the drive in with my girl friend. He saw that I had taken a drink from a can. He tasted my can of Coke and determined that’s just what it was and that ended it.
Like I said though, I just don’t understand the fixation on the subject. Driving is dangerous whether with drunks on the road or not so if it is total safety one wants, I guess maybe don’t drive. I understand when people have lost a family member to a drunk driver and make it their life’s goal to eliminate them. That’s where MADD came from. But I had a family member killed in a single car accident without alcohol involved so it does happen drunk or not. Life is a risk and we’ll never get out of here alive.
He was a competent judge… 
Well honestly, I have seen some drivers who I felt sure were more dangerous sober than I would be drunk but I wouldn’t try to prove it.
And as for throwing the book at drunk drivers, here in Mississippi those who can afford it can lawyer up and drink their way into and out of court. We had a municipal judge who was notorious for arriving drunk to sit on the bench and try those charged with DUI. The court clerk was an old friend of the drunk judge and he ran interference for him.
The fallacy of stiffer penalties is that the higher the penalty, the more someone will fight the charge and plea it down to a lesser crime. One thing police look for is someone driving quite a bit slower and more cautious than everyone else. Kinda contrary to the image of the drunk driving 60 on a residential street and on the wrong side. Then again they also look for folks that forget to turn their headlights on which is pretty dangerous. But I’ve encountered people on the wrong side of a divided road several times and its always been about 8:00 in the morning and the people are not drunk, just confused. True it’s an issue like the cultural shift now to texting but we still must be reasonable in all things regardless of interest groups and marches and screaming mobs.
The police also look for drivers that are called in by concerned citizens. I called 911 one night on the Baltimore Beltway. Someone has driving at about the speed limit, but had trouble staying in their lane. It happened often enough that I called in a description of the car, where I was, and what direction the other car was headed. I hope they stopped them and found out why the car behaved erratically. It could have been a drink, or a few other things.
Our Bars close at 2:00 am. I have always thought it would be a fun idea to call 2 to 2:30 a no dwi exempt time. Sane people stay off the streets. Ticket for accident related causes, leaving lane, running light etc.,
Servers and bartenders are on the road at that time, and others might just be getting off work, too. I doubt that most of them are drunk.
IMHO that is an absolutely unacceptable excuse for not toughening the laws. Innocent people are being killed, innocent children losing their fathers and mothers, innocent fathers and mothers losing their children. It’s time to at least TRY to stop the carnage. The laws, what ever they become, will be abused by some and ignored by some incompetent judges, but that should not stop the legislators from at least trying. Yeah, in 1969 Ted Kennedy swam away from a drunk-driving crash with the car in a river and a drowning woman in the passenger seat and didn’t report it until he’d sobered up the next morning, the woman being dead by then, and his money and power got him off. But that doesn’t mean we should just give up. I pray we never do.
Give up…
Why? Just because you don’t like what I’m saying? You’re free to give up if you choose to.
Me? I’d rather not yield my right to argue that we need stronger DUI laws and stronger enforcement. This is a serious issue. Innocent people are getting killed by drunks with long records of repeat DUI convictions.
In some cases, as with the “care command and control” garbage I talked about above, we need weaker enforcement.
What we need is stronger penalties for drunk driving (no more 15+ DUIs and still being able to get a license), and we also need much stronger “driving like a moron” laws.
If you’re driving like a moron and you ram into me and put me in the hospital for 3 months, I guess it doesn’t really matter to me whether you were driving like a moron because you were drunk, or playing with your phone, or maybe you’re just a moron behind the wheel as a matter of habit.
If someone’s swerving in and out of their lane and almost causing a wreck every five minutes, it seems a shame to let them off with a gentle slap on the wrist just because they happened to have avoided the bottle that day.
In NH these “driving to endanger” and “distracted driving” laws have been strengthened in recent years. I suspect (hope) other states have been following a similar path.
I don’t disagree with attempting behavior modification but sometimes we need to think about who really is being punished, or is it like Barney Fife shooting himself in the foot. So we put the person in jail and the taxpayers end up footing the $60,000 a year bill for how many years? Sometimes I think out desire to punish and control gets in the way of common sense solutions.
You have to admit the culture among normal law abiding folks has changed in the last 40 years so that driving even after a little is seen as a poor choice. So now we get into the area of diminishing returns in trying to eliminate the last few percentage points. Probably not going to happen without extreme measures and gestapo style road blocks.
One of the problems with strengthening laws is that they always focus on people who are cited for breaking the law, and what the state will do to them. An aspect of strengthening laws that tends to get overlooked is in the actual enforcement thereof.
Put another way, if we passed a law tomorrow that said driving like a moron = a 20% of your yearly income fine, that would be a pretty draconian way of getting people to make real sure they didn’t drive like a moron, because that’s a lot of money.
If, however, it then became known that the cops weren’t bothering to enforce the law at all, it would no longer be a deterrent. And that’s kind of what’s happening with a lot of traffic laws.
Cops go for the low hanging fruit. Spending the day writing speeding tickets is like fishing. You sit under the bridge with your laser gun and write 5 tickets an hour until it’s time to go home.
No fuss, no muss, no extended paperwork at the end of your shift, and you know that barring some extraordinary circumstance, it’s probably not going to be challenged in court and if it is, you will probably win because judges tend to believe (often falsely, btw) that the speed detection equipment in use by law enforcement is accurate and infallible.
And best of all, the money from those speeding tickets often finds its way right back into your department, which means you’re getting better equipment, better cars, more weapons, and possibly raises.
Compare that to even something simple like a DWI charge - now you have paperwork, and you have burdens of proof, and you have to get the tests just right or they’ll be tossed out in court, and the driver is almost definitely going to demand a trial because being found guilty of DWI carries much higher financial and societal consequences than getting a speeding ticket.
DWI’s are hard, take a lot more time, and generate a lot less revenue. That’s one reason there are lots of grants out there for DWI enforcement - because unless you absolutely have to do it to keep the money flowing, it’s awfully tempting to do something easier and more lucrative.
And if you think that’s bad, “driving to endanger” is even worse, because when the motorist takes you to court you won’t have a breathalyzer to refer to. You won’t have a radar/lidar gun output to refer to. The only shot you’ve got is your dash cam, and that means you have to follow the guy around watching him drive like a moron before you pull him over, and if he happens to notice that there’s a cop behind him, he’s probably gonna stop driving like a moron. And then if you pull him over anyway it’s your word against his, and he forces you to waste time going to court, etc etc. Much, much easier to just dole out speeding tickets like candy.
Maybe repeat dui convicts should be hospitalized rather than jailed. If we could cure their alcoholism, they wouldn’t cause accidents for the same reason. I know it doesn’t always work, but putting them in jail only postpones their next incident.
I agree with that - IF - we can cure them. But in most cases that’s not the problem. I knew many kids and adults who were NOT by any stretch of the definition - alcoholics. But they did like their partying every weekend. The Friday and Saturday drink mentality. What would the cure be? They don’t NEED a drink. They just like to party on weekends…and too many of them take their drinking too far and too often.
I was thinking about repeat offenders, as in multiple convictions. It seems to me that if someone was busted for drinking and convicted, that would make any rational person that isn’t an alcoholic cut waaaayy back or find another way to get home after a toot.
Good point…but some are just still immature little kids who don’t give-a-hoot. I’m related to a few.
My daughter and her friends like to drink, and they do get drunk. They plan ahead, though, and uber to and from the bars. They live a few blocks away from the bars and several ride together. It’s a low cost, responsible solution.