<p>Drunk drivers aren’t a danger to anyone?</p>
<p>Wake up and smell the coffee!</p>
<p>I happen to agree with Goldenpooch for reasons I gave on the older thread.</p>
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<p>NCDad’s son openly admitted it was not his first time drinking, that he’d drank several times before after track meets. So maybe he’d never been in trouble before, but it’s just because he hadn’t been caught. It wasn’t because he hadn’t drank before.</p>
<p>I didn’t say all people. But most assuredly, there are many people who are getting charged with DUI offenses who are not dangerous drunk drivers that need to go to jail. Do some research on the subject if you don’t believe me.</p>
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<p>There is a difference between someone who gets a DUI with BAC = 0.01% versus someone who gets a DUI with BAC = 0.16% and also violating other traffic laws.</p>
<p>But then even without DUI in the picture, US society is generally rather tolerant of poor or dangerous driving skills and habits.</p>
<p>I think too often bars and restaurants serving booze get off the hook too easily after serving patrons already stumbling drunk…they don’t stop serving when they should. We had a woman a few years ago in our area who left a bar drunk in her car, killed someone after leaving bar while she was driving, took off hit and run from accident, proceeded to drive to another restaurant ( a big national chain) and was served more booze when she sat in the place with her face bloody and with shattered chunks of broken windshield glass laced visibly through her hair. The cops found her in the second joint drinking highballs, arrested her, and she is now in prison. I don’t think anything happened to the two joints who served her.</p>
<p>If you drive drunk, you are a danger, period. An otherwise wonderful person who drinks and drives only one time in his/her life is just as dangerous during that one time as a habitual drunk driver is each time he/she drives drunk. Granted, the accumulated episodes of the habitual drunk driver add up to a lot more danger, but even one episode can kill someone else. Even where no one is injured or killed, there’s no way for a judge to know whether a drunk driver will be scared straight with a stern lecture and community service or whether he/she will do it again.</p>
<p>A woman I know was arrested twice for drunk driving with minimal consequences, a fact I learned only after she was arrested a third time…with my 8 year old daughter in the car.</p>
<p>This woman, whom I genuinely like, had been through rehab a number of times but was only able to get sober when she went to prison for over a year and was threatened with the loss of her children. She was sick, an alcoholic, and the previous slaps on the wrist did her no favors. She could have killed someone.</p>
<p>Posters are conflating people who are alcoholics or drink to excess with prior criminal records with first-time offenders who may have had a few drinks and didn’t think they were impaired. It just seems obvious to me that someone who has no history of alcohol abuse, no criminal history, is gainfully employed and may not have been impaired sufficiently to be dangerous should end up having a criminal record and going to jail. There are other ways to deal with them than ruining their lives.</p>
<p>My other problem with a system that doesn’t attempt to distinguish between people who need to be severely punished and those that don’t, is that DUI offenders don’t have the same due process rights that almost everyone else has who is accused of a criminal offense. For instance, if a police officer says you failed a sobriety test, the accused now has to prove the officer may have been incorrect rather than the burden of proof remaining with the officer. The police should record a video of the entire exchange with the driver and then present the evidence in court to prove their case. Organizations like MADD have manged to suspend our 5th amendment rights by intimidating cravenly politicians to pass draconian DUI laws.</p>
<p>People who think the police never make mistakes or use good judgement when making DUI arrests should look at the bridge I have for sale.</p>
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<p>Yeah, the woman who almost killed my dad while driving “impaired” thought she was fine, too. She had had a few glasses of wine at lunch and thought she was fine.</p>
<p>Good thing that she was only “impaired”. If she was drunk, she would’ve hit and almost killed my dad. I mean, if she was just impaired, I wouldn’t have had to see him in a coma, almost die, have no memory of me or my mom, and still be going through therapy almost 10 years later. </p>
<p>Oh wait…</p>
<p>(And if anyone’s interested, it was her first offense and she got a ticket. We got a life sentence.)</p>
<p>The drunk driver who killed my grandfather had never been arrested. I’m sure he would have told you he thought he was safe to drive, but then again we’ll never know for sure since the accident killed him as well.</p>
<p>Oh, yeah, we should TOTALLY trust the judgement of people who have a habit of having a few drinks and then getting behind the wheel, to decide if they’re impaired. Because people who have had a few drinks have such excellent judgement.</p>
<p>I’m very sorry for your loss, Sue.</p>
<p>I’m surprised the drunk driver was killed, too. It seems that the innocent party is almost always better off. The woman who hit my dad didn’t have a scratch on her.</p>
<p>A few glasses of wine is a lot. I can’t even have one without feeling it. </p>
<p>I wish there were some affordable and easy way to objectively tell when you’ve had too much. I bought a gizmo for H once that you breathe into and a different colored light would go off depending on your BAC. But what was your BAC and was it really accurate? No way to tell so it was too frustrating to use. </p>
<p>Of course, you should always designate a sober driver but I think for all these cases where people think that they’re fine, it would be helpful to know for sure in the moment. Maybe a phone app that could test your reflexes or something, then it would’t be dependent on only alcohol - too much Benadryl and you should stay home!</p>
<p>I am not saying we should go back ten years or longer to the laws we had then, but I do think the pendulum has swung too far. We need to find a sensible middle ground.</p>
<p>I found these statistics:</p>
<p>“Statistics have been showing that the DUI repeat offenders tend to get involved in a fatal car crash more than 1.5 times compared to the first time offenders. Also one out of three DUI conviction cases are the repeat offenders. Repeat offenders are 4 times more likely to be part of serious accidents among the high BAC level convicts. It is also known that DUI repeat offenders are 4 times more likely to be involved in serious car accidents causing person’s death or property damages in the end.”</p>
<p>It is common knowledge that repeat offenders are generally not deterred by harsh penalties because many of them are alcoholics. Instead of severely punishing first time offenders who don’t have an alcohol problem, it would be far more effective to concentrate on the recidivist population that is causing most of the damage.</p>
<p>goldenpooch:</p>
<p>If it makes you feel better, I have another very recent anecdote for you - </p>
<p>California, 1st DUI, over 21, not much over the legal limit, no other people in the car, no accident. The punishment was - plea down to ‘wet reckless’ via a public defender (no lawyer cost), a fine (around $1K or so), 1 month suspended license, few year probation where the BAC can’t be above .01 (i.e. no more drinks at all plus driving), no jail time, insurance didn’t even go up that much.</p>
<p>From what I understand, in California at least, the above is typical for similar circumstances. No one is tossing these people in jail on a first time barely DUI with no aggravating circumstances and throwing away the key.</p>
<p>But the above circumstance, which you might consider to be the typical one as opposed to what many of the DUIs are (and I don’t know what’s ‘typical’), is quite different from NCDad’s posted circumstance. There’s a difference in severity of the circumstances and it warrants a difference in the severity of the punishment in the eyes of most of us.</p>
<p>There are lots of posters here who have personal experience with the consequences of drink driving that resulted in the deaths of their friends and loved ones. That’s just it - drunk driving is not a ‘victimless’ crime - it’s a crime with great potential for bodily harm to others. It doesn’t matter if the person is otherwise a ‘nice person’, not an alcoholic (many people who aren’t alcoholics drink to excess frequently - part of a lifestyle among some people), if they’re a good student or a good family man or a good wife, by driving drunk they committed a crime. I certainly don’t think a person who’s a poor student should receive more of a penalty than someone who’s a good student and someone who might not be employed should receive a more severe penalty than someone who’s employed. Those attributes are irrelevant - the person did a certain crime and should receive a penalty for it.</p>
<p>Don’t forget that ‘first time offender’ really means ‘first time caught’ - not the ‘first time doing the offense’. You can’t conflate the two. Most likely, the person is in fact a repeat offender who simply wasn’t caught before.</p>
<p>Do you think the anecdote I posted above was too severe of a penalty for the DUI for those circumstances? Do you think NCDad’s posted circumstance warrants a more severe punishment or should they be the same because they were both ‘first time caught’?</p>
<p>Not all first time offenders should be treated the same. It depends on their driving history, criminal record and any history of alcohol abuse and other factors prosecutors or judges could look at. Treating them all the same is absurd.</p>
<p>In Ca, my understanding is that it is very foolish to go through the process without an attorney. Having the charges dropped or reduced is unlikely to happen without representation. I think it is going to cost you far more than $1k if you’re charged with a DUI. At the minimum, you are going to have your car impounded and you are going to spend at least one night in jail in most cases. In addition, your license will be suspended for a period of time and you will have to attend drivers ed/drug rehab courses even if you don’t have an alcohol problem. It’s not a slap on the wrist.</p>
<p>Edit: A DUI can wreak havoc on your insurance premiums in CA.</p>
<p>Goldenpooch-
The problem is that there’s no real way, short of a past arrest, for a judge to know what someone’s history with alcohol is. Here’s another case from my own life.</p>
<p>The “husband” of someone who works for me is a raging alcoholic. He drinks, hard, all weekend, every weekend. A few weeks ago he came home so drunk that he fell down the steps to their apartment. In the morning he couldn’t figure out where he got all the bruises and the big gash in his forehead. He had parked his car diagonally across the sidewalk.</p>
<p>A couple of months ago he was arrested for drunk driving for the first time. His lawyer said he thought the most likely result would be a fine and community service. At his first hearing the judge strongly suggested he attend AA meetings, so at his court date (tomorrow) he will be presenting a pile of AA chips, chips he has been paying someone $50 per chip to acquire for him. His “wife” is so worried he’ll kill someone she was considering turning him in but her legal status is tied to his and she’s worried about being deported.</p>
<p>So here’s a family man with no history of arrest, no public history of alcohol abuse, nothing more than a speeding ticket or two, who knows what routes to take home at 2 am on a Sunday morning to avoid being caught. How would you like to see him treated?</p>
<p>(And I swear I’m done with the personal stories. I’m really not surrounded by lushes!)</p>
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Here’s where we have different understandings of the norm. The anecdote I gave is current and from what I understand typical for an offense on that end of the DUI spectrum and let’s not forget there’s a spectrum here - from my anecdote to much different and more severe ones.</p>
<p>The whole process only took a few minutes and apparently it’s fairly rote - if the offense is at that (lower) end of the spectrum the plea is made, accepted, and the penalty pretty straightforward and predictable but of course could vary by DA, Judge, and area I suppose. </p>
<p>Note - the car was impounded on the night of the DUI and it was to jail until bail could be arranged - which could be just a matter of hours. That was it for the car impound and jail time. I forgot to mention though that there is also an alcohol education course that must be taken, which I don’t think is a bad thing.</p>
<p>I was surprised on the insurance - the DUI didn’t cause it to increase all that much. Maybe more is coming later.</p>
<p>I don’t consider what happened in the case of the anecdote I posted severe. Again I ask you - do you? Do you have any recent anecdotes to illustrate your viewpoint? You seem unusually soft on DUI and drunk driving and are minimizing the potential danger and damage for them and therefore I’m wondering what you think the penalty s/b. Maybe you personally know of some recent anecdotes where the penalty was really out of line with the offense.</p>