Originally Posted by
Kerlenbach
DC - I don't know what percentage of alcoholics change, and the number really is beside the point.Here's why. In the law, and in life for that matter, you don't deal with percentages, you deal with individuals.
True, but you also know that those statistics and percentages are a good guide for who is and which crimes are likely to be repeat offenders/repeated. And as such that they cannot be totally ignored either. The LBS that I go used to rent space in a strip mall next door to a small restaurant/bar and grill type of place. And we'd be sitting back in the workshop listening to the people next door (I don't know if they knew if we could hear them or not or how clearly we could hear them) and laugh at them because they would go on at length about how "Just because I drink X-number of cases of beer/booze a day and I am on my Y-DUI that doesn't mean that I'm an alcoholic." Just listening to them talk I think that it is safe to presume that if they had were given a Breathalyzer test, or had their blood drawn for a BAC that they would be well over the legal limit. And I am sure that you know full well as an officer of the court that just because it is a person's first arrest and/or conviction for DUI that more likely than not that it isn't the first time that they've been driving while under the influence of whatever substance.
And I am sorry but there are certain offense that the first time that a person gets caught committing that they should have to face series jail time/penalties. And Driving under the influence of any mind altering substance is one of those. As I am sure we all know how easy it is for a sober but distracted driver to "not see us" and end up hitting and killing us, and than to use one of the two "magic get out of jail free cards," i.e. "But officer I didn't see him/her," or "But officer they just 'swerved' into my lane and I didn't have time to avoid them." Throw alcohol or some other mind altering substance into the mix and you're really asking for trouble.
I'm also sure that we all know that even with the Breathalyzer interlocks installed in a repeat offenders car that there is no way to insure that the repeat offender isn't going to go out drinking, get wasted and than get someone else who isn't wasted to blow into the interlock. So that they can drive home or to the next bar.
The better way to have those Breathalyzer interlocks setup is as I think I've said before have them not only analyze the breath for alcohol but temperature and moisture content to insure that it came from a person's lungs, as well as DNA to insure that it came from the person who it is suppose to have come from and that they have to breath into it either every X-number of miles driven or every Y-number of minutes. As well as having either a video or web cam mounted so that it observes the person who is blowing in the Breathalyzer interlock.
Originally Posted by
Kerlenbach
I learned that the hard way. I was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2003, and in 2005 it spread to my liver, making it stage 4. The five-year survival rate for stage 4 colon cancer is about 30%. I finished chemo on July 19, 2006, meaning that, statistically, I had a 30% chance of living until July 19, 2011. But, I have learned, survival is not a game of percentages. For an individual it is binary - the answer is either yes or no. I am cancer-free, meaning that for me, I would say my chances of making it to 7/19/11 are around 100%, not 30%
I hope that you do beat the odds, but again as an officer of the court you know that you can't totally ignore those numbers either.
Originally Posted by
Kerlenbach
It works the same in court - the likelihood whether an individual will or will not re-offend can be expressed statistically, but for a particular person the answer is binary. That's why each person must be treated as an individual, and why painting everyone with the same brush is not justice. Treating everyone the same is called "wholesale judging." It's a whole lot easier than retail judging, but a lot less fair.
I am not a criminal court judge, but I can tell you that the crime of driving with a suspended license is by more than a factor of 2, the most frequently charged crime in this county and probably throughout Florida. Drivers licenses get suspended all the time (I deal with child support DL suspensions almost daily) for good reasons and bad. To raise revenue, the state has greatly bumped up traffic fines, meaning more and more people get suspensions for failing to pay fines. Too often a small fine results in a cascading failure to pay, resulting in a very long suspension.
So, letting a repeat DUI offender petition to get his license back after a 10-year revocation is fair.
Unless you happen to end up as a victim of this multiple repeat offender. How does the court explain to the little girl or boy that because even though the person who hit and killed their parents had had 4 DUI's and served their 10 year suspended license that they were able to petition to get an interlock installed on their car and get their license back?
How is it fair to society to allow a person who has been convicted of DUI four times back on the road with an interlock and/or suspended license? As you've said you deal with numerous cases of people who continue to drive on suspended licenses. Even going so far as to ask whether or not putting them away in prison is a good use of a limited resource or not.
How would you recommend that a person who has been arrested for
AND convicted of numerous DUIs and/or driving on a suspended license be treated? I agree that putting them into the Federal system right away probably isn't a good use of a limited resource. But what about putting them into either the Country or State penal system? Starting out in the county system for the first offense for X-amount of days, and a second, third, etc. getting them longer stays until they finally "graduate" to the state lockup. Where again they spend X-amount of time, number of convictions in the State lockup before eventually graduating to the Federal lockup.
And as we know there are still certain areas of the country where DUI (despite all of the media coverage) is treated as no big deal. Even after individuals have wrapped numerous cars around telephone poles and trees and whatnot.
How many "second chances" should a person get before they "graduate" to killing someone because they were driving while drunk, stoned, or otherwise wasted?