Oh come on. I've lost my license for what you'd call DUI - made a stupid decision to drive the 1.5km back home from a pub, got a 1 year ban and a hefty fine. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do and I deserve what I got, but attempted murder? Don't be ridiculous.
At most repeated DUI is criminal negligence, and negligence on the part of whomever supplied the offender with the vehicle. It should be met with driving bans and escalating punishments if those are ignored. Life imprisonment is an amazingly harsh and expensive over-punishment for a stupid but usually non-malicious crime.
So, yea, murder. That's how serious DUI (or texting behind the fucking wheel) is.
Unless you cause a accident, then you can get attempted murder, or murder (depending on the outcome).
Then people will say: "Oh, but the driver had no intention to murder someone." here the most common argument from the judge is: "someone that knows that driving under influence is dangerous and do it anyway, is taking full responsability for the fact that it might accidentally kill someone, thus it is not accidental, since the person is on purpose gambling away with other people lives."
TL;DR Breathalyzers are based on dubious science, system is unfairly tilted in favor of conviction. Guilt is presumed & punishment issued even before trial.
I cannot tolerate anyone who would plow around our roads in a 2,000 pound bullet and either be drunk or looking at their phone.
Are we going to argue that you're a murder if you drink to excess while your keys are still in your pocket? Because that's when the decision was made, not when you get in your car drunk. At that point, its not you making the decision.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_driving_in_the_United_Sta...
I was just saying that attempted murder is when you actually attempt to murder someone. It's not the same, not at all.
As a whimsical thought experiment, care to explain why the other 60% of fatal accidents should not be classed as criminal negligence by one party or another? : P
edit: since this got a few upvotes, I'd like to expand. I'm in my late thirties; I got my drivers' license in the early nineties. I was never really educated on drink driving the way people are today.
I didn't take it seriously enough. I thought it would be OK; I didn't know the risks properly, and I certainly didn't know the penalties. I had no idea that being a couple of times over the limit led to a 20x+ increased risk of accident. Maybe I was stupid to not know that, nonetheless I had never properly internalised that fact.
Maybe everyone here is smarter than me - it certainly seems like that most of the time - but I am not completely stupid, and my internal risk profile was totally wrong about this. If you're of a similar age as me - earned your license decades ago, in a more permissive time - I beg you not to make the same mistakes I made. Drink driving is never an option. It is not even on the table. You are endangering yourself, the community, your reputation, and everyone you love. Catch a god damn taxi, like I wish I had done that night.
Drink driving - not even once. From one hacker to another. Please.
And yet we have media organizations saying things like:
" Washington (CNN) -- A common benchmark in the United States for determining when a driver is legally drunk is not doing enough to prevent alcohol-related crashes that kill about 10,000 people each year and should be made more restrictive, transportation safety investigators say.
The National Transportation Safety Board recommended on Tuesday that all 50 states adopt a blood-alcohol content (BAC) cutoff of 0.05 compared to the 0.08 standard on the books today and used by law enforcement and the courts to prosecute drunk driving.
The NTSB cited research that showed most drivers experience a decline in both cognitive and visual functions with a BAC of 0.05. "
Of course we have a decline in cognitive and visual functions - that's what a depressant does. At any dose. So long as we have drinking as a major societal institution, and we have bodies that slowly process alcohol, and we have an automotive-mobile culture, there is some nonzero number of deaths we will prefer to tolerate every year due to drunk driving, whether it's 1,000,000 or 10,000 or 100.
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While there may be some distribution of how well people deal with a certain degree of drunkenness, the basic objective fact that we possess to measure impairment is BAC. Limits vary geographically and through history - in the US we have had experience with thresholds at 0.05%, 0.08%, 0.1%, and 0.15% in various eras and places.
A BAC of 0.01% doesn't significantly harm anyone - it is barely detectable. A BAC of 0.05% poses some minor statistical increase in danger, and is generally the minimum people seek out to 'get a buzz'. A BAC of 0.1% indicates moderate impairment - about what you thought, several times more dangerous. It's only when you get to a BAC of around 0.2% that it becomes 20x more dangerous. At a BAC of around 0.3% and up, on the other hand, one generally loses consciousness. Death from alcohol intoxication (assuming no complications) occurs at an average of about 0.45% BAC (that is the approximate LD50).
The goal of this idea is to encourage you to not attempt manslaughter with your vehicle, so if you were faced with life imprisonment perhaps you would think long and hard before you do it the third time.
Look, I can see your point of view. There needs to be a deterrent, yes. Locking someone up and throwing away the key, though, should be reserved for only the most heinous offences. In my opinion, you should not be able to achieve that using only a six-pack, a car, and zero dead bodies.
There has got to be some other solution that doesn't utterly ruin the person's life, and the state's finances.
I think DUI three times is particularly heinous. Maybe life in prison is excessive, but the third time you do it you are well aware that it is potentially lethal, and the punishment should be on the level of attempted manslaughter. If that gets you nailed with some three-strikes thing, I think your argument should be against the three-strikes aspect.
But my original point was to disagree that DUI is the same class of crime as drug use in general, since it's incredibly dangerous for the other members of the public.
It is hard to disagree with you about the third-time DUI. I guess I am against "automatic" laws in general; it reeks of populism and "tough on crime" rhetoric, ignoring the human variables - see above article for examples. Trying to legislate judicial discretion out of the equation is, to me, a foolish idea.
Couldn't agree more on the drug use issue. They should not even be in the same category of crime.
update: thanks for the link, it led me down an interesting path of "attempted manslaughter" reading. eg, from http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=645716
> in Virginia a few traffic offenses can be classified as attempted manslaughter. Such as, speeding well above what classifies as reckless driving or driving sufficiently intoxicated. I think the reasoning is that if one were to kill someone under those circumstances it would be manslaughter, and any reasonable person would know that excessive speeding or driving drunk carries a high risk of killing someone even though that person isn't exactly trying to kill anyone, therefore, even though they didn't kill someone, they still basically attempted to in being so careless. IOW, you really should be charged with manslaughter, you just were lucky enough to have no actually killed anyway
> I think different jurisdictions probably punish those actions similarly, they just may call it something other than attempted manslaughter, like maybe reckless endangerment or whatever.
Reckless endangerment - I admit that strikes me as a better term, although I now understand the reasoning behind "attempted manslaughter".
Perhaps I'm misguided, but it seems to me that its more fair to impact the life of the offender than it would be to allow an innocent person to die.
Fortunately, there are more than two options. The best idea I can come up with would be to permanently suspend driving privileges for anyone with a second DUI conviction.
This is the worst part of excessive penalties -- that people think they would actually be effective. Most defendants have absolutely no idea what the penalties are until after they've been charged with the crime, which makes any deterrent effect of increasing the penalties quite impossible.
Even if you ran some kind of expensive continuous education campaign (which naturally can't work for every category of crime because there are so many types with such complicated penalties that no one could keep track), you're assuming that people engage in planning. If people planned ahead then they would all have a ride home from the bar in the first place.
Then again, death is an amazingly harsh and expensive punishment for an innocent who happens to get killed in a driving accident with somebody who's drunk...
That said, attempted murder doesn't really fit. Attempted Manslaughter or something like criminal negligence (of the sort that endangers people's life) maybe?
That kind of ruins your simplistic little moral diorama, doesn't it?
As a society we realize that certain risks will always remain, and due to bad luck accidents will always happen: We accept that and live with that. What we do not accept is behavior which unnecessarily endangers a person's life. It's perfectly reasonable from a moral point of view to hold people accountable in proportion to how reckless they are acting.
