Posted on 08/15/2010 8:28:42 AM PDT by Abin Sur
The ninth conviction was the breaking point for one Texas judge who earlier this week sentenced a habitual drunken driver to life in prison. A Texas man is sentenced to life in prison for his ninth DWI conviction.
Bobby Stovall, 54, was driving his truck in Round Rock, Texas, in early July when he weaved through several lanes of traffic and hit another vehicle, injuring the driver. It was later determined that Stovall had a blood alcohol concentration of .32, four times the legal limit in Texas.
And while that DWI was certainly enough to get Stovall in trouble with the law, when the judge found out the defendant had eight prior DWI convictions across several different counties in Texas, he ordered up a life sentence for Stovall.
"This is someone who very deliberately has refused to make changes and continued to get drunk and get in a car and before he kills someone we decided to put him away," said Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley.
Bradley said that in addition to the multiple DWI convictions , Stovall also had a extensive rap sheet for other crimes, including burglary, credit card abuse and supplying alcohol to a minor.
"He basically walked through the penal code for the past twenty years without any regard for safety or society," said Bradley. "In every single one of his cases he had an opportunity to change."
But some argue that Stovall's sentence was too harsh and that the court should have considered his struggle with alcoholism.
"This guy has a disease, he is an alcoholic and this isn't the kind of situation where he's acting with malice to hurt people," said Lawrence Taylor, a DUI lawyer and author of "Drunk Driving Defense."
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Not too harsh.
I wouldn’t pretend to know the difficulty of what you have accomplished.
Good for you and may God Bless!
was he found incompetent? no.
did he kill or almost kill someone? yes
could he have hurt someone before? possibly
this conclusion seems very reasonable.
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