I see these threads all of the time, and I am sick of them. Will someone here please outline to me why drunk driving laws are stupid and intrusive?
Just so ya know, a drunk driver killed a couple of relatives of mine. His nth time he was caught, hard telling how many times he wasn't caught. They were killed one Labor Day weekend, he was home long before Christmas.
"hard telling how many times he wasn't caught."
Some use that right there to defend why it isn't a big deal.
Some subscribe to the notion that if they got home and didn't harm anyone that what they did was ok.
That seems a bit to me like shooting at someone and not hitting them being used a reason to offer why a person shouldn't be punished for that crime.
I offer my deepest sympathy for your loss. Take solice that here in Illinois if you kill someone when you drink too much and drive you can spend up to 14 years in prison. ALl I can say to that is ITS ABOUT TIME.
Because fatalities per 100 million miles driven have remained fairly constant for as long as records have been kept, (even before the current DWI laws were conceived) and will continue to do so.
Another reason is that we have always had laws against murder, manslaughter, reckless endangerment, etc., etc.
We don't need a subset for DWI.
Then there is the damage done to the U.S. Constitution
"The DUI Exception to the Constitution"
A long read, but worth it. I could go on and on, but that's enough for now.
Sorry for your loss.
The majority of crashes where the driver's BAC is >0.00 are the result of drivers with a BAC of 0.15 or more. Some stats are linked in posts 105-108. Most of the people who are complaining about drunk-driving laws have no objection to the arrest and prosecution of people who are just plain sloshed.
The problem is that reducing the legal BAC throws the concept of probable cause out the window. It used to be that for someone to be pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving, the person had to be driving in a manner generally inconsistent with safe and sober drivers. But since many people can drive perfectly normally at 0.08 (an otherwise-good driver with a 0.08 BAC can drive better than an inept driver at 0.00 BAC), the police argue that they need the ability to pull over even good drivers at "sobriety checkpoints".
Unfortunately, the government collects more revenue from conducting bogus "sobriety checkpoints" than from targeting drivers with BAC >0.15 even though getting the latter off the road would save far more lives than getting the former off.