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No drunk-driving death is easy to take, but this one had a sickening twist. It turned out that Romero had been arrested for drunk driving a whopping six times before. Yet apparently this ticking time bomb had only been thrown in jail once, for a mere fifteen days. In fact, on the day he collided with Sonja DeVries, Romero had a perfectly valid driver's license.
How could that be? It turns out that lenient judges and kid-glove laws allowed Romero to slip through the cracks. According to Westword, a weekly newspaper in Denver, Romero's license was suspended several times, but by state law it was automatically handed back to him after a year. And following a couple of his arrests, judges let him plead to a lesser charge and accept alcohol counseling instead of jail time.
Most infuriating of all, Romero's story is far from unusual. Each year, it is estimated that about 500,000 drunk-driver arrests in this country involve repeat offenders like him. In Minnesota alone in 2000, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, more than 1,000 drivers were arrested on alcohol-related charges for at least the sixth time. For 182 of those people it was at least their tenth bust!
All those smashed drivers aren't just playing Russian roulette with their own lives. In 2001, drunk drivers killed over 5,000 innocent people -- almost double the toll of the 9/11 terror attacks that year. At the same time, according to an estimate by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drunk drivers cost our economy tens of billions of dollars, including higher expenses for medical care and such public services as police, fire and ambulance. The family budget even takes a direct hit, since drunk drivers boost almost everyone's auto insurance premium.
It's become a national disgrace for several reasons, but lax laws are among the biggest. In most states, a first offense is a misdemeanor that rarely leads to jail time. In a number of them, it takes three or more convictions before drunk driving becomes a felony. And even when you have repeat offenders who could get significant prison time, they're seldom handed the maximum sentence. In fact, in 2002, less than one percent of drunk drivers convicted in Massachusetts got two or more years in prison. Only 15 percent got any time at all. (Massachusetts has since changed its laws somewhat.)
Sometimes it's sloppy work by prosecutors that lets drunk drivers off easy. The Albuquerque Journal recently uncovered the case of a local man, Edward Sena, who pled to a first-offense DUI charge -- despite the fact that it was his fifth drunk-driving conviction. It seems prosecutors failed to dig up the records that would have revealed all this. For this "first-time" offense, Sena never spent a day in jail or paid a penny in fines.
One of the quickest ways to reduce the work burden is to let defendants plead to lesser charges and receive probation. And that leads to other problems.
An investigation by The Washington Post showed how easily drunk drivers in nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, can game the system. More often than not, the judge sentenced the offenders to probation if they agreed to undergo some sort of treatment. Almost one-fifth of the guilty drivers got unsupervised probation. Yep, essentially not a soul kept tabs on them.
Then there are judges who are overly lenient because...well, they just choose to be. In February 2002, a New Mexico woman with two prior DUI convictions was driving drunk when she swerved into an oncoming car, killing a 35-year-old man (also inebriated). Yet a judge sentenced her to just 30 days in jail, a decision that the enraged prosecutor called "a joke." Not many years ago in Maryland, a man who caused an accident that killed a woman got off with a $500 fine, three years' probation and community service. Noting the offender's injuries, the judge said, "You've punished yourself," and soon after let the man leave town for a bowling tournament.
With so much shielding drunk drivers, it's tough to come up with solutions. But Maine may be onto something. After a first conviction in that state, drunk drivers lose their license for at least 90 days, then get a "conditional" license. If during the next 12 months they're stopped with any alcohol in their system, they lose their license for a full year. Mothers Against Drunk Driving wants other states to adopt similar standards.
Of course we have to both toughen laws and then be willing to throw the book at drunk drivers. And when it comes to repeat offenders, we have to do the most commonsense thing of all: take away their keys. Maybe forever.
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