University Daily Kansan, February 4, 1982
Page 7
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Kin of drunken-driver victims want stiffer laws
By JANICE GUNN Staff Writer
Tears pooled at the lower rim of Sid McCullough's eyes as she explained the auto crash that took the life of her father. And then the car that struck his brother's car.
"I was hospitalized for a week for emotional stress and mental fatigue. My brother was killed," McCullough, 61% of W.9th St., said recently.
The crash happened in 1973 as 72-year-old Macdonald Reed drove down 17-0 in route from Topeka to his home in Lawrence. A wayward vehicle crossed the median and struck Reed's car in the opposite lane. Reed died instantly.
It took McCullough weeks to accept her brother's death. She realized he was gone one day when she stopped by his house, she said. "I was on his front steps, hysterical and angry. At the time I saw him, the car that killed my brother murdered!"
She has never seen the man who operated that vehicle, and declared she never wanted to.
Pat Owen, who appeared on the Jan. 3 broadcast of CBS's 60 Minutes representing Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, said Monday that family members of victims needed to want to see the driving while intoxicated offender to see that they were prosecuted justly in court for their offenses.
The problem of drunken driving victims is widespread and accounts for half of the deaths on highways out of an annual average of 56,000 highway fatalities.
To counteract the problem, MADD forces in California managed to put enough pressure on their Legislature to override the jury sentence for drunken driving.
Mandatory sentencing for drunken driving is exactly what the Rev. Richard Taylor, president of Kansas Law School, best sees in the Kansas Legislature.
Taylor is attempting to organize a
MADD in Kansas. He calls the Kansas organization "Many Against Drunk Driving," a title he said was more appropriate.
With drunken driving legislation bills receiving special attention in the 1982 Legislative session, MADD could succeed in securing a mandatory sentence for drunken drivers in Kansas.
In Gov. John Carlin's legislative message on Jan. 12, he said that more citizens of Kansas were killed on the job and drunken driving than were murdered.
In Kansas, first-time offenders can be punished by a combination of imprisonment for 24 hours to six months, a $100 fee, fine, suspended driver's license or participation in alcohol awareness programs.
Three bills relating to alcohol-related auto crashes have been proposed in Kansas, and others are being drawn up.
Of all the charge charged with DWI in Lawrence last year, only 39 percent were found guilty in court Lawrence police reported.
According to reports compiled by the federally funded Lawrence Alcohol Safety Action Project, which is composed of police and alcohol safety directors who apprehend and treat drunk drivers, they are not prosecuted for DWI as charred.
More than half of the charges are either amended or reduced.
in the fiscal year 1981, Lawrence municipal courts processed 511 drunken driving cases. Only 200 of these cases were reviewed and, rest, were appended to another charge.
Lawrence Police Sgt. Ron Dalquest, police supervisor for the ASAP Program, said that all of the offenders last year had a blood-acohol level of 10, the level of legal intoxication, or above.
City prosecutors plea bargain with the offenders for sentencing, he said. The significant difference between chivalry and revenge is that driving instead of with DWI is that the
charge is not put on the defendant's record. This obstracts the city prosecutor from charging the offender with a criminal offense and defensive if he is apprehended again.
“As far as I'm concerned, they’re making a mockery out of the court system,” Dalquest said. “People that are plea bargaining away their sentence are actually getting away with something because the important part of the whole arrest was that the offender's had too much to drink.”
On the contrary, Mike Glover,
Lawrence city prosecutor, said that each case was different and should be prosecuted on an individual basis.
"Other factors have to be looked at besides the blood-alcohol level," he said.
"I look for their past driving record, the field sobriety tests and blood-alcohol level, how serious the accident was if there was one, the person's general attitude toward the police and probable cause that gave rise to the crash."
He said that a mandatory sentence would not treat each individual fairly and justly.
The problem between mandatory sentencing and fairness to the individual remains unsolved.
"I'm sick and tired of it-that somebody can be drunk and get a suspended sentence," State Sen. Paul Heus, R-Wichita, said.
In 1946, his mother and father were injured in a car accident. The driver of the other car who was at fault was driving under the influence of alcohol.
"I've lived with the pain and agony of not only drunk drivers, but the way it affects a whole family. I saw it and I felt it. And I remember the daily pain it caused my father."
"We're knocking off a thousand a week on the highways, half of them are alcohol-related and the Legislature is trying to ban it," she said. "The present law is like having a $500 fee for littering. People still litter and people still drive after drinking."
With the social drinking that goes on at bars, few bar regulars give consideration to their blood-alcohol content.
"Who knows when their blood-alcohol content is, '10?" Glover said. "There's too much emphasis put on 10, because it affects people differently."
Dalquest said that the average drink had .02 percent alcohol in it. The
average person can drink five of those and be at 10 blood-alcohol limit.
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An average person can also drink four beers before he reaches the .10 blood-alcohol limit.
Society does not take the drunken driving as seriously as it should, said Bruce Beale, president of the Kansas Association of Alcohol and Drug Program. He advocates stiff penalties for all offenders.
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"We're not trying to throw people into jail for the hell of it." Beale said. "The bottom line is to reduce alcohol-related accidents and deaths. If society thinks you must offense, then they should have stiff penalties to go with that attitude."
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DID YOU KNOW?
Benjamin Franklin made a plea for public prayer. On June 28, 1787, a deadlock had descended upon the Constitutional Convention. Men from various states were planning to leave and it would be years before they could gather "e states' representatives again for another try at bringing the loosely-knit confederated colonies together to form a republic. Benjamin Franklin stood to his feet and addressing the convention president, George Washington, directly and with simplicity said:
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