DWI and Devastated
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This was supposed to be a slam-dunk column, one of those easy bits of punditry ripped from the headlines. It was a good time for it, given last week’s big announcement from General Motors Corp. that it reached an employee buyout agreement — one of the most expensive in U.S. corporate history — to pare thousands of workers from its U.S. assembly plants and its largest parts supplier, the bankrupt Delphi Corp. But I got a phone call from a longtime family friend — an extremely decent, upright wife and mother who had never done anything to break the law, or hurt anyone in her half-century of life — until she left a Fairfax County party after January’s Super Bowl game. She needed to talk. In our friend’s own words, “I was drunk, and I was driving. I was stupid, so stupid. . . . I’m so humiliated, devastated by all of this. . . . After everything I’ve done good in my life, everything and everyone I’ve loved, I’ll be left with this. . . .” Her blood-alcohol content was “above 0.15,” at least twice Virginia’s and the nation’s legally drunk BAC limit of 0.08 percent. It was her first offense. She hired a good lawyer, a $7,000 defense attorney. But she was found guilty and sentenced to five days behind bars under Virginia’s drunk-driving laws, revised in 2004 to stand among the toughest, the most unforgiving in America. Our family friend was not seeking forgiveness. “I was wrong. I deserved what happened to me. I could have killed someone, killed myself,” she said. And she was right about that. A total of 279 people died in Virginia in traffic crashes in 2004 involving motorists with blood-alcohol levels “of 0.08 percent or higher,” according to the latest available numbers published by the Fatality Analysis Reporting System of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That was two deaths fewer in Virginia than in 2003. Virginia law enforcement and traffic safety officials are extremely unhappy with those numbers, as are their peers in the District of Columbia, where 11 people died in “0.08 percent or higher” drunk-driving crashes in 2004, down 56 percent from the 25 people who died that way in 2003, but who died tragically and unnecessarily nonetheless. In Maryland, 209 people died in legally-drunk-and-above crashes in 2004, up 12 percent from 187 in 2003. (Hint: If you are caught drinking and driving in Maryland, don’t expect any sympathy from police or anyone else in the law enforcement and judicial systems.) Nationally, the numbers were just as grim — 12,879 people dying in drunk-driving crashes in 2004, down a scant 2 percent from the 13,096 people who perished in unfortunate meetings with drunken motorists in 2003. Luckily, our friend did not kill anyone or damage anything except her self-esteem and self-respect. But that was tragic enough. She sank into a nearly debilitating depression, straining her marital and other familial relationships. She said she felt, still feels, imprisoned by her one-time failure, “like everyone is watching me, like I deserve to be watched, not to be trusted,” she said. “People, you know, some of those people who I met in ASAP [Virginia’s mandatory Alcohol Safety Action Program for convicted drunk-driving offenders, who must pay an additional $450 in penalties to attend] . . . they tell me that I ‘just’ served five days in jail. ‘Just’ five days in jail,” she said. |