I think that this speaks to intent. If it can be proven that the intent of getting behind the wheel was to cause harm, the it will be rightly prosecuted as a crime. Since that is not obvious- ie. no chain of events leading up to it that can be used as evidence, it can’t be prosecuted.
Now if someone left a not which was discovered to express malicious intent, it would be a different story.
In a DUI, there is a chain of events leading up to the act which can be used to deduce intent. You drive to a bar. You drink to the point of intoxication. You get in the car. Start it, begin driving, etc. When these items are assembled as a chain, the become evidence of intent. There is also the distinction made between driving under the influence and driving while intoxicated. You can be under the influence and not know it, but it is far less likely that you can be intoxicated and not know it.
I was involved in an event a while back that resulted in me being injured very badly. A guy put drano into a whiskey bottle and put the bottle back into the bar at his house. I happened to pick up that same bottle and took a big swig, which turned out to be nearly fatal. The police investigated and found it to be very unusual and incredibly negligent, but couldn’t prove malicious intent. The person was never charged, even though it came out long after the fact that there was actual malicious intent. It was treated as a civil case rather than criminal, because without an admission of intent, it was virtually impossible to prove that he intended harm by any legal standard.
Yes, welcome to the broad net of conspiracy. You charge a group of people with conspiracy figuring some will flip and cooperate with police. Then being the head of such a group is an upward enhancement at sentencing.
DUI doesn’t require intent, lack of intent is the very definition of negligence. If you have alcohol in your system and you’re caught driving, you’re screwed. Period. There is no requirement of harm to be punished. That is how the law is interpreted.
I had a coach who used to say, “if the ref didn’t see it, you didn’t do it.”
Bad idea. There isn’t a police cruiser behind every vehicle to police every infraction. Moreover, swerving over the line doesn’t have the probability of causing harm that driving drunk does.
Life and society are better off if we prevent the harm from occurring in the first place, not simply assigning liability or punishment after a person has been hurt. And since humans respond to incentives, we erect laws to provide that incentive not to get behind the wheel of a car after drinking by tying it to BAC - because it’s far better, given the probability of the harm and the gravity of it, to (try to) prevent someone from doing it.
We do the same thing in all kinds of areas where drastic harm has the potential to take place - conspiracies to commit murder, of course, but also environmental laws and regulations.
PubMed is just a search engine for medical journals. It does not rate or assess the quality of articles or the validity of their findings. It merely indexes published articles for convenience.
Furthermore, articles that are published in quality medical journals are often misinterpreted by those “reporting” the results. Just because an article leads to a headline like “Blacks have more muscle mass than Whites” doesn’t mean that the results really supported that conclusion.
Then we might as well dismiss claims like “black people kill other black people at higher rates than white people do” because we didn’t sequence their DNA. And down goes the toilet the statistic of black unemployment because we didn’t blood test those black people to see if they had enough black DNA to make them black. We have never required such data, so I’m not sure why we need it now.
I didn’t say anything like that, Max. I was merely clarifying that something found on “PubMed” is not necessarily a “reputable scientific resource” - since PubMed is merely a search engine - and therefore your statement to EyeDentist that…
“…most people view Pubmed as one of the most reputable medical resources we have available. If you want to try to discredit them, I wish you luck.”
…is kind of a nonsense statement. That indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what PubMed actually is. No one would discredit “them” because there is no “them” to discredit; PubMed is not a conglomerate of people. It’s merely a resource maintained by the National Institute of Health that indexes journals. Something found on “PubMed” is not necessarily an unassailable fact merely by virtue of being found on PubMed. The journals indexed on PubMed span a wide array of topics and a wide range of quality; and unfortunately, a large number of them draw misleading or outright incorrect conclusions, either borne out of ignorance (since a large number of research scientists are not appropriately trained in data analysis) or nefarious intentions (scientists that know all sorts of tricksy ways to “fudge” their results).
This is a pretty serious threadjack, so I’ll end here.
See the next paragraph in my original response. We include - and have included since forever - states of mind lesser than intent, meaning taking unnecessary and stupid risks that could cause harm even without the intent to hurt (i.e., recklessness, etc.). We do that to discourage stupid risk-taking that can really wind up hurting people.
This is for the common sense reason that we want to prevent harm to people, whether the harm was intended not.
That is surely the reason for DUI laws. So why do we permit drunks to get behind the wheel and drive in the first place? Why not mandate ignition interlock in all vehicles on the road? Even if not 100% effective, that would certainly be more effective than relying on busy officers/deputies/troopers to happen upon drunks while enforcing other laws, or relying on drunks to pass through checkpoints.
It’s kind of the same way with speed limits: if the speed limit is there for safety, why does our government(which mandates many features already) permit vehicles that can travel faster than the maximum speed limit in the U.S. to be sold here?
Ok. The current arrangement works fine, but if you think mandatory ignition interlocks would work better, put on your good suit and run for office and see if can get the law changed. But there’s nothing wrong with how we do it now.
[quote]t’s kind of the same way with speed limits: if the speed limit is there for safety, why does our government(which mandates many features already) permit vehicles that can travel faster than the maximum speed limit in the U.S. to be sold here?
[/quote]
For many reasons, not the least of which is that speed limits are varied and fluid, meaning they are subject to change.
The problem with all your “solutions” is that they are solutions to non-problems. The current solutions are not immune to improvement, but they are not so flawed as to need the alternatives you’re proposing.
I had already read it. I was wondering why you tried to make two opposite arguments in one response. First you used a metaphor that likens drunk driving to a premeditated act or at the least conspiracy. Then you describe it as reckless behavior. To the latter I will say there is also a lot of stupid behaviors that could harm others that we do not try to discourage with law. Where you and I draw the line in that respect will never be the same.
They aren’t opposites, they are related. As a society, we start with crimes of intent and make it illegal to plan them even before the harm is carried out. Then, in the interest of public safety, we decided to take that smart principle one step further and criminalize those actions that, while not intending to hurt someone, are done because of some unjustified risk-taking that could result in serious harm (the concept of recklessness). We take that principle even further in specific, particular circumstances when only carelessness is involved but the harm or potential harm is catastrophic - that is, when someone gets killed as result of the carelessness (think negligent homicide).
You’ll see a trendline here - when there is outright intent, the harm or potential harm doesn’t have to be that high. As the potential harm increases, intent becomes less relevant because we are trying to discourage stupid-risk taking when it comes to really, really dangerous things.
And as far as where “you and I” draw such lines - “you and I” don’t draw them, our duly elected legislatures do and it is precisely their job to hash out such lines by weighing trade-offs.
“You” don’t get to unilaterally decide the legality of your actions, and you never have been able to do so.
Back to the Legally-DUI vs. Man Wildly Firing Shots in Crowded Mall scenario(because it bothered me that I didn’t come up with a response that satisfied me):
Are these two scenarios treated in a similar manner anywhere? I doubt a citizen would have much trouble at all justifying firing a shot to stop the threat in the mall. Would a citizen be justified in performing a PIT maneuver to stop a vehicle being driven by someone that just happens to be drunk(…even if the action were taken after watching the guy stagger out of a bar and drive off before he could be stopped) but was driving in a manner no worse than many elderly folks? Would he be justified in taking that action if the driver of the car were blindly and wildly swerving from sidewalk to sidewalk(even if he were somehow-and by pure luck- able to avoid striking and damaging both people and property?) in crowded traffic?
*Let’s assume that these things happen in a place that doesn’t expect citizens to act as sitting ducks, and that no police officer were in the immediate area.
TB is right, especially when dealing with large vehicles moving at a very high speed. Driving is also a privilege, not a right, and people should be made to abide by laws that reduce the chances for catastrophic error. When dealing with vehicles weighing tons moving at very high speeds, the margin for error is already small.
