The vote is in. Hooray! Save the children. Get tough, get tougher. There are no sweeter sounds to the ears of a politician than the applause of their constituents. And there are few things constituents applaud more than a tough new law to save the lives of children. Or, at least, seems to do so.
If nothing else, the New York Legislature has shown that it can pass a law as fast as Congress did the USA Patriot Act.
New York law already provides for felony DWI. The new law doesn’t increase the penalty, but rather mandates that the charge cannot be reduced below a felony. Mandatory. A word that seems to have come under a great deal of scrutiny lately for being, oh, very wrong, with terrible unintended consequences. Perhaps it takes a while for the news to reach Albany?
And don’t quibble with details, that what happened to Leandra has nothing to do with the content of the law, since Leandra wasn’t riding in a car with a drunk, but was a victim in the car into which the drunk crashed. That’s already a crime, so they had to come up with something new, even if wholly unrelated, to name a law after her. And it would be wrong for a child to die without getting a law named after her.
I can both understand and appreciate her father’s angst, and his quest to make sure his daughter didn’t lose her life in vain. I really can. This just isn’t the answer, no matter how good it may feel at the moment. Of course, that’s why we have detached legislators to enact laws rather than emotional parents. A lot of good that does us.
While everybody agrees that drunk driving is a bad thing, and is particularly bad when there are children involved, whose lives should be given greater concern by the driver, sufficient to make the decision not to drive drunk, it’s never quite that easy. Consider the parents driving home with junior in the back seat, dinner at a friend’s house with a couple glasses of wine. Lawful? Maybe. Criminal? Maybe. Obvious to the otherwise law-abiding and particularly good parents of junior? Unlikely. Happens all the time? You bet.
On the way home, parents get stopped. There are far too many ways and reasons why someone gets stopped, so it really doesn’t matter why, except to say that they neither struck another vehicle nor caused anyone any pain. But they’re stopped, a P.O. Smith smells a 1982 Château Latour on Dad’s breath. Out comes a black box that reads BAC .08%. And there’s junior, happily playing in the back seat to kill the time until he can get home and catch the last half hour of Pokemon.
Dad gets busted. Felony conviction. Loses his job. Loses his license. Loses his house because he can’t pay the mortgage because he has no job or license. Cable TV shut off so junior can’t watch Pokemon, not to mention have a roof over his head or eat.
Way to go! Save the children! Woo hoo!
The problem is that if Dad was a serious drunk driving problem, the law already enabled prosecutors to charge and convict for a felony. But there was discretion, the ability to address the specifics of the case, the defendant, the situation, so that unintended harm wasn’t the result. But as we’ve learned from years of failed and misguided mandatory laws, take away discretion to address the particulars and we’re left with absurd application of law and, invariably, unintended disasters.
The problem is that legislators always seem to forget about this when it comes time to vote on the law named after the latest dead child. They should enjoy the applause today. Tomorrow, we’ll be back to fixing the mess they’ve gotten themselves into.
If nothing else, the New York Legislature has shown that it can pass a law as fast as Congress did the USA Patriot Act.
Something crazy happened in Albany this week: The Assembly passed a bill, then the Senate passed their version of the bill, and then Governor David Paterson signed it into law—all in two days! Yesterday New York instituted the nation’s toughest drunk driving law, making it a felony to drive intoxicated with a passenger 15 years old or under. The bill, “Leandra’s Law,” was named for the 11-year-old New York girl killed in a DWI crash on the West Side Highway last month.One month between dead child and new law? Two days between introduction and signing? It’s a miracle in a state that can’t pass a timely budget to save its life. Put aside the rule of thumb, that no law named after a person is a going to be good, and let’s consider its inherent merit.
New York law already provides for felony DWI. The new law doesn’t increase the penalty, but rather mandates that the charge cannot be reduced below a felony. Mandatory. A word that seems to have come under a great deal of scrutiny lately for being, oh, very wrong, with terrible unintended consequences. Perhaps it takes a while for the news to reach Albany?
And don’t quibble with details, that what happened to Leandra has nothing to do with the content of the law, since Leandra wasn’t riding in a car with a drunk, but was a victim in the car into which the drunk crashed. That’s already a crime, so they had to come up with something new, even if wholly unrelated, to name a law after her. And it would be wrong for a child to die without getting a law named after her.
I can both understand and appreciate her father’s angst, and his quest to make sure his daughter didn’t lose her life in vain. I really can. This just isn’t the answer, no matter how good it may feel at the moment. Of course, that’s why we have detached legislators to enact laws rather than emotional parents. A lot of good that does us.
While everybody agrees that drunk driving is a bad thing, and is particularly bad when there are children involved, whose lives should be given greater concern by the driver, sufficient to make the decision not to drive drunk, it’s never quite that easy. Consider the parents driving home with junior in the back seat, dinner at a friend’s house with a couple glasses of wine. Lawful? Maybe. Criminal? Maybe. Obvious to the otherwise law-abiding and particularly good parents of junior? Unlikely. Happens all the time? You bet.
On the way home, parents get stopped. There are far too many ways and reasons why someone gets stopped, so it really doesn’t matter why, except to say that they neither struck another vehicle nor caused anyone any pain. But they’re stopped, a P.O. Smith smells a 1982 Château Latour on Dad’s breath. Out comes a black box that reads BAC .08%. And there’s junior, happily playing in the back seat to kill the time until he can get home and catch the last half hour of Pokemon.
Dad gets busted. Felony conviction. Loses his job. Loses his license. Loses his house because he can’t pay the mortgage because he has no job or license. Cable TV shut off so junior can’t watch Pokemon, not to mention have a roof over his head or eat.
Way to go! Save the children! Woo hoo!
The problem is that if Dad was a serious drunk driving problem, the law already enabled prosecutors to charge and convict for a felony. But there was discretion, the ability to address the specifics of the case, the defendant, the situation, so that unintended harm wasn’t the result. But as we’ve learned from years of failed and misguided mandatory laws, take away discretion to address the particulars and we’re left with absurd application of law and, invariably, unintended disasters.
The problem is that legislators always seem to forget about this when it comes time to vote on the law named after the latest dead child. They should enjoy the applause today. Tomorrow, we’ll be back to fixing the mess they’ve gotten themselves into.
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RE: “no law named after a person is a going to be good.”
What about Amber’s law?
Sir Geoffrey Palmer once said that New Zealand had the “Fastest law in the West” but New York and other state legislatures are just as fast and maybe faster because the have subsequently slowed things down in New Zealand.
This process of enhancing penalties in a fit of legislative hysteria has got to be stopped. I think they probably have to suspend their own rules to do it that fast and that may be flaw in the process.
I shudder to think what my state of Texas will do now that New York has become the toughest DWI state. Enjoy the title while you can because if DWI can be a death penalty case, our state will be the first to pass it. Maybe it can be called the “Rick Perry” law.
The save the children aspect of this one doesn’t actually bother me too much. The current DWI felony statute for the most part is only based on whether the driver has DWI priors and how recent they are. If the legislature, in its infinite wisdom and representative capacity, wants to say that they think DWI is worse when there’s a kid in the car, so be it.
But the no reduction from a felony aspect is horrible. I have never seen these sorts of things have anything but negative consequences, including, but not limited to people getting railroaded (sorry, I’d love to give you a misdemeanor but our only options are to the charge and dismissal, and you know how option b would look on the stats), as well as prosecutors having to engage in all kinds of intellectually dishonest shenanigans to occasionally arrive at a fair result. Prosecutors have discretion to work with judges and defense lawyers to reach fair dispositions because things, i.e., real life, doesn’t happen the way legislators imagine it does. It should not be taken away.