God forbid it happens, but maybe in the space of 20 years you lose a family member and two friends to drunken acts of driving, one being the wife's 15 year old cousin just innocently walking down the street on the pavement, the other 2 both late teens, at the same time in a car incident you too would feel strongly about it I'm sure.

 

It nearly happened already - my grandma's sister's husband was hit by a car while he was walking on the pavement. The driver of the car was 17 or 18. Apparently after he lost conrol of the car he hit a signpost, then a concrete shop front, and finally ran over my relative. The most significant injury was a broken pelvic bone, which left him bedridden. He died a few months later of natural causes. The driver was never punished for reckless driving. I'm not sure if alcohol was involved, or if the driver was sober but simply being very careless, or distracted in some other way. I've also had a friend who crashed into a wall and ended up in hospital when he tried driving home after a night of drinking and mistook a roundabout, and another friend who totaled his car and got stitches on his eye when he fell asleep at the wheel.

 

Anyway, my original point was that someone wanted to destroy the livelihood of the poster who got the DUI, but my argument is that the punishment should be proportional to the crime. His only crime was exceeding the legal blood alcohol limit (he never said by how much, so maybe it was just slightly over). So I think a fine and some points on the license are reasonable. Now, if he'd been caught demonstrating poor driving (or worse), then that deserves its own penalty which should increase proportionally. He doesn't say he was booked for reckless driving too, so presumably he was driving properly at the time. If I was on that road at the time, I'd be more afraid of someone engaged in an argument with her passenger, or shouting with the kids, or checking her make-up or talking on the phone, because in each of the latter cases the driver has almost certainly diverted her attention away from the road.

LMF5000, on 16 Mar 2013 - 11:38, said:

 some people are safer drivers drunk than some other people are when sober.

 

Hmm, not quite sure I have seen evidence for this.

 

Sure you have. Go to youtube and look at some Russian dashcam videos, or videos of driving in Libya. The people you see in the videos are presumably sober (alcohol is illegal in Libya), but they make errors of judgement that are sometimes hard to comprehend.

 

Now compare some of those drivers, sober, with a 30-year old man who has 10 years of clean driving experience (i.e. what one might consider a "good driver"), but is currently driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.81% (which is just above the legal threshhold in my country - 0.80%).

 

Who do you think is statistically more likely to cause an accident? Scrutinise those videos carefully!