Randy Cassingham's Blog

Posted by St Monance, Fife on March 15, 2008:

How about punishment that fits the crime . . . how many other drunk drivers lose their position at work; be subjected to intrusive counseling; be banished from their volunteer activities and face community and world-wide humiliation for driving while intoxicated? It would appear that it was the clothes not the crime that did him in . . . hope their community has enough volunteer firemen who are tee-totalers.

Posted by Faye/Oklahoma on March 16, 2008:

No punishment is stiff enough when it comes to driving while drunk. It's called "responsibility". All one needs to do is take the bull by the horns and use a designated driver for a night out partying! Lay it on him.

Posted by Charles. Menomonie, Wisconsin on March 16, 2008:

Truthfully, punishment is not a cure for antisocial conduct such as impaired driving.

We do not actually have hard data about how prevalent the use of impairing chemicals including alcohol truly is within the driving public, because no one has ever tested ALL drivers in any segment of traffic.

We do know that a high percentage of drivers involved in accidents are impaired, but since we don't know what proportion of the drivers on the road are impaired, we don't really know the cause/effect relationship. For all we know, the percentage of impaired drivers involved in accidents is exactly the same percentage of impaired drivers in the total population.

This country is not now and never has been serious about dealing with chemical impairment. We have never taken strong steps to keep impaired drivers off of the road nor have we taken realistic steps to limit the damage done by chemically impaired people in the workplace.

Were we serious about the issue, we would test our people based upon the potential for damage that their actions hold.

We would test the top level public officials on a continuous basis and lower levels at increasingly great intervals as their potential for damaging decisions decreased.

Additionally, we would not criminalize such use, but offer treatment for those who cannot or do not control their usage, and we would recognize the true dangers by the individual chemical's risk, rather than based upon public or legislative perceptions.

We really do not have problems with people who drink and drive--so long as they drive safely, and our enforcement shows this to be true. This being the case, we need to deal with persons who do not travel safely by treatment.

Embarrassment, humiliation and punishment are as ineffective in reducing the amount of impaired unsafe driving as torture is in extracting accurate information. What is needed is treatment of the condition, not the symptom, and impaired driving is merely a symptom.

Undoubtedly, thousands of people drive while chemically impaired each day on our roads, and the vast majority make it to their destinations with no major problems.

The two things most needed are treatment for people with self-control issues and discouragement of offenders from driving impaired in the future. The only sure method of the later part of this is to equip vehicles with the ability to determine if the driver is sufficiently competent to operate the vehicle.

Neither removal of driving privileges nor any similar restrictions will stop impaired driving, since the offenders seldom realize that they are impaired.

Humiliation and other psychological approaches only work if the persons involved have a strong connection to a community which will penalize them--and whose opinion is over-ridingly important to the offender.

In other cases such actions are more likely to lead to further impairment.

People do not set out having decided to drink and drive, they decide after they are impaired that it is o.k. to do so. Thus, any solution which depends upon behavioral change on the part of the offender, is unlikely to be effective without external enforcement.

Posted by JULIA SMITH NEWYORK on September 16, 2008:

I'm a big fan of Denmark's drunk driving laws: one offense, and your license is revoked... FOREVER! The reason people continue to drink and drive (and get innocents killed) is because the potential damage isn't enough to deter them. It's not hard to get a taxi, catch a bus, or have a designated driver if you're committed to doing so, and a harsher penalty would encourage more people to make sure they have taken care of such necessities before getting sloshed. (Of course, if their licenses were revoked, we'd probably just get more driving without a license charges....)

Posted by Dave, Indiana on November 4, 2009:

The claim that his sentence should be (should have been, now) made less because of the embarrassment he suffered and his loss of job--that claim is all wet! Those are not criminal punishments; they're consequences "in the normal course", so to speak. Judicial punishment is AND SHOULD BE in addition to anything he essentially did to himself.