Slashdot Mirror

They're using bad science, too.

Drunk drivers are likely to not get caught their first time. DUI penalties are so high largely on the stated justification that it's probably not their first time--that the police catch you after your 50th or 100th time driving drunk--so we need to penalize you for all the times we've probably missed. There are numerous other problems as well.

It's a valid assumption, but it raises a key consideration:

drivers with a 0.05% blood-alcohol level were found to be twice as likely to be in a crash. For a person weighing 180 to 190 pounds, that could be a single can of beer, glass of wine, or shot of liquor. At 0.08% (two drinks), the likelihood is quadrupled, and at .20% (four drinks or more), the risk is higher by 23 times.

To get these conclusions, you would have to measure a person's BAC through a blood sample every time they drive. You would have to baseline their 0% BAC crash rate with their 0.05% and 0.08% crash rate. You would have to count how many times they drove at 0.0%, 0.05%, and so forth, and measure how many crashes they were involved in. Confounding includes the length of the drive, the visibility conditions, if the person is tired, if the person is stressed, the bad driving of other drivers, and so on; even crashing at mile 105 of a single, long drive is quite different than crashing 5 miles into a drive out of a sample set totaling a distance of 105 miles. The average of all individuals will be different than the average of all drives taken as a group. It goes on.

The way you regard the measurement has a big impact, as well. Memory tests readily exemplify this statistical concept: psychological studies into mnemonics have measured what percentage of things had been remembered, what percentage had been forgot, how many had been remembered, and how many had been forgot. You get ridiculous shit like a study showing that a greater percentage of things remembered in 5 minutes is forgotten when using a mnemonic; meanwhile the participants using the mnemonic memorized 70 things and forgot 30, and the participants using rote memory memorized 30 things and forgot 5. You can see here that people using mnemonics forget 6 times as much; they forget 30% of what they try to remember, versus 14%; and that they remember 2.3 times as much. That's right: they forget 6 times as much and remember 2.3 times as much--they forget more and remember more.

Statistics results are often meaningless without a short explanation of the method used.

Using a breathalyzer to measure somebody's ability to drive a car is fraught with assumptions, which means, horrifyingly, what's now illegal is the indicators rather than the behavior.

The DUI Exception to the Constitution

In Denver, a bar I went to had a novelty breathalyzer that would tell you your BAC for $1. I blew 0.10, but wasn't driving but I considered myself way past the point of safe driving. Why have I only ever seen this device once? Why not place it everywhere, for free, and let people check themselves before getting behind the wheel? It would be waaaay more cost effective and everyone could use it. And the cab companies could sponsor it. The ones who don't give a damn aren't going to care and drive drunk anyway.

Also note, that the legal limits are on the extremely cautious side of impairment. I urge everyone to read The DUI Exception to the Constitution. While I support safe roads, the extremes (rights violations) we go to to prevent drunk driving do not enthuse me. Now, some states are putting judges at checkpoints to make on-site court-orders possible.

There are two scapegoats that always work in America: think of the children and think of drunk driving. These seem to be more noble causes than the rights that get violated by them.

You forgot drunk driving.

There is an exception to the Fourth Amendment when it comes to DUI investigations. That is why it is legal to have DUI checkpoints where they stop all traffic and perform whichever manner of sobriety test / breath check that they intend. For more information (with a strong point of view - but the information is there regardless of which side you agree with) read this.

If you could make it a public safety issue (i.e. chemical plant inspector certification exam) and demonstrate there was no better method of investigation, then your fears - while maybe justified - would likely have no bearing in a US court. How this applies to laws in Taiwan - I have no idea, but the ideological part of me generally likes to think of the US Bill of Rights to be an outline of some inalienable human rights and thus not subject to government permission.

A speech given outlining a history of DUI, how the supreme court has ruled on DUI vs the Constitution, and a little of the technical reasons why breathalyzers are bogus: http://drunkdrivingdefense.com/general/lawrence-taylor.htm

...the only exceptions are a civil judgment for damages caused by drunk driving, as far as what my attorney told me...

Yeah, because we all know about the DUI exception to the Constitution. I'm not arguing against punishing people for non-soberly operating a 2,000 pound high-speed weapon, but I do think that throwing the lawbooks out the window is foolish, no matter the charge.

On a side note (and steering this post back on topic), the very fact that the damage awards have bounced through several orders of magnitude should be enough to get this entire case dismissed. It's a court of law, not an auction house.

They're a big part of this travesty:
The DUI Exception to the Constitution"

Especially if you have a family you are taking care of. You have that extra drive to make sure your daughter will grow up in a free country, but that's tempered by the knowledge that certain acts of civil disobedience (or extrapolating to an illegally oppressive government - those may be acts of constitutional obedience) may place you in custody/court for a sufficient amount of time to lose your job. That could result in failure to pay mortgage, inability to obtain another job within your career, etc...

I like to think that my daughter will still think of me as her hero and role model when she grows up, and I know my wife would support me (we'd probably be in trouble together actually) if it were one of the Big freedom issues. So what do you do when it's things like back scatter screening on a field-trip to the courthouse or driving through a DUI checkpoint in the coldest form of sobriety?

This is the insidious danger inherent in the erosion of freedom: not enough to die for, not even enough to make you homeless or hungry or inconvenienced over, but enough, over time, to leave you with a shallow shadow of what our ancestors died for.

To understand it you must understand the difference. Hundreds of years ago a guy named Galileo said, "the universe is really not FLAT, the way the Vatican says it is". You saw what happened to Galileo. The government, for saying such things, based on SCIENCE, executed him.

Galileo said the universe is not flat? They executed him? Huh? Kinda odd coming from someone so obsessed with truth to just make stuff up for effect.

BAC calculators aren't that hard to find.

http://www.ou.edu/oupd/bac.htm
http://www.drunkdrivingdefense.com/general/bac.htm
http://www.bestduidefense.com/BACCHART.htm

Those are three of the first responses on google. And according to those, 3 drinks in an hour will put you at about a .05, if you're 200 lbs. As opposed to 4 for a .08. Also, look at the effects at even .06. On the first of those links, if you scroll down you see that at .04 driving skills are "significantly affected". Come off it. If you've been drinking more than a beer or two with dinner, let the wife drive home. Or if you want to let her have wine with dinner, then stay off the booze yourself. It's not a complex proposition.

Which sounds like a presumption of guilt without proof.

Forcing people to pull over means a change in speed, especially when compared to the flow of traffic. Changes in speed are dangerous (statistically speaking).

Keep in mind, of course, that breathalyzers (as used in interlocks) measure breath alcohol and assume a partition ratio of 2100:1. With actual partition ratios in humans typically ranging between 1300:1 and 3100:1, this means that the actual BAC could reasonably be between .015 and .037. That's a huge spread, and pretty ridiculous.

Now, I'm not a drunk driver (never been caught doing it because I don't do it), but I care about our rights. Drunk driving is being used as a tool to violate our rights.

Check out this link for a little run down on the case-law that has completely boned us.

I think his point was that an adult body is said to process 1 bottle of beer in one hour which is a pretty good baseline. As long as you're only having a single drink per hour your BAC should never rise above .05% at any point in time. Keep in mind that in general for this 1 bottle of beer = 1 glass of wine = 1 shot of liquor, all of which are processed in about the same time. http://www.drunkdrivingdefense.com/general/bac-com parison-over-time.htm

FYI: This standard excludes the current President of the United States , who had a DUI in his twenties.

Keep in mind this is DUI and *NOT* DWI. DUI is very subjective and you can be charged with it for any trace amounts of alchohol in your system.

Many people, myself included, say the same about Bush

Can't deny it; he definitely has conviction

Canadians are free to reject this rejection, since Bush can't even come to Canada to negociate with them.

As for the Supreme Court, no doubt they have the final word on what's legal. But that doesn't always mean they're right.