Worth familiarizing yourself with this remarkable reporter (Radley Balko), if you don't already know who he is:
That's such a naive and irresponsible, and frankly stupid, position to take. That's the first advocate for drunk drivers/driving I've ever heard of. I'll assume he wrote that for the "shock" value (i.e. click bait). I guess that makes him "remarkable", but not in a positive way.
Regarding the Little Rock police chief -- it sounds like race has nothing to do with it. Rather, sexual improprieties and personnel issues are what peoples' complaints are about. The Intercept is hardly a credible journal anymore (hear what its founder, Glenn Greenwald, has to say about it (https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald).
How can anyone with an IQ above freezing seek to criminalize any one substance rather than just criminalizing a) bad results b) impairment?
I don't care what, if anything, you're on. If you can't drive you can't drive. If you can you can. Penalizing any one substance simply because we can measure it seems farcical at best.
Sure, on paper.
In reality 99% of enforcement is against alcohol because that's what they have the breathalyzers, blood tests and established law to go after.
It's exceedingly rare for someone to get a DUI for anything other than booze unless they are so high they fall asleep at the wheel
Yep, and the law agrees… as you agreed. Does it take a freezing cold brain to argue against itself?
I find it so odd few see the absurdity in all these public health debates. Now we have a virus going around and people go full authoritarian, even though the majority of deaths is way above the median life expectancy in many countries. Meaning they'd not have lived much longer anyway. But drunks kill tons of random people including kids every year - no biggie.
Just to be clear I'm against prohibition, I think all drugs should be legalized. There are millions of people who have serious issues with alcoholism though, and we have to do something against that, because they cause a lot of problems, even beyond killing others. It's farcical that drugs like LSD are highly illegal, even though users aren't known to harm others, but then others like alcohol are so accepted we even arguing about allowing people to drive while impaired with them.
If there were data showing that legalizing drink driving would lead to fewer accidents I'd be absolutely willing to consider it. I've never heard of anyone seriously make such an argument though, it seems like total bunk. A professional drinker may be driving inconspicuously, until one day their slow reaction time may not be enough to not hit that person crossing the street at night.
If two people throw a stone at your head and one misses because he happens to be a bad thrower few people would argue that this matters rather than the intent to harm.
These two crimes have different punishments. It's quite normal to have outcome-based laws.
In your example, how much of a civil penalty should each perpetrator pay to reimburse the victim's medical expenses? If we only considered intentions and not outcomes, the civil penalty would depend on the average cost of medical expenses the victim would incur from this type of attack, multiplied by the probability such a throw would result in a hit, regardless of whether the stone actually hit the victim's head.
But in reality, a court would focus more on outcomes than on intentions for this kind of civil penalty. The perpetrators would pay a civil penalty that depends on the victim's actual medical expenses. It's simply not practical to make accurate probability-based calculations for every damage assessment, and the victim should always be fully reimbursed.
My point is rather that for criminal culpability to exist, there needs to be intent. And (excuse me if this is somewhat inaccurate because I'm not from a common law region), in general a 'guilty mind' is a requirement in criminal law, no?
Insofar as people receive lesser judgements for crimes without adverse outcomes the argument is that the better outcome reflects less willingness to commit or go through with a crime.
To take an extreme example, no jurisdiction I'm aware of punishes attempted murder substantially less severely than actual murder even if the outcome is that there's no harm done at all. Likewise an accidental death is not a crime.
> I think you're actually giving a consequentalist account in both examples, just one time collectively and the other individually.
That's an interesting point, so let me revise my example. If we only considered intentions and not outcomes, the civil penalty would depend on how much damage the perpetrator intended to inflict (interpreted in monetary terms) by throwing the stone, multiplied by what the perpetrator believed to be the probability that the stone would hit the victim. The amount of the civil penalty could be wildly different from the victim's actual losses.
A financial system could be set up to ensure that the victim would always be compensated for their actual losses, while the perpetrator would always pay an amount that scales with the monetary interpretation of their moral culpability. There would be no guarantee that the incoming payments would equal the outgoing payments.
I don't think it's possible to implement this system, because there is no way to determine the required numbers with a reasonable degree of accuracy. As long as intent is established, courts rely on outcomes to determine judgments when the extent of the intent is unclear.
> My point is rather that for criminal culpability to exist, there needs to be intent. And (excuse me if this is somewhat inaccurate because I'm not from a common law region), in general a 'guilty mind' is a requirement in criminal law, no?
Yes, intent is an important factor in criminal cases. I'm not trying to argue that intent doesn't matter in court, because intent does matter. My point is that, for a legal system to be practical, outcomes also have to be taken into consideration.
> Insofar as people receive lesser judgements for crimes without adverse outcomes the argument is that the better outcome reflects less willingness to commit or go through with a crime.
Outcomes aren't necessarily a good approximation for intent. A perpetrator who is more competent at executing crimes would generate more adverse outcomes, while an equally willing but less competent perpetrator would generate fewer adverse outcomes. The more competent perpetrator should receive a greater sentence, but the reasoning would be based on the perpetrator's greater harm to society rather than their intent.
> To take an extreme example, no jurisdiction I'm aware of punishes attempted murder substantially less severely than actual murder even if the outcome is that there's no harm done at all. Likewise an accidental death is not a crime.
The counterpoint is that, at least in the U.S., states differ on whether attempted assaults are recognized as crimes, and whether assault charges require actual injury. There are related charges that vary per state, so I'm not able to make a generalization on the difference between attempted crimes and successful crimes.
It's called "mens rea"
You can get upset that we don't have the tools to measure other substances but as soon as we do I can guaranteed they'll be deployed and I won't mind a bit. Don't drive intoxicated, it's simple, I do it all the time. If I drink or smoke, I uber to and/or from. It's not a hard concept to abide by.
Who said anything about penalizing any one substance? Alcohol abuse is just the most rampant and its effects tend to be the strongest when compared to other illicit substances. I think people that are selfish and ignorant enough to drive intoxicated deserve harsh penalties. Sorry not sorry.
These are examples of enforcement based on questionable assumed outcomes, essentially boiling down to probabilistic pre-crime.
[I just tried to look the case up in the county's court computer system, but it only shows a fraction of his dozens of criminal cases and sadly does not include this one, so I am unaware of the final disposition]
But Greenwald 2021 is something different than Greenwald 2010, and denying that difference is not believable.
https://quillette.com/2015/12/19/glenn-greenwald-fascisms-fe...
Or you could look to his support for Putin, Fox News against traditional media (CNN, NYT, WaPo,...), and his denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Accusing someone of bigotry while arguing that their speech shouldn't be censored is not inconsistent with the position that their speech shouldn't be censored. It's just answering speech with more speech.
His "support for Putin" is some kind of farce where he'll e.g. speak approvingly of Snowden being granted asylum and this is taken as proof of loyalty to the Kremlin.
He appears on Tucker Carlson periodically, typically to advocate for Assange. It's not obvious why saying the same things he does anywhere else is to be condemned just because he's saying them to the audience of Fox. Should we not be trying to convince them of anything? Why is that bad?
He consistently calls out CNN/NYT/WaPo/etc. when they get something wrong, presumably because these are the media he actually reads.
No one seriously denies that Russia attempts to influence US elections, as they always have in every election for decades. What many deny, because there is no credible evidence of it, is that Trump colluded with Russia. The people providing non-credible "evidence" of this have since been caught out as frauds and one is currently under indictment for lying to the FBI.
Personally I find him very impressive. A genuinely independent and courageous thinker, this is incredibly rare in the media.
Of course, there are indeed other solutions that should be studied if they have a chance of reducing harm & death initiated by the act of driving under an influence.
I wonder about that.
We always hear the trope about the drunk driver usually not dying because they're "relaxed," but being relaxed isn't going to do jack when you smash into an overpass at highway speeds or dump your car over a cliff.
Keep telling everyone that drunk driving is dangerous and they're easily going to infer that it's dangerous for themselves. And then which is more of a deterrent, a nasty fine, or death?
They are notoriously bad at executive function generally; deterrents aren't aimed at them.
The deterrent effect of DUI laws isn't on drunk people, it's on people who would otherwise choose to drink when they would then have to drive.
TLDR: British Columbia implemented the toughest anti-drunk-driving laws in Canada. Automobile accident rates dropped 20%. Pretty damn effective.
I do think that one study that shows a robust correlation is a good start, though. That would be the starting point for trying to decide what the optimal tradeoff is.
The thing is though, I think it's a matter of diminishing returns. I bet if you made the penalty for drunk driving death it would reduce drunk driving further, but I don't think many would agree that is a measured and reasonable response to the offense.
Here, take a look at the pretty pictures and tell me again that the results of the new laws are just a result of news media hype: a decade later and DD fatalities still down more than 50%.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/driving-and-transportation...
TLDR: lowering the acceptable BAC level and putting some teeth behind the law radically and permanently changed the DD accident rates in BC. Gosh, such a surprise, that.
People so consistently ignore it or get it wrong that people have to bring it out time and again. For example:
> a decade later and DD fatalities still down more than 50%.
We're trying to distinguish between the effect of the law and the effect of hearing about the dangers.
If the law is still actively being publicized, presumably so are the dangers, so that doesn't work.
If nobody has heard a word about the law in ten years but people remember hearing about the law ten years ago then they also remember being warned about the dangers ten years ago. Maybe once people change their behavior it sticks.
If people don't remember things they heard ten years ago then they don't remember that the law exists either and it can't be deterring anything.
If you really want to do the experiment, repeal the law but keep publicizing the dangers and see if the rate goes back up.
Pull the other one, it has bells on.
Something explains why the law was passed in 2010 and not 30-odd years before. How do you know the same thing that caused legislative action isn't the same thing that caused the behavior change?
Also the way you use correlation isn't causation is disengenous. By your usage apples falling down is correlation not causation. The whole point about that statement is that we should not infer causation if we don't have a good understanding of why the causal relationship exists. In this case we do.
[1] https://www.responsibility.org/alcohol-statistics/drunk-driv...
I'm sorta one, and I'll be the first to say that the newsroom is not a place for activism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the...