This from a report in The New York Times on New Mexico’s increasingly ineffective fight against drunk driving.
After pleading guilty to drunken driving, Joseph Tapia followed the judge’s orders and showed up one night in November at a forum at Santa Fe Community College to hear from accident victims.
The trouble was, Mr. Tapia appeared to be drunk.
More on the problem:
Recently, an Indian tribal police chief was charged with drunken driving after a wreck; the chief business officer for the Albuquerque school system was accused of driving drunk and pleaded no contest; a judge was forced to resign after intervening to release a friend arrested for drunken driving; a chief state district judge resigned after pleading guilty to aggravated D.W.I. and possession of cocaine; another judge quit after being accused of altering court records to make her appear to have been tougher on offenders, and two Albuquerque police officers in the D.W.I. unit were found to have drunken-driving convictions.
NewMexiKen wonders if the solution might be one that was once made to me, I assume in jest. If you drive drunk and kill someone, they hang you along the road at the spot and leave your body hanging there.
And the cellphone talkers, screaming children monitors, newspaper readers, make-up appliers, looking-for-something-in-the-glove-compartmenters, just gotta get through this just-turned-red-lighters, don’t know that my car has turn signalsers, tailgaters, too freaking oldsters, used to driving on the other side of the road and so when I turn down the wrong lane it’s o.k. I’m Britishers, and just-plain-bad-driverers. I have known plenty of people who can drive fine with a drink or two in ’em, but I have never been so frightened in all my life as when I british bloke gave me a lift to the airport: not only did he drive as fast as his car and the road would allow, but he twice turned onto the wrong lane!
Shall we string them all up?
Yep, if they kill someone.
I’d like to add the people who chronically drive about 10 mph under the speed until there is a place to get around them, then they speed up or stay in the passing lane so you can’t get around them without endangering your life. They don’t seem to care how many people get stuck behind them. (Some states have laws about pulling over if a certain number of people get behind you, but they go largely unobserved, and no one seems to enforce those laws.)