What if I told you that there was a woman in California who’d had 15 DUIs and was still driving drunk. I know what my dad would have said: “What are they — nuts?”
The traffic authorities in California are not nuts. But over the past couple of decades, the state has allowed a system to prevail that lets repeat offenders keep driving, surprisingly often with a legal driver’s license in their possession.
An extensive investigation by the nonprofit news site CalMatters came across the case of the 15-time offender, a woman who began collecting DUI convictions in 1989 and was still driving last year. Most of the times she was convicted, she was given a modest fine and/or a brief incarceration, often sent to rehabilitation, then let loose on the roads again. This year, on her 16th conviction, she was handed a four-year sentence, but with time off for rehab and for good behavior, CalMatters says, she could be driving again next year.
“We warehouse her for a number of months,” her prosecutor said at one of her trials. “She comes out. She is still an addict. How is public safety addressed by a prison commitment here when we know she has gone to prison over and over again on DUIs?”
The answer is obvious. But the explanation lies in the forest of laws, rules and procedures that govern driving in California. Under that state’s code, it often takes four DUI convictions over 10 years to charge someone with a felony. That’s a bit lenient in itself. But the rules for felony conviction border on laughable. Manslaughter by a drunken motorist isn’t necessarily considered a felony. Causing “great bodily injury” is. So, theoretically at least, drunken drivers who break someone’s leg can be treated more harshly than if they had killed them. Unlike many other states, California does not require first-time DUI offenders to use an in-car breathalyzer ignition interlock.
The usual penalty for a first DUI in California is a license suspension of 6 to 10 months. A vehicular manslaughter conviction normally results in a three-year license suspension. But those convicted often find ways to get back behind the wheel without much trouble. CalMatters estimates that as many as 40 percent of the drivers charged with vehicular manslaughter since 2019, many of them with a history of DUI convictions, are still driving with valid licenses.
The bottom-line result of California’s lenient drunken driving laws is just what you might expect: Alcohol-related highway deaths in the state are up 50 percent over the last decade. That’s an increase more than twice as great as the one the rest of the country was experiencing.
HOW MUCH WORSE ARE CALIFORNIA’S LAX DRUNKEN DRIVING LAWS than those in other states? Worse than most, but not as bad as some. South Dakota is notoriously lenient with offenders. There is no minimum mandatory jail time. Even after a repeat DUI conviction within the preceding 10 years, you can avoid incarceration by paying a fine.
Arizona, notwithstanding its libertarian self-image, has the toughest system in the country. The first time you are arrested on charges of drunken driving, you lose your license immediately, are required to pay a fine of at least $1,250 and must spend at least 10 days in jail.
The national data on drunken driving are somewhat ambiguous. If you take a long view, there’s no doubt that things have been getting better. In the past four decades, while total traffic fatalities were decreasing by 7 percent, drunken driving deaths declined by 41 percent. Among people under 21, these deaths were down 71 percent.
But if you look at more recent statistics, the national picture isn’t quite as encouraging. Over the past decade or so, drunken driving deaths went up nearly 25 percent, from 9,967 in 2014 to 12,429 in 2023. The numbers have improved a bit in the last year, but they are still looking a lot grimmer than the ones from 10 years ago. In 2021, it’s been estimated, 31 percent of car crash deaths in the United States involved drunken drivers.
IT’S A BIT IRONIC THAT THE CENTER OF THIS CRISIS IS CALIFORNIA. It was there in 1980 that Candace Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) after her 13-year-old daughter was killed on her way to a church carnival by a motorist who had just been released from imprisonment after his fourth DUI conviction. Prodded by activists from MADD, California created a special drunken driving task force and followed up with a package of laws imposing a new legal limit for blood alcohol content and increasing the penalties for DUI conviction.
Gov. Jerry Brown called the MADD-generated laws the “toughest package of legislation in the nation against driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.” And in the short run, the effects were striking. In the next couple of decades, alcohol-related road fatalities in California fell by as much as 50 percent.
But it didn’t last. As the number of drunken driving deaths were declining, law enforcement vigilance was declining as well. Between 2010 and 2020, DUI arrests in California dropped by nearly half. Lax police vigilance seems to have been a significant factor in the depressing resurgence of drunken driving deaths over that 10-year period.
But so has an overall change in public attitudes in the state toward punishment and the rights of the accused. California is the birthplace of “three strikes” laws, under which a criminal could be incarcerated for life after conviction for three felonies. But it is also a state where sympathy for defendants has led judges and DMV officials to take a less-punitive approach, not only in drunken driving cases but in cases that range all over the spectrum of criminal misconduct.
In some ways, it’s easy to understand why adjudicative decisions have grown so lenient in the nation’s largest state. Put yourself in the place of the judge or presiding DMV official. The accused drunken motorist is unlikely to be from the upper strata of society, although that does happen. What’s more likely is that the defendant comes from the lower ranks of the working class, or the semi-employed class a rung below that. He or she can’t pay a stiff fine, and jail time will make it difficult to get to work, or to find work at all. Under those circumstances it’s clear, if questionable, why the presiding official might cut the accused a break.
I can’t prove it, but I have a strong suspicion that liberal social sympathies have a lot to do with the debacle of drunken driving law in California. They aren’t the only factor, of course. A shortage of police and judicial and administrative personnel in many places clearly has something to do with it. But so do liberal values.
In the past generation, sensitivity to issues of social equality and economic justice has erased or softened egregious punishment practices that stood for decades just about everywhere in the country. That’s a good thing. But sometimes it has stretched too far. My guess this is what has happened to one state’s drunken driving laws.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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