So I'm going to Prison for 2 years

[steggy]

[ QUOTE ]
I hope you learn something while you are there. 3 DUIS, some of them aggravated (you shouldn't have been driving, even sober), definitely deserve this sentence, if just to have you off the roads.

What's the difference between a drunk driver who swerves around the road, and is occasionally in the wrong lane, who makes it home and falls asleep and the drunk driver who swerves around the road, and is occasionally in the wrong lane, who head-on's a family on the way home from visiting their grandparents?

Just luck.

Therefore I don't think whether an accident even occurred should be relevant - it's like blindfolding yourself, twirling around, and firing a bullet in a mostly empty city street. Most of the time you'll miss, but occasionally you'll hit someone. Do you punish the guy who, purely out of luck, hit someone and let the guy who didn't out with a slap on the wrist?

I say you deserve your 2.5 years, not because penalties like this scare others into not DUI-ing, but because you being off the road is safer for the rest of us.

Do what you want with your friends and other consensual people, but don't play Russian roulette with uninvolved parties by stepping behind the wheel of a vehical you can't properly control.

edit: And yeah, I'm not giving you the benefit of the doubt that you were somehow still a competent driver while drunk.

[/ QUOTE ]


The difference is the other person hit a family. Pretty big difference IMO.

What's the difference between someone who runs a stop sign and gets pulled over and someone who runs a stop sign and hits a car full of kids and kills them all? Do you punish the guy who, purely out of luck, hit someone and let the guy who didn't out with a slap on the wrist?


(This post is irrelevant to OPs situation.)



This thread would have been a lot cooler if we actually could get more insight about anxieties before going to prison, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

[OrrLives]

[ QUOTE ]
i hope you get raped a lot

[/ QUOTE ]

booooooooo

[Schwatt]

Wow the laws sure have changed since I got my DUI's. Or maybe the state laws are that much different.


I got 3 DUI's in less than 2 years, 1 of them on a suspended license and I only spent a weekend in jail total.(not counting time in detox)

2.5 years is pretty harsh. Did you not have a lawyer or what?

I am from a small town, and if you are drinking and underage, you are in a vehicle. We used to just cruise empty gravel roads outside of town at about 15mph. Pretty low risk.

Yes I agree it is still a very stupid thing, so don't go off on me about it.

[Jay.]

[ QUOTE ]


Not sure it all depends on what security level i get classified in (most likely mininum). Maybe Florence

[/ QUOTE ]

Florence is a really nice city. Lots of good food and hot women. Rent scooters one day and trash around the city. Enjoy!

[Henry17]

[ QUOTE ]
I got 3 DUI's in less than 2 years, 1 of them on a suspended license and I only spent a weekend in jail total.(not counting time in detox)

[/ QUOTE ]

Did you have representation? My general observation has been that, at least in my jurisdiction, the punishment for DUI is 4 to 5 times greater for individuals who do not get lawyers.

The problem I have with the 2.5 years is not the length of time so much as the relative length of time. This thread occurred to me yesterday when I was listening to the news and a women who assaulted a baby in her care (daycare worker) causing brain damage got 18 months of house arrest. One of my last criminal cases was a drug dealer. He sold crack, was the leader of a small gang, was found with a weapon and was also charged with assaulting a competing drug dealer. He got 3 years. When you factor in double time for time served pre-trial he ended up spending less time in jail than OP.

[inishowen]

2.5 years is pretty harsh, 10 years from now it'll probably be 5 years.

Anybody else find it odd that MADD executives are paid over $12 million on a $45 million budget?

Is it fairly obvious that they lack any incentive to say enough is enough regarding DD laws?

Has our biology changed that much in the last 20 years that what once was considered impaired at .12 became .10 and now .08? Or is it more likely that the level will continue to drop regardless of the science of BAC impairment?

Here's a formula: take an emotional issue, raise money to combat it, basically achieve the initial goal, misconstrue facts to keep the issue at the forefront, raise more money, when the issue has been saturated sharpen legislation to the point of imposing on peoples civil liberties, raise more money, lastly make up stuff to keep the issue pertinent, raise more money.

Don't think so? Then why does MADD want to make drinking and driving a golf cart, while playing golf, a crime?

DD laws will continue to be more and more punitive. Not for cause but for the almighty dollar. It is a huge industry. The founders of MADD were long ago ousted by the corporate execs who run the "business" on a for (their own) profit basis.

Last stop will be prohibiton. Followed by a valiant effort to eliminate the evil that is better known as cough syrup.

[NickdaNutz]

This thread has obv gotten out of hand.

Its sad that MADD is being villified more than the OP and the drunkards in this thread. I have a friend of the family that works for MADD because her two sons were BOTH killed in seperate drunk driving incidences.

My guess is nobody in this thread is qualified to discuss the appropriateness of 0.08 as a level.

The only part of the thread that made me laugh was when the DUI defenders kept mentioning that it was a fact that there were articles proving that a reduction from 0.10 to 0.08 has not resulted in less traffic fatalities.

http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/cgi/...stract/6/2/109

Article:Effects of recent 0.08% legal blood alcohol limits on fatal crash involvement

Results—States adopting 0.08% laws experienced a 6% greater post-law decline in the proportion of drivers in fatal crashes with blood alcohol levels at 0.10% or higher and a 5% greater decline in the proportion of fatal crashes that were alcohol related at 0.10% or higher.

Conclusions—If all states adopted the 0.08% legal blood alcohol level, 400–500 fewer traffic fatalities would occur annually.

I found this article after looking for 2 minutes.

[NickdaNutz]

Another minute of searching has led me to this article:

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/co...ract/157/2/131

Association of Alcohol-related Laws with Deaths due to Motor Vehicle and Motorcycle Crashes in the United States, 1980–1997

From 1980 through 1997, laws mandating a BAC of 0.08 g/dl per se and zero tolerance laws had modest associations with a reduction in overall traffic mortality: approximately 3 percent and 4 percent, respectively. Both had stronger associations with reductions in crash fatalities attributable to alcohol: approximately 14 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Administrative license revocation laws were associated with a 5 percent reduction in overall mortality and alcohol-related mortality. Implementation of mandatory jail terms for persons first convicted for driving under the influence of alcohol was associated with an overall 2 percent increase in traffic mortality, while there was a 5 percent reduction in alcohol-related traffic mortality. Implementation of laws that explicitly allowed police to set up sobriety checkpoints for controlling drinking and driving did not appear to be related to a reduction in overall traffic mortality or alcohol-related traffic mortality.

Our study had several limitations. With the methods used, we were unable to measure any police effort to enforce a law. Substantial variations might occur within a state and between states. We did not account for any policy, law, or program applied at a county or city level. This is especially important for the evaluation of sobriety checkpoints, which have been mostly applied at local levels and at specific times (47). Another potential limitation, one that is common to most studies that deal with this subject, is the high proportion of missing information on BACs. We used multiple imputation methods in an attempt to reduce the bias that may result from only considering data without missing values. We dealt with missing BAC values by employing the multiple imputation methods suggested by Rubin et al. (43); we think the method of Rubin et al. is an improvement over the method of Klein (44), because continuous rather than categorical values of BAC are imputed and because multiple imputation allowed us to account for the uncertainty regarding the missing BAC values. Finally, defining denominators to evaluate the association of laws with deaths is difficult for motorcycle crashes. Data on total vehicle miles driven for motorcycles is not available by state and year, because not all states report this information. Data on registered motorcycles are available but serve only as a rough estimate of motorcycle use.

Our study had several strengths. We used models appropriate for longitudinal count data, took into account changes in mortality over time, and evaluated possible interactions between the laws. We calculated alcohol-related deaths based on the relative risk of being in a fatal crash due to a specific driver BAC, as described by other investigators (38, 48), because this is a more accurate assessment of alcohol-relatedness than proxy measures such as single nighttime crashes (11, 49) or police-reported alcohol consumption (49, 50). This explained the smaller percentage of alcohol-related deaths that we estimated in comparison with some other studies (1, 6, 30, 49, 51, 52).

BAC 0.08 g/dl per se laws
Our finding of a 14 percent reduction in alcohol-related deaths due to implementation of BAC 0.08 g/dl per se laws is similar to that of several recent studies (9, 10, 53). Another study (6) found only five of 11 states to have a significant reduction in mortality. Our findings differ from the findings of a North Carolina study (14) that reported no overall association of these laws with a reduction in alcohol-related deaths.

Two studies (6, 54) used the ratio of the number of fatalities for drinking drivers to the number of fatalities with no drinking drivers as their dependent variable. Another study (9) used a proportion of fatalities rather than the actual count. This use of ratios could bias estimates as described by Kronmal (55) and others (56–59). A recent systematic review of studies reported an estimate similar to ours (60).

Zero tolerance laws
Our estimate of a 12 percent reduction in alcohol-related mortality due to the implementation of zero tolerance laws is consistent with findings from other studies as reported in a systematic review (12). Previous studies estimated reductions in mortality between 11 percent and 33 percent after implementation of zero tolerance laws in the United States and Australia. Our finding that the association of these laws was greater among alcohol-related crashes supports the view that these laws affected their target population.

Administrative license revocation laws
Administrative license revocation laws were associated with a 5 percent reduction in overall motorcycle mortality and a 2 percent reduction in alcohol-related motorcycle mortality. This is consistent with findings by Whetten-Goldstein et al. (49), who reported a statistically significant fatality rate difference of –0.04 per 1,000 persons, and Zador et al. (61), who reported a 9 percent reduction in nighttime fatal crashes.

Sobriety checkpoints
Enacting laws that allowed police to set up sobriety checkpoints did not appear to be related to a reduction in overall mortality, and it had a minimal, statistically nonsignificant association with lower alcohol-related mortality. Other studies (47, 62–64) have reported a benefit from sobriety checkpoints. Those studies used information about the degree of enforcement, whereas we could not account for actual enforcement.

Mandatory jail terms upon first conviction
For all alcohol-related deaths, mandatory jail terms imposed upon the first conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol were associated with a 5 percent reduction in mortality. Previous studies have differed in their conclusions regarding these measures (49, 65–67), ranging from no effect (49, 67) to a 40 percent decrease in reoffending (65).

Other laws
Primary seat-belt laws were associated with reductions in traffic mortality in all crashes and in alcohol-related crashes. This association was slightly weaker for alcohol-related crashes—a finding consistent with evidence that intoxicated drivers are less likely to comply with seat-belt laws (68–70). Secondary seat-belt laws appeared to have no association with reductions in traffic mortality among any of the groups studied. This is consistent with other evidence that primary seat-belt laws are more strongly related to mortality reductions than are secondary seat-belt laws (68, 71).

Universal helmet laws appeared to be strongly related to reductions in traffic mortality in all motorcycle crashes, as well as in alcohol-related crashes. Several studies have evaluated the relation of universal helmet laws with mortality (15, 16, 18, 72–74), estimating changes that range from 12 percent to 73 percent. Our results are generally consistent with those findings. Selective helmet laws were not associated with significant reductions in motorcycle fatalities.

This study provided information on the effect of alcohol-related laws in the 50 states and the District of Columbia during a period of 18 years. Our results support recent policy measures that set a national level of 0.08 mg/dl for BAC (75). Additional measures such as zero tolerance laws and administrative license revocation laws may also have reduced mortality due to drunk driving.

I would do more searching for the lazy drunks but I have to get back to work; my lunch is over.

[Schwatt]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I got 3 DUI's in less than 2 years, 1 of them on a suspended license and I only spent a weekend in jail total.(not counting time in detox)

[/ QUOTE ]

Did you have representation? My general observation has been that, at least in my jurisdiction, the punishment for DUI is 4 to 5 times greater for individuals who do not get lawyers.



[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah I got an attorney who specializes in DUI cases. I know probably 10+ people with 1-2 DUI's, and NONE of them have ever served more than a couple of weekends for a DUI because they got a lawyer.

If you can't afford it, the relative cost of a good attorney is worth taking out a loan for in cases like this.

[BarryLyndon]

Try to get yourself an appellate attorney and hope that an issue works out for you.

I dunno what to say, man. Happy trails. I mean, that's just gonna be some long [censored]. Basically, try to find a few guys who can't play poker + won't rape you if you pwn them. Look forward to that, learning a new language, and becoming a better person. I dunno. Tough.

Barry