There was a recent crash in my area that killed 5 out of the 7 members of a family riding in a minivan. They were traveling through our state back home from visiting an ill family member in Colorado. Five of the 7 passengers were not wearing seat belts and were ejected from the van. They were rear-ended by an 18 yr old drunk driver in an SUV; both vehicles spun out of control and rolled. I should also mention the drunk driver was a fugitive from a California youth facility for drug and alcohol abusers. Nice.
Crashes like this always make me shake my head in disappointment at the loss of life. The family certainly didn’t ask to have their lives taken by this thoughtless, reckless bonehead. He showed complete and utter lack of respect for their lives (and everyone else’s on the road that night) and disregard for the law. He should be punished to the full extent of the law.
But what about the family’s responsibility? It’s hard to say whether or not they would have survived the crash if they had all been wearing their seat belts. I’m not a crash investigator and I wasn’t on scene to make that determination. We all know the statistic that we’re 4 times more likely to be thrown from a vehicle if we’re not belted in. No one expects to be in a crash when they get in the car to drive from point A to point B, but we should be prepared for it. If they had been wearing seat belts, perhaps they’d all still be alive with scrapes and bruises instead of being 6’ below ground today.
These types of moral arguments make my head spin. Each side has responsibility in this crash. Should the 18 yr old have the strictest penalties placed on him because the family members made the decision not to wear seat belts? That doesn’t seem fair. Yet he also made the decision to drink and drive. If he hadn’t, the family might still be here (or might not—maybe something else could have happened to them that night). Should we prosecute based on intent or on outcome? Sometimes both are the same, but in this case, I don’t think it was. What do you think about these situations?
My husband almost got hit by a drunk driver when he was walking on the sidewalk one evening and the car jumped up the sidewalk! It’s too easy to drive in this country! Everyone should be forced to watch videos of accidents and then they’ll be more careful.
Do you know that when I went back to China with my 1 year old I had to sit in a taxi nervously holding her tightly with no seatbelt? The vehicle was not moving very fast luckily. Well, drivers in China drive much better of course.
Heather is not in California. 😉
As far as are drunk people capable of choosing not to drive- yes. Evidence does indeed show that people don’t realize how drunk they are and think they are “safe to drive” when they aren’t, but evidence also shows that if people plan before drinking an alternate way to get home, or to wait a safe time before driving, the incidence of them driving home anyway goes way down. Also, people who know they should not drive if they have had a drink in the last x amount of time and buy into that, are likelier to choose not to drive, last time I glanced over the research. Education is certainly key- but at some point the onus has to be on the person making the choice to drive impaired, because you’d have to be living under a rock at this point to not know that driving after drinking is not ok or legal.
I just this afternoon had to call the police and report an unrestrained child – about 4yo, front seat, no belt at all, in a late ’90s Jeep Grand Cherokee. If I would have thought faster, I actually could have even given them a brand new HBB since I had just spent all day running an educational booth at a safety fair. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of that quickly enough and the light changed. I followed them for a bit see if I might have another opportunity to get the driver to roll down her window so I could simply say “I’ll give you a free booster seat right now if you just let me talk to you!” Unfortunately I didn’t get another chance, so I had to settle for reporting it to the police.
The difficulty with that type of situation is how can you expect a parent who is that careless to even use a booster if it was given to them? Of course, the driver also wasn’t belted. I just don’t know what’s wrong with people …
The drunk driver is 100% responsible for the consequences of his actions. He happened to hit a car with unfastened passengers – that’s his bad luck and he’s entirely responsible for such luck. If he didn’t want to be responsible for it, then he should not have hit them in the first place.
That’s like saying to people with a smart car “YOU made the decision to buy a tiny car, and when my drunk self rammed into you, you died! Should’ve gotten a Hummer, not my fault!”
My personal view is that while the victims’ failure to buckle up is very unfortunate, it does not really lessen the drunk driver’s guilt in any way. By choosing to drive while intoxicated, he took on the risk of potentially injuring others, whether bicyclists, pedestrians, or motorists, and whether they were restrained or unrestrained.
In civil matters, some states apparently do allow a contributory negligence or comparative negligence defense in cases where the victim was not wearing a seatbelt. However, most states do not.
Heather/Murphydog77 – what state are you in? My summary sheet from NHTSA lists California as having a primary enforcement law. Are you in a different state or are you referring to some other proposed upgrade to the law?
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811691.pdf
California does indeed have a relatively high rate of seatbelt use, somewhere around 96%. Interestingly, my state of Massachusetts has the lowest seatbelt usage rate in the country, at 72% — even lower than in New Hampshire, where seatbelts are not legally mandatory for adults. Baffling.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811651.pdf
I was driving to an appointment yesterday and while sitting at a red light, noticed a shockingly high number of unbelted drivers going past. This was a major intersection–not a neighborhood intersection where drivers are pulling out and “just getting around” to putting their seat belts on. And yet my legislature refuses to pass a primary offense law for seat belts because some study showed inflated seat belt usage in my state. Getting back to drunk driving and intent, when you’re drunk, do you necessarily have intent? What I mean by that is, do you know you’re not safe to drive? So does the drunk driver who kills someone know that they’re not a safe driver when they get behind the wheel in the first place? Ugh. We have the technology and it’s easy to do–every vehicle should have an ignition interlock.
I don’t have much sympathy for either drunk drivers OR adults that refuse to wear seat belts. This isn’t 1985, so it’s not like the benefits of wearing seatbelts are new information. I’m of course horrified that the children had to pay for their parents’ foolishness, as well as the drunk driver’s.
As far as penalties go, I think the legal consequences of driving drunk are ridiculously low regardless of the circumstances or outcome. Here’s my (admittedly hyperbolic) solution: first conviction you get a fine, maybe a license suspension, and some time to get your life together. Second conviction you get your license back right away and your airbag replaced with a claymore mine. Too many people have died at the hands of habitual drunk drivers and it needs to stop.
I think that when people drive drunk, they should be punished harshly. Drunk driving is more likely to kill people than almost any other action you could take (without actually saying “I’m gonna go out and kill people tonight.”)
Basically, each time a driver chooses to drink and drive, s/he is choosing a path with a higher-than-normal likelihood of killing someone.
That he happened to get into a “worst case” scenario as far as survival odds of the people he hit was not his fault- but that he hit them while driving impaired in the first place WAS.