Drunk driving as a criminal offense

SIGNIFICANCE:According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drunk drivers were involved in accidents that resulted in 13,544 fatalities in the United States in 2022. About 37 people die from drunk driving accidents each day in the United States. This is one person every 39 minutes.

The term “drunk driver” is loosely applied to all persons who operate motor vehicles on public or private roads while under the influence of alcohol or any other drugs. Motor vehicles are defined by state vehicle codes as vehicles that are propelled by means other than human power. In the broadest sense, therefore, a person could be considered a drunk driver for riding a horse while under the influence of alcohol or other drug. Some jurisdictions go further by defining drunk drivers to include bicycle and scooter riders and skateboarders. Additionally, operators of road-building equipment have been charged and convicted of drunk driving. It is more generally accepted, however, that the term “drunk driver” applies to persons who drive motor vehicles upon highways while intoxicated.

Every US state has a legally defined presumptive limit for determining levels of driver intoxication. All fifty states have set 0.08 grams of alcohol per deciliter of blood as the maximum acceptable blood alcohol levels (BAL), or blood alcohol concentration (BAC), for drivers. These standards mean that drivers whose blood alcohol levels exceed the acceptable state levels are presumed by the laws of those states to be “driving under the influence” (DUI) of alcohol. California holds drivers of trucks to a more stringent BAL standard of 0.04.

Persons of average height and weight generally reach blood alcohol levels of 0.10 after consuming the equivalent of five ounces of alcohol during a one-hour period. Absorption rates vary with body mass and food consumption, but blood alcohol levels tend to drop at the rate of 0.02 per hour after consumption of alcohol stops.

History of Drunk Driving

Sanctions against drunk driving may be said to have originated during the mid-nineteenth century, when railroads began disciplining employees who operated their locomotives while intoxicated. However, similar sanctions would not be placed on operators of motor vehicles operated on highways until nearly fifty years later. East Coast states such as New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts were the first to adopt drunk driving laws shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. As motor vehicles became more common on the roadways, other states began following suit. However, most states still lacked basic vehicle codes for drivers.

In a trend that moved gradually from the East Coast to the West Coast, states began developing motor vehicle codes. New York was the first, outlawing drunk driving in 1910. At that time, the offence was defined simply as operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, and there was no set standard by which officers could gauge levels of intoxication. Drunk driving arrests were thus made strictly at the discretion of the arresting officers. By the mid-1930s, all forty-eight states in the Union had laws on the books prohibiting drunk driving. Many of these laws were adopted in response to the new post-Prohibition drinking and driving culture. In 1939, Pennsylvania became the first state to implement laws that connected blood alcohol content of drivers to drunk driving offenses.

During those early years, driving while intoxicated was not considered to be a major social concern. Even after V-12 and other high-performance engines began taking to the highways in the 1930s, law-enforcement officials did not regard drunk driving as a major problem. That attitude changed after American servicemen and women returned following World War II.

America’s love affair with the automobile and the wide-open spaces offered by a rapidly expanded network of interstate highways drew more traffic than ever before to the roadways. During the 1940s and 1950s, deaths from motor vehicle accidents increased significantly, and the automobile industry worked to improve vehicle safety. Drivers, for the most part, were ignored in assessments of motor vehicle safety. Public awareness of the hazards of driving while intoxicated finally began to develop as the findings of traffic safety studies were published. Federal traffic safety guidelines began to surface in the mid-1960s as a result of these studies. Law enforcement responded to the problem, but generally only passively.

During the 1940s and 1950s, when police officers cited drunk drivers, they typically parked the drivers’ cars and either took the drivers home or called taxis for them. That practice was socially accepted as good enforcement policy. During the 1960s, the numbers of arrests for drunk driving increased as federal highway funding became contingent upon state enforcement of DUI laws.

Public attitudes toward drunk driving underwent a dramatic change after a young pedestrian was struck and killed by a drunk driver in a Sacramento, California, suburb in 1980. Thirteen-year-old Cari Lightner was hit by a car driven by a drunk driver who was a repeat offender. Cari’s mother, Candace (Candy) Lightner, started a grassroots campaign to increase public awareness of the social harm caused by drunk driving. The organization she founded, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), developed into a major national force for tougher drunk driving laws and enforcement.

Meanwhile, as public concern over drunk driving increased, so too did law-enforcement response. A new emphasis on arresting suspected drunk drivers replaced the old informal sanction of parking the drivers’ cars and assisting them to get home. The result of tougher enforcement of DUI laws was a notable reduction in alcohol-related traffic fatalities. In 1982, there were 26,173 alcohol-related traffic deaths in the United States. That number would decline over the next two decades.

Prevalence of Drunk Driving

It is difficult to estimate how many drivers operate motor vehicles while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. One measure of the prevalence of drunk driving can be found in data on alcohol-related traffic fatalities. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 13,524 alcohol-related traffic fatalities occurred in the United States in 2022. Between 2013 and 2022, 11,000 people died each year from drunk driving accidents. However, alcohol-related traffic fatalities are only one measure of the prevalence of drunk driving. In addition to fatalities, thousands of injuries occur as a result of alcohol-related accidents each year.

Another measure of the prevalence of drunk driving can be found in arrest records. According to the , there were approximately 186.6 million motor vehicle drivers in the United States in 2001. During that same year, approximately 1.4 million persons were arrested for drunk driving. (Those figures do not include Wyoming, Ohio, Colorado and Montana, whose arrest records are maintained at local jurisdictions and are not shared in a centralized database.) According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 513,000 people were in jails or on probation in 1997 for drunk driving offenses. That figure compares with nearly 270,000 people in jails or on probation for such offenses in 1986. While the number of continued to drop for several years, it increased in 2020 and again in 2021, when 443,000 people in the United States were arrested for drunk driving.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), typical DUI offenders are White, male, and older and better educated than other classes of criminal offenders. In 1983, female drivers represented only about 5 percent of all DUI arrests. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2010, men were responsible for 81 percent of 112 million alcohol-impaired driving incidents that year. The increase in the number of females responsible may indicate that more women are driving while drunk, possibly due to increased work schedules and social pressures. By 2021, there were four male alcohol-impaired drivers for every female alcohol-impaired driver involved in a fatal crash.

Even arrest figures do not complete the picture of the prevalence of drunk driving. Those numbers reflect only those offenders who are actually observed and apprehended. It is impossible to know the actual numbers of drunk driving offenders because many—perhaps most—are not detected.

Investigation

Almost all drunk drivers enter the criminal justice system through arrests by law-enforcement officers. Some arrests result from police investigations of motor vehicle accidents, but most offenders are arrested in the course of their driving. Patrol officers from sheriffs’ departments, highway patrol agencies, and city police departments are now trained in detecting drunk drivers.

There is no one thing that officers look for to detect drunk drivers. Although most offenders are arrested between the hours of 10:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M., arrests are made at all hours of the day and night. Some law-enforcement agencies have special drunk driver task forces that work during peak detection periods. Officers watch for cars that are traveling too slowly or too fast, aggressive driving behavior, and other traffic offenses. Many drunk drivers are detected simply because they allow their vehicles to drift from side to side in their traffic lanes.

When officers suspect drivers to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs, traffic stops are initiated. If, after stopping the suspect drivers, the officers observe objective symptoms of alcohol or drug consumption, such as slurred speech or bloodshot and watery eyes, they ask the drivers to perform field sobriety tests (FSTs). Every department has policies on the administration of such tests, which may include balance tests, such as standing on one foot or walking in a straight line, and tests involving mental dexterity, such as counting on fingers or reciting the alphabet backward. When drivers fail to perform the test satisfactorily or refuse to take them, arrests are made.

Prosecution

After they are arrested, suspected drunk drivers are transported to facilities where chemical tests of their alcohol levels are made. When blood tests are made, they are administered at hospitals. Breath and urine tests are usually administered at local jail facilities. When breath tests are taken, the results can be assessed immediately. When test results indicate blood alcohol levels below the acceptable limits, the drivers may be released without undergoing prosecution. However, such decisions are at the sole discretion of the arresting officers and are made when the officers consider all relevant facts in the cases. For example, an officer who suspects that a driver has ingested drugs as well as alcohol may elect to pursue prosecution. The ultimate decisions of whether to prosecute are made by local prosecutors’ offices.

Drunk driving is categorized as a misdemeanor in all fifty states, but under some special circumstances it is treated as a felony. Although what constitutes special circumstances varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, drunk driving is always a felony when persons other than the drivers are injured as a result of accidents caused by drunk drivers. Felony charges are also pursued against repeat offenders.

Punishment

Specific laws vary among the states, but most states follow similar general guidelines in the punishments they administer to convicted drunk drivers. In the case of first offenses, offenders are generally required to remain in jail a minimum of four hours—the approximate length of time they need to sober up. First-offense fines usually range from $500 to $1,000. Many jurisdictions allow first-time offenders to go to traffic school to have their arrests expunged from their driving records.

Subsequent drunk driving arrests result in stiffer sanctions. Fines for second and third offenses generally result in fines of more than $1,000 and jail sentences of thirty to ninety days. Offenders who violate DUI laws more than three times are considered habitual and are given six-to-nine-month jail sentences and are assessed fines of around $2,500. In many jurisdictions, felony charges are brought against offenders with more than four drunk driving arrests.

In addition to fines and jail time, DUI offenders face scrutiny by state departments of motor vehicles. In all fifty states, driving is considered a privilege, and motor vehicle departments reserve the right to suspend the driving privileges of drivers who are stopped for DUI and refuse to complete field sobriety tests. Such suspensions follow administrative hearings at which the drivers may have attorneys present. Driving privileges of drivers who accumulate excessive numbers of DUI arrests are also suspended. A new form of punishment that has gained favor in America is the forced installation of ignition-locking devices that allow law-enforcement officials to shut down drivers’ vehicles under certain conditions set forth by the courts.

Bibliography

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