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"Balko has advocated the abolition of laws criminalizing drunk driving, arguing that the "punishable act should be violating road rules or causing an accident,

"Balko has advocated the abolition of laws criminalizing drunk driving, arguing that the "punishable act should be violating road rules or causing an accident, not the factors that led to those offenses. Singling out alcohol impairment for extra punishment isn't about making the roads safer" That's such a naive and irresponsible, and frankly stupid, position to take. That's the first advocate for drunk drivers/driving I've ever heard of. I'll assume he wrote that for the "shock" value (i.e. click bait). I guess that makes him "remarkable", but not in a positive way. Regarding the Little Rock police chief -- it sounds like race has nothing to do with it. Rather, sexual improprieties and personnel issues are what peoples' complaints are about. The Intercept is hardly a credible journal anymore (hear what its founder, Glenn Greenwald, has to say about it (https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald).

bastardoperator 5y ago
How can anyone with a brain think like this? Drunk driving should come with harsher penalties in my opinion... How to lose all credibility in less than 10 seconds.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  We live in an age of legal weed, and probably soon to be other substance. How can anyone with an IQ above freezing seek to criminalize any one substance rather than just criminalizing a) bad results b) impairment? I don't care what, if anything, you're on. If you can't drive you can't drive. If you can you can. Penalizing any one substance simply because we can measure it seems farcical at best.
  - olliej 5y ago
    A DUI isn’t “drunk driving”. It is driving under influence, and covers all impairments: alcohol, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, etc. If the drug impacts your ability to safely operate a vehicle then DUI laws apply.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      <rolls eyes in loop> Sure, on paper. In reality 99% of enforcement is against alcohol because that's what they have the breathalyzers, blood tests and established law to go after. It's exceedingly rare for someone to get a DUI for anything other than booze unless they are so high they fall asleep at the wheel
      - orf 5y ago
        > I don't care what, if anything, you're on. If you can't drive you can't drive. Yep, and the law agrees… as you agreed. Does it take a freezing cold brain to argue against itself?
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Australia uses saliva tests to perform roadside THC, Methylamphetamine and MDMA tests. My understanding is that the Netherlands also performs similar roadside tests, and Canada is piloting doing so.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
        You're forgetting it's also what most people are on, which is the reason why it's the most tested for. 3 million deaths caused by alcohol every single year according to the WHO! It's almost like some sort of pandemic, only it's been going on forever and society isn't in the slightest way bothered. I find it so odd few see the absurdity in all these public health debates. Now we have a virus going around and people go full authoritarian, even though the majority of deaths is way above the median life expectancy in many countries. Meaning they'd not have lived much longer anyway. But drunks kill tons of random people including kids every year - no biggie. Just to be clear I'm against prohibition, I think all drugs should be legalized. There are millions of people who have serious issues with alcoholism though, and we have to do something against that, because they cause a lot of problems, even beyond killing others. It's farcical that drugs like LSD are highly illegal, even though users aren't known to harm others, but then others like alcohol are so accepted we even arguing about allowing people to drive while impaired with them. If there were data showing that legalizing drink driving would lead to fewer accidents I'd be absolutely willing to consider it. I've never heard of anyone seriously make such an argument though, it seems like total bunk. A professional drinker may be driving inconspicuously, until one day their slow reaction time may not be enough to not hit that person crossing the street at night.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    criminalizing based on impairment is fine but criminalizing based on 'bad results' is what is sometimes called 'moral luck' philosophy and dubious because it attributes punishment based not on intent but on factors beyond one's control. If two people throw a stone at your head and one misses because he happens to be a bad thrower few people would argue that this matters rather than the intent to harm.
    - compiler-guy 5y ago
      If two people throw a stone at your head, and one misses and the other hits, then there are (probably) two crimes involved: Both people assaulted you, but only one battered you. These two crimes have different punishments. It's quite normal to have outcome-based laws.
    - commoner 5y ago
      You're taking a deontological[1] view instead of a consequentialist[2] view. That's a valid viewpoint, but legal systems typically incorporate both views, and consider both intentions and outcomes. In your example, how much of a civil penalty should each perpetrator pay to reimburse the victim's medical expenses? If we only considered intentions and not outcomes, the civil penalty would depend on the average cost of medical expenses the victim would incur from this type of attack, multiplied by the probability such a throw would result in a hit, regardless of whether the stone actually hit the victim's head. But in reality, a court would focus more on outcomes than on intentions for this kind of civil penalty. The perpetrators would pay a civil penalty that depends on the victim's actual medical expenses. It's simply not practical to make accurate probability-based calculations for every damage assessment, and the victim should always be fully reimbursed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism
      - Barrin92 5y ago
        I don't think the issue is deontology or consequentialism here, I think you're actually giving a consequentalist account in both examples, just one time collectively and the other individually. My point is rather that for criminal culpability to exist, there needs to be intent. And (excuse me if this is somewhat inaccurate because I'm not from a common law region), in general a 'guilty mind' is a requirement in criminal law, no? Insofar as people receive lesser judgements for crimes without adverse outcomes the argument is that the better outcome reflects less willingness to commit or go through with a crime. To take an extreme example, no jurisdiction I'm aware of punishes attempted murder substantially less severely than actual murder even if the outcome is that there's no harm done at all. Likewise an accidental death is not a crime.
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    I don't care what people do in the privacy of their home. All of that is out the door when you step foot in a vehicle and put others at risk while driving intoxicated. You can get upset that we don't have the tools to measure other substances but as soon as we do I can guaranteed they'll be deployed and I won't mind a bit. Don't drive intoxicated, it's simple, I do it all the time. If I drink or smoke, I uber to and/or from. It's not a hard concept to abide by. Who said anything about penalizing any one substance? Alcohol abuse is just the most rampant and its effects tend to be the strongest when compared to other illicit substances. I think people that are selfish and ignorant enough to drive intoxicated deserve harsh penalties. Sorry not sorry.
pulisse 5y ago
Balko started out his career as a bog-standard libertarian and staked out some unrealistic positions during that time, but has since evolved into a serious reporter on issues related to civil liberties.
olliej 5y ago
Allowing drink driving is a not unusual libertarian view, much like the their desire to remove the requirement to be licensed to drive.
- oxfeed65261 5y ago
  To be clear, a license is not required to drive, although it is required on public roads.
scythe 5y ago
Dismissing a journalist because he holds one view you disagree with is an interesting standard. Can you honestly say you hold to it consistently?
s1artibartfast 5y ago
I won't support this entire position, but there are a number of regulations for behavior which are correlative and not causative. Good examples for a more nuanced position are zero tolerance laws punishing drivers with any detectable level of bac, without any claim of danger or impairment. Open container laws are similarly problematic. Last but not least are intent to drive' provisions which allow charging of a drunk sleeping it off in the back seat with a DUI. These are examples of enforcement based on questionable assumed outcomes, essentially boiling down to probabilistic pre-crime.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I know someone who spent two years fighting an open container charge for an empty beer can in the centre console he was using as an ashtray.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Yeah, great example. How did it turn out for them?
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      Well, he was demanding a jury trial and the judge didn't want a jury trial for such a petty offense, so the judge scratched out the ticket (the ticket is the formal indictment in a traffic violation in Illinois) and wrote "noisy muffler" on it and asked if the defendant would plead guilty to that instead. He did so. I met him about five minutes later when he realized he'd made a mistake and wanted to get back in front of the judge and rescind his plea. [I just tried to look the case up in the county's court computer system, but it only shows a fraction of his dozens of criminal cases and sadly does not include this one, so I am unaware of the final disposition]
bigbillheck 5y ago
Greenwald's not much of a credible source these days.
- Lhiw 5y ago
- Krustopolis 5y ago
  Please explain. He’s one of the last journalists that I still trust these days. Care to elaborate on your claims?
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    There is no possible way you don’t know what OP means. I can understand if you insist on regarding Greenwald as anything but yet another hack these days: you’d be wrong, of course. But there are too many wrong in that specific way to consider it as remarkable in any way. But Greenwald 2021 is something different than Greenwald 2010, and denying that difference is not believable.
    - Krustopolis 5y ago
      This is not helpful. I asked the OP to back up his drive-by claims. I wasn’t asking for more of them.
      - vajrabum 5y ago
        Google "Glenn Greenwald is unreliable" or simply type his name into Quora's search and you'll soon see the substance of the complaints. Here's one article on the topic. https://quillette.com/2015/12/19/glenn-greenwald-fascisms-fellow-traveller/ https://quillette.com/2015/12/19/glenn-greenwald-fascisms-fe... Or you could look to his support for Putin, Fox News against traditional media (CNN, NYT, WaPo,...), and his denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
        5y ago
dylan604 5y ago
Isn't this why some places are moving from driving while intoxicated (DWI) to driving under influence (DUI)? Doesn't matter the influencer so that it's not specific to alcohol.
jchw 5y ago
I'll play devil's advocate: I doubt increasing the punishments for drunk driving is the most effective way to dissuade people from doing it. It's true that endangering people's lives by driving a vehicle while impaired is detestable behavior, but the desire for retribution should not be allowed to fuel unreasonable sentences and punishments. (Unfortunately, it often is, and it plays well into politicians getting re-elected into positions of power, so I suspect much of it creeps far higher than optimal.)
- judge2020 5y ago
  Looming punishment at least puts it in people's minds, even if a majority still doesn't follow the law; there's a reason a lot of people have a 'designated driver', and I imagine it's more about avoiding the ticket & punishment rather than avoiding endangering lives on the road. Of course, there are indeed other solutions that should be studied if they have a chance of reducing harm & death initiated by the act of driving under an influence.
  - jchw 5y ago
    Well, it is definitely good that a DUI is taken seriously. And maybe it is necessary for alcohol to have specific laws against it in order to make that dissuasion effective. I can, however, understand the position that the current punishments are unnecessarily harsh. What would probably be nice, is if we had data to back up which approaches are effective.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > I imagine it's more about avoiding the ticket & punishment rather than avoiding endangering lives on the road. I wonder about that. We always hear the trope about the drunk driver usually not dying because they're "relaxed," but being relaxed isn't going to do jack when you smash into an overpass at highway speeds or dump your car over a cliff. Keep telling everyone that drunk driving is dangerous and they're easily going to infer that it's dangerous for themselves. And then which is more of a deterrent, a nasty fine, or death?
    - 5y ago
upofadown 5y ago
Well just as long as it would mean that people would actually get punished for bad driving. Right now things are a bit bizarre in that bad driving is mostly OK if you are not drunk. There is no general duty of care. If you didn't do it on purpose then it is just an accident.

bastardoperator 5y ago

How can anyone with a brain think like this? Drunk driving should come with harsher penalties in my opinion... How to lose all credibility in less than 10 seconds.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
We live in an age of legal weed, and probably soon to be other substance. How can anyone with an IQ above freezing seek to criminalize any one substance rather than just criminalizing a) bad results b) impairment? I don't care what, if anything, you're on. If you can't drive you can't drive. If you can you can. Penalizing any one substance simply because we can measure it seems farcical at best.
- olliej 5y ago
  A DUI isn’t “drunk driving”. It is driving under influence, and covers all impairments: alcohol, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, etc. If the drug impacts your ability to safely operate a vehicle then DUI laws apply.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    <rolls eyes in loop> Sure, on paper. In reality 99% of enforcement is against alcohol because that's what they have the breathalyzers, blood tests and established law to go after. It's exceedingly rare for someone to get a DUI for anything other than booze unless they are so high they fall asleep at the wheel
    - orf 5y ago
      > I don't care what, if anything, you're on. If you can't drive you can't drive. Yep, and the law agrees… as you agreed. Does it take a freezing cold brain to argue against itself?
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Australia uses saliva tests to perform roadside THC, Methylamphetamine and MDMA tests. My understanding is that the Netherlands also performs similar roadside tests, and Canada is piloting doing so.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      You're forgetting it's also what most people are on, which is the reason why it's the most tested for. 3 million deaths caused by alcohol every single year according to the WHO! It's almost like some sort of pandemic, only it's been going on forever and society isn't in the slightest way bothered. I find it so odd few see the absurdity in all these public health debates. Now we have a virus going around and people go full authoritarian, even though the majority of deaths is way above the median life expectancy in many countries. Meaning they'd not have lived much longer anyway. But drunks kill tons of random people including kids every year - no biggie. Just to be clear I'm against prohibition, I think all drugs should be legalized. There are millions of people who have serious issues with alcoholism though, and we have to do something against that, because they cause a lot of problems, even beyond killing others. It's farcical that drugs like LSD are highly illegal, even though users aren't known to harm others, but then others like alcohol are so accepted we even arguing about allowing people to drive while impaired with them. If there were data showing that legalizing drink driving would lead to fewer accidents I'd be absolutely willing to consider it. I've never heard of anyone seriously make such an argument though, it seems like total bunk. A professional drinker may be driving inconspicuously, until one day their slow reaction time may not be enough to not hit that person crossing the street at night.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  criminalizing based on impairment is fine but criminalizing based on 'bad results' is what is sometimes called 'moral luck' philosophy and dubious because it attributes punishment based not on intent but on factors beyond one's control. If two people throw a stone at your head and one misses because he happens to be a bad thrower few people would argue that this matters rather than the intent to harm.
  - compiler-guy 5y ago
    If two people throw a stone at your head, and one misses and the other hits, then there are (probably) two crimes involved: Both people assaulted you, but only one battered you. These two crimes have different punishments. It's quite normal to have outcome-based laws.
  - commoner 5y ago
    You're taking a deontological[1] view instead of a consequentialist[2] view. That's a valid viewpoint, but legal systems typically incorporate both views, and consider both intentions and outcomes. In your example, how much of a civil penalty should each perpetrator pay to reimburse the victim's medical expenses? If we only considered intentions and not outcomes, the civil penalty would depend on the average cost of medical expenses the victim would incur from this type of attack, multiplied by the probability such a throw would result in a hit, regardless of whether the stone actually hit the victim's head. But in reality, a court would focus more on outcomes than on intentions for this kind of civil penalty. The perpetrators would pay a civil penalty that depends on the victim's actual medical expenses. It's simply not practical to make accurate probability-based calculations for every damage assessment, and the victim should always be fully reimbursed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      I don't think the issue is deontology or consequentialism here, I think you're actually giving a consequentalist account in both examples, just one time collectively and the other individually. My point is rather that for criminal culpability to exist, there needs to be intent. And (excuse me if this is somewhat inaccurate because I'm not from a common law region), in general a 'guilty mind' is a requirement in criminal law, no? Insofar as people receive lesser judgements for crimes without adverse outcomes the argument is that the better outcome reflects less willingness to commit or go through with a crime. To take an extreme example, no jurisdiction I'm aware of punishes attempted murder substantially less severely than actual murder even if the outcome is that there's no harm done at all. Likewise an accidental death is not a crime.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  I don't care what people do in the privacy of their home. All of that is out the door when you step foot in a vehicle and put others at risk while driving intoxicated. You can get upset that we don't have the tools to measure other substances but as soon as we do I can guaranteed they'll be deployed and I won't mind a bit. Don't drive intoxicated, it's simple, I do it all the time. If I drink or smoke, I uber to and/or from. It's not a hard concept to abide by. Who said anything about penalizing any one substance? Alcohol abuse is just the most rampant and its effects tend to be the strongest when compared to other illicit substances. I think people that are selfish and ignorant enough to drive intoxicated deserve harsh penalties. Sorry not sorry.

pulisse 5y ago

Balko started out his career as a bog-standard libertarian and staked out some unrealistic positions during that time, but has since evolved into a serious reporter on issues related to civil liberties.

olliej 5y ago

Allowing drink driving is a not unusual libertarian view, much like the their desire to remove the requirement to be licensed to drive.

oxfeed65261 5y ago
To be clear, a license is not required to drive, although it is required on public roads.

scythe 5y ago

Dismissing a journalist because he holds one view you disagree with is an interesting standard. Can you honestly say you hold to it consistently?

s1artibartfast 5y ago

I won't support this entire position, but there are a number of regulations for behavior which are correlative and not causative. Good examples for a more nuanced position are zero tolerance laws punishing drivers with any detectable level of bac, without any claim of danger or impairment. Open container laws are similarly problematic. Last but not least are intent to drive' provisions which allow charging of a drunk sleeping it off in the back seat with a DUI. These are examples of enforcement based on questionable assumed outcomes, essentially boiling down to probabilistic pre-crime.

kingcharles 5y ago
I know someone who spent two years fighting an open container charge for an empty beer can in the centre console he was using as an ashtray.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Yeah, great example. How did it turn out for them?
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Well, he was demanding a jury trial and the judge didn't want a jury trial for such a petty offense, so the judge scratched out the ticket (the ticket is the formal indictment in a traffic violation in Illinois) and wrote "noisy muffler" on it and asked if the defendant would plead guilty to that instead. He did so. I met him about five minutes later when he realized he'd made a mistake and wanted to get back in front of the judge and rescind his plea. [I just tried to look the case up in the county's court computer system, but it only shows a fraction of his dozens of criminal cases and sadly does not include this one, so I am unaware of the final disposition]

bigbillheck 5y ago

Greenwald's not much of a credible source these days.

Lhiw 5y ago
Krustopolis 5y ago
Please explain. He’s one of the last journalists that I still trust these days. Care to elaborate on your claims?
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  There is no possible way you don’t know what OP means. I can understand if you insist on regarding Greenwald as anything but yet another hack these days: you’d be wrong, of course. But there are too many wrong in that specific way to consider it as remarkable in any way. But Greenwald 2021 is something different than Greenwald 2010, and denying that difference is not believable.
  - Krustopolis 5y ago
    This is not helpful. I asked the OP to back up his drive-by claims. I wasn’t asking for more of them.
    - vajrabum 5y ago
      Google "Glenn Greenwald is unreliable" or simply type his name into Quora's search and you'll soon see the substance of the complaints. Here's one article on the topic. https://quillette.com/2015/12/19/glenn-greenwald-fascisms-fellow-traveller/ https://quillette.com/2015/12/19/glenn-greenwald-fascisms-fe... Or you could look to his support for Putin, Fox News against traditional media (CNN, NYT, WaPo,...), and his denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
      - 5y ago

dylan604 5y ago

Isn't this why some places are moving from driving while intoxicated (DWI) to driving under influence (DUI)? Doesn't matter the influencer so that it's not specific to alcohol.

jchw 5y ago

I'll play devil's advocate: I doubt increasing the punishments for drunk driving is the most effective way to dissuade people from doing it. It's true that endangering people's lives by driving a vehicle while impaired is detestable behavior, but the desire for retribution should not be allowed to fuel unreasonable sentences and punishments. (Unfortunately, it often is, and it plays well into politicians getting re-elected into positions of power, so I suspect much of it creeps far higher than optimal.)

judge2020 5y ago
Looming punishment at least puts it in people's minds, even if a majority still doesn't follow the law; there's a reason a lot of people have a 'designated driver', and I imagine it's more about avoiding the ticket & punishment rather than avoiding endangering lives on the road. Of course, there are indeed other solutions that should be studied if they have a chance of reducing harm & death initiated by the act of driving under an influence.
- jchw 5y ago
  Well, it is definitely good that a DUI is taken seriously. And maybe it is necessary for alcohol to have specific laws against it in order to make that dissuasion effective. I can, however, understand the position that the current punishments are unnecessarily harsh. What would probably be nice, is if we had data to back up which approaches are effective.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > I imagine it's more about avoiding the ticket & punishment rather than avoiding endangering lives on the road. I wonder about that. We always hear the trope about the drunk driver usually not dying because they're "relaxed," but being relaxed isn't going to do jack when you smash into an overpass at highway speeds or dump your car over a cliff. Keep telling everyone that drunk driving is dangerous and they're easily going to infer that it's dangerous for themselves. And then which is more of a deterrent, a nasty fine, or death?
  - 5y ago

upofadown 5y ago

Well just as long as it would mean that people would actually get punished for bad driving. Right now things are a bit bizarre in that bad driving is mostly OK if you are not drunk. There is no general duty of care. If you didn't do it on purpose then it is just an accident.