Napa County drunk driver sentenced to 15 years in prison

The year 2022 marks 40 years of tracking alcohol-related driving trends and major changes in how the United States legally and socially tolerates drunk driving.

The fight against drunk driving has a relatively recent history, and like many other major civic movements, it has been galvanized by the outcome of many preventable tragedies. Many of the alcohol laws and social norms respected today were shaped over the past few decades – not that long ago considering that people have been driving drunk since invention of the automobile.

On May 3, 1980, Clarence William Busch, while driving drunk despite four prior arrests for the same crime, killed 13-year-old Cari Lightner and fled the scene. Busch was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for intoxicated manslaughter and was released on parole after just nine months. Lightner was not Busch's last victim. Several years after his parole, Busch caused his sixth drunk driving accident.

Four months after her daughter's death, Candace Lightner founded the nonprofit Mothers Against Drunk Driving to advocate for stricter laws on drunk driving and ultimately reduce it to zero. the number of alcohol-related road deaths. MADD has inspired new advocacy groups like Students Against Destructive Decisions and Americans United Against Destructive Driving to pursue similar avenues of education, lobbying and victim support.

Even in 1980, drunk driving was regulated inconsistently across states, and penalties were not severe enough to curb the growing number of drunk driving deaths. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration didn't begin tracking alcohol-related driving incidents until 1982, and that same year the number of drunk driving deaths topped 21,000, or almost half of all road deaths.

Despite poor charitable ratings and controversy involving founder Lightner, MADD is credited with helping drive major reforms such as raising the minimum legal drinking age from 18 to 21 in 1984. The impact of this reform was a 16% median drop in car crashes, as well as reducing the legal blood alcohol limit from 0.10% to 0.08%. According to a study by the National Institute of Health, this change reduced the number of deaths caused by impaired drivers by 10.4% and is estimated to have saved nearly 25,000 lives between 1983 and 2014.

It wasn't until 2004 — spurred by a provision in the Department of Transportation appropriations bill signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 — that all 50 states passed a 0.08 per se law that says driving with a rate blood alcohol content, or blood alcohol level, higher. greater than 0.08% is illegal per se, and no further proof of impairment is required.

Anti-drinking and driving campaigns today focus not on driving below the legal blood alcohol limit, but on driving completely sober. Slogans such as “Drunk driving is driving drunk” and “Drive/ride sober or get arrested” imply that driving drunk legally – less than or equal to 0.08 % but not zero – is unacceptable. NHTSA reported that in 2019, more than 1,700 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes in which a driver had a blood alcohol level below the legal limit of 0.08%.

Advances in transportation and evolving technology are creating new ways to prevent driving under the influence of alcohol and other intoxicants. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft are estimated to have reduced alcohol-related traffic deaths by about 6 percent. In November 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which mandates that all new vehicles, starting in 2026, must be equipped with technology that will prevent disabled drivers drunk to drive the vehicle.

The Patel company compiled data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics to identify how drunk driving rates have declined since the 1980s, contextualizing the longer history of the fight against drunk driving. drunkenness. Each year, it presents information on the number of fatal crashes linked to drunk driving and the number of deaths linked to drunk driving.