By Adrian Pascua
By Adrian Pascua
Let’s say for example that you killed someone while driving drunk. For the sake of conversation, we’ll say that it was a mother and her two year old child.
The penalty for this crime would be a night in the drunk tank and a cheap bail. I guess that’s okay, especially if the victims’ family wasn’t ready for the loss of a mother and a young child.
Instead of getting jail time, you get house arrest and a breathalyzer test before you can use another car. So now, I want to know why the penalty for killing someone while drunk driving is far less than when you commit first degree murder.
If you have money or have lived an honest life, the laws become even easier on you, because now you get six months in the jail, a fine of $10,000, and few hours of community service, just because the jury feels sorry for you. No one really takes DUI laws seriously because of the fact that it’s not really a “criminal” act to get behind the wheel of a car and turn it into a weapon.
You all probably know of the “every 15 minutes” that we all saw in high school. If you don’t, let me educate you: every 15 minutes, someone dies from a drunk driving accident.
That’s every 15 minutes that someone loses a mother or a father, a son or a daughter and, in some cases, entire families. I understand that we’re all of age or almost of age, but at least be responsible about what you do when you party it up.
The penalties for drunk driving may not be that great, but nothing gives you the right to kill a person just because you insisted on driving home since you felt that you weren’t as drunk as your friends. When you kill someone in a drunk driving accident, you should know what you did.
The blood of some person you didn’t know and who didn’t know you should be on you when you wake up to realize what you’ve just done. But if the police clean the blood up for you because you were too drunk to do so, you’ll never have to worry about it.
If I had the power to write the drunk driving laws, I’d have all drunk drivers incarcerated. Somebody that you killed has left something behind, whether you like it or not. You don’t kill just one person in a drunk driving crash, you kill a friend, someone’s child, a husband, a mother. You shouldn’t have the right to live your life like nothing happened when somebody else lost that chance because of you.
When the court sentences someone, the only reason the jury convicts a drunk driver with vehicular manslaughter and not murder of the 1st degree is because they only have enough room to convict “real” criminals, the ones guilty of arson, grand theft auto, robbery and assault; crimes that are committed with a free and “sober” mind.
If you think that’s bad, you should hear about the stories that never make the news, like parents or siblings getting behind the wheel and driving their family home and killing them because they were too drunk to react in time.
If anything, drunk driving isn’t even seen as a crime by the government. The laws are so lax and filled with so many loopholes that the only real consequences from a drunk driving accident is usually twisted metal, a pool of blood and a dead body.