Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306140092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY NOTE: below
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The community has talked to me, at me and with me for the past few days - more than 210 phone callers responding to a question I posed last week: How do we keep motorists with suspended driver's licenses from continuing to drive?
For eight hours, I listened to your recorded messages and I heard loudly and clearly the anguish and the fury of a community. I heard from Hot Springs and from Bristol, from farmers and cops, from doctors and widows and drunks.
I heard a community say in a single message of 200 voices that we have had enough. We do not want Dustin Washburn to die, a 9-year-old with the life smashed out of him on Peters Creek Road because some brute with a yen to party and an accelerator pedal ignores his suspended driver's license and drag races on a public road. We do not want Geoffrey Pelton to die, a 20-year-old slain because some freak with a revoked license wants to see how fast his pal's car will drive on the interstate.
I heard from Dustin's 10-year-old cousin and the neurosurgeon who could not save his life. I heard from Geoffrey's dad. From one of Dustin's school instructors. From a man whose license is now revoked: "It's a miracle you weren't writing about me. Thank God for me. Thank God for me."
I listened at my desk. In my kitchen at home. The number and the passion of the calls were overwhelming, at once inspiring and draining me, robbing me of sleep and leaving me with a nagging question: What good is the voice of a community coming from the tinny receiver of a phone into a single ear?
Friday morning, first thing, I phoned Richard Cranwell of Vinton. A longtime member of the Virginia House of Delegates, he's one member of the community with whom I'd never spoken. We wrestled with the suspended-driver issue. Cranwell called Del. James Almand, D-Fairfax, who chairs the house Crime and Justice Committee, so the three of us could talk.
You have got to hear these voices, I told them. You have got to hear them yourselves.
Almand will call a special meeting of his committee, of which Cranwell and Del. Clifton Woodrum, D-Roanoke, are members. It will convene in Roanoke within a month or so - the sole purpose being to hear our voices and to gather ideas on how to corral the sociopathic drivers who are killing us.
When a date is set, I will advise you.
Now, though, I turn this space over to you and to your voices. How do we stop suspended drivers from getting behind the wheel of a car?
Here's our community's voice:
R.D., Moneta: "If existing laws were enforced, it'd work . . . I'm willing to pay higher taxes to build more jails to keep these idiots off the road."
J.B., Roanoke: "We can't stop them. They have no conscience, no remorse for what they've done . . ."
About 75 percent of all callers suggested the vehicles of suspended drivers caught on the road be confiscated - regardless of who owns them. Many suggested the cars be sold at auction, with the proceeds going to benefit police, charitable groups or the families of the victims, if any. Some states already impound vehicles; Virginia does not.
T.H., Roanoke: "The simplest thing'd be to turn in their license plates and replace them with a bright red set of tags, so police or the rest of us could at least see who they are and ask what they're doing out driving."
Some callers went a step further, or even combined ideas: Impounded cars would be sold, proceeds would fund a reward pool for tips that lead to the capture of suspended drivers on the road. Bumper stickers: "I am a suspended driver. If you see me, call 1-800- . . . "
E.B., Roanoke: "They have to be physically removed from the road. Throw them in jail for long jail terms."
P.G., Roanoke County: "Let them wear an electronic monitoring device, like those people under house arrest. Put their keys in lock boxes timed only to open at times set by the court."
J.W., Roanoke: "Every time this happens, make the judge be a pallbearer at the funeral."
Many callers suggested longer jail terms, with less discretion from judges to eliminate, suspend or shorten jail time.
O.Q., Roanoke: "I'm the parent of a child injured by one of these drivers. I now have $350,000 in medical bills. The driver was fined $50."
K.C.: : "A special police force to check up on people with suspended licenses."
T.C.: "How could this not be a felony? Make it a felony! His charge should be murder!"
R.O.: "We should have more road checks. When I was a kid, we had road checks everywhere. My daughter is 16 years old and coping with the death of a boyfriend in one of these accidents . . . when I was 16, my boyfriend was killed by a drunk driver."
G.S., Roanoke: "Speed controls on all cars. Why should we have cars that go over 100 mph? They're light, they're flimsy. I think speed is causing just as many accidents as the drivers who shouldn't be there."
Anon.: "We need to correct the system - all these hot-shot lawyers and their golf-playing judge buddies are getting these people off light . . . "
G.M.: "They ought to pay all the funeral costs, even if it takes garnishing their salaries for years."
M.L., Orange, Va.: "Make it a felony to knowingly lend your car to a suspended driver."
M.G., Franklin County: "Put a neck collar on them. Humiliate them. Encase a sensor inside the collar that can be picked up and read out in a police cruiser computer."
Anon., Blue Ridge: "The newspaper ought to be publishing their names and their pictures. Put big tags on their cars with DD - Drunk Driver - right on them. The public embarrassment would do it."
J.Q.: "They should have to face a board of victims and survivors, go to a class to listen to what it's done to their lives."
A.S.: "Six-week boot camp."
Anon.: "You put them in front of a wall and you shoot them. You wouldn't have to shoot too many . . . It may sound cruel but I don't think it's any crueler than what they're doing to the rest of us out there."
Anon.: "They drive suspended once, you cut off one of their hands. They do it again, you cut off the second."
Anon.: "I'm a habitual offender . . . I try not to drive, but in this world, you gotta have a job, you got a family, the mode of transportation is the car."
M.R., Blue Ridge: "You put an implant in them, like those birth control things. If they try to start a car, a sensor picks up on the implant and the horn blows and the lights flash, but the car doesn't start."
D.P.: "I got caught for DUI and my license was suspended. I kept driving. I was lucky, very lucky. I think if somebody had thrown me in jail, I would have stopped."
B.C., Roanoke: "Let the habitual offender stay behind the wheel as a crash-test dummy in a controlled test. Send them for 10 years to the Third World, where there are very few cars. Give them a lifetime of room and board - in the morgue."
Anon.: "Hang their pictures in their local post office."
J.W., Roanoke: "Let them use a bicycle! I have no sympathy for someone who can't drive. Let the state sell them a bicycle that looks different from all the other bicycles, so that we can see them pedaling along the road and we know who they are."
Anon.: "You pay my bills and go to work for me and I'll quit driving with my suspended license."
D.S., Roanoke: "The person can worry about getting to work. That's his problem and he brought it on himself!"
J.P.: "I work in the morgue at Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Let them come and do autopsies with me."
J.F., Roanoke: " . . . I would certainly cooperate with this: To have one of these drunken drivers follow me to the emergency room some night and watch me have to tell a young mother that her 9-year-old son is brain dead there in the emergency room and that there's nothing that we have to offer them. I think if they witness the pain of a conversation like that, the tragedy and the hopelessness of it, they might change their mind about what the effect of the drunken driving is on individuals."
by CNB