ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 5, 1996 TAG: 9611050057
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
MOTHERS Against Drunk Driving is risking some of the public respect it has earned when its members bird-dog checkpoints set up by police to catch drunken drivers.
MADD members' intent may be to show support for police efforts. But the practice smacks of a vigilante committee that doesn't trust law-enforcement officials to do their job - or, worse, sanctimonious crusaders there to smirk when and if the police nab a suspect.
The presence of MADD observers adds to the invasion of privacy that, to us anyway, has always seemed questionable in the sobriety checkpoints themselves.
In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such checkpoints constitutional, on the grounds that the threat of drunken driving outweighs any inconvenience or constitutional risk to law-abiding drivers who are stopped by police without probable cause.
So be it. But MADD's monitoring of these surely does nothing to ease law-abiding drivers' resentment of them.
Through educational campaigns, this organization has helped change public attitudes about driving under the influence of alcohol, raising consciousness to the dangers that drunken drivers pose to themselves and others. MADD has also worked tirelessly and effectively to strengthen laws against drunken driving. For these efforts, which doubtless have saved lives, the group is to be thanked.
But its members go too far in some of the legislation they recently have sought - and now in hanging around DUI checkpoints, as if looking forward to prisoners' being strung up on the gallows.
They risk becoming successors to Carry Nation, marching intemperately into saloons with hatchets raised, without limit to their righteous crusade.
We have long been fans of MADD. It is partly as supporters of its aims that we now conclude the Mothers should back off.
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