Getting Away With Murder

"They recover, get out of hospital, drive drunk again and escape prosecution and conviction. It doesn't take them long, which is exactly why the conviction rate has to go up. Ghere needs to be more intervention to get them off the roads."
Dr. Roy Purssell, Vancouver General Hospital

A study in the B.C. Medical Journal creates an interesting and highly disturbing picture of the subterfuges available to sociopaths who have committed murder but manage to get away with it. It is as though we cannot get our minds around the rational understanding that if people choose to drink and drive under the influence of alcohol and in the process of doing so, cause accidents that maim and kill people, they are responsible for their actions.

Even when many of those people have been involved in a series of drunk-driving accidents. Society views them with disgust, but does nothing useful to ensure that their harmful behaviour does not persist, because for some truly amazingly stupid reason we don't invest them with the responsibility of making those dangerous choices of their free will. Their damaging criminal activity is shrugged off as unfortunate.

People are killed, or seriously injured in a way that will deleteriously impact their quality of life for the duration of their lives and those who are responsible are simply not held to account in full justice of a law applied as it should be. Laughably inadequate prison sentences are meted out to offenders, which, with automatic reductions through parole and statutory release laws, sees them serving little time for their offences.

Neither society nor Canadian courts appear capable of viewing quite how serious these crimes are, when habitual drunk drivers, despite having previous convictions, despite having their driving licenses suspended, despite knowing of their casual disregard for the safety of others, can get away with a literal slap on the wrist. If these drivers know they will never be held to full account for their choices, what is to stop them from repeating their offences?

The study published in the B.C. Medical Journal, authored by B.C. doctors and Ontario law professors, outline the legal challenges faced by police in collecting evidence from blood alcohol readings from impaired drivers who have been injured. They are intoxicated, drive their vehicles, cause accidents, and when they too are injured they are taken to hospital. Once there, police are unable to acquire evidence because of medical ethics protecting patients' privacy.

As a result, hospitalized injured, impaired drivers are rarely convicted of impaired driving because the evidence cannot be collected. Only 7 to 11% of such drivers eventually face justice. And a hefty proportion of these drivers simply continue driving while intoxicated. They haven't been held to account, and haven't suffered the inconvenience of having to pay the piper.

What the study pointed out was that even those drivers responsible for killing and maiming other people through their drunk driving episodes eventually go on to face additional drunk driving charges. "Follow up over a 4.5-year period indicated that 30.7% of the injured impaired drivers were engaged on subsequent impaired driving, notwithstanding that they injured or killed someone in more than 84% of initial crashes.

"These studies suggest that our emergency departments may have become safe havens for the worst drinking drivers, those drivers who are involved in fatal of personal injury crashes", according to the study led by an emergency room doctor at Vancouver General Hospital, Dr. Roy Purssell.