South Dakota DUI Law gain momentum
For states that have a time window for per-se DUI laws, the fact that South Dakota lacks one may come as a surprise.
The following quote comes from an editorial:
But some defendants have argued successfully that even though they had a 0.08 percent reading by the time their blood was drawn while in jail, they were driving before alcohol actually reached their blood system.
In other words, they were drunk after they got out of the car.
That this is factually true in some cases makes little difference. That a person can have several drinks and then immediately drive home sober, only to become intoxicated by those drinks as time passes is a scientific fact that no law can change. In the political world it does not matter. Politics has little to do with justice in drunk driving cases, that is until a politically connected person gets arrested fro DUI.
Newspaper editorials mostly support per se DUI laws with look-back windows (that is, if you are .08 or more within two hours of driving, the law does not care if you were sober while you drove, you are still guilty of DUI). Politicians oppose such laws at their political peril.
As a legal matter I oppose these laws because there is no rational relationship between the evil sought to be prevented (driving impaired) and the means of preventing it (jailing somebody who is sober when they drove but drunk later).
However, as a preventative measure, I see where people are coming from who support it. The thinking must be that if we make it illegal to have a .08 or more alcohol concentration any time within two hours of driving, then the would be drunk driver won't try to calculate when they will become impaired by an amount of alcohol they drank (sufficient to cause them to be a .08 or more at some time during the absorption process). If the idea is to scare people out of making the choice to make a quick dash towards home before the booze hits, then they may be on to something, something that even a rational defense could not help but agree with.
The problem is that while these laws pass with fanfare amongst politicians, few people actually pay attention to the changes in the law, and fewer understand the dynamic interplay between alcohol metabolism and the law.
The trend towards two (and even three or four) hour look-back/look-forward windows for per se alcohol DUI laws appears to be irreversible. What we need now, since we are stuck with them in the majority of states, is serious public information.
As a society we will be safer if we educate rather than simply incarcerate.
