Smartphone Distracted Driving [W:265]

Re: Smartphone Distracted Driving

Andalublue said:

At my age you never take a raise for granted. :lol:

Click to expand...

You spelled rise wrong. :mrgreen:

Re: Smartphone Distracted Driving

I saw a new sign in 'little d' (as opposed to Big D) yesterday. It is now against the law to text or use a cellphone while driving in the Denton, Texas city limits. I got my hands free bluetooth working recently. It's voice activated, and has a cradle button on my steering wheel.

I'm glad that they passed this ordinance. With two universities in town, there's a ton of youngins everywhere. I'll feel much safer on my bike now!

SouthernDemocrat said:

Last Monday I went for a ride on my road bike over lunch. I work downtown and chose a route that I have biked many times before. Just a few minutes into my ride, I was stopped at a stoplight on a broad boulevard that doesn't get much traffic during the day. While I was stopped at that red light a woman was driving while looking at her smartphone and plowed into me from behind at about 40 mph never even seeing me or the red light. I was rendered unconscious at the point of impact, however this has been verified by the driver as well as witnesses. As a result of being hit, I was thrown against the wind shield, then thrown forward a number of yards before being ran over by the same vehicle. I sustained a significant head injury with bleeding on the brain and a severe concussion, a broken scapula, broken ribs, a broken lumbar vertebrae, some damage to my right eye, a tear from my right eye to the top of my forehead that extended clean to the skull and required over 100 stitches (thus disfigurement), muscle damage throughout my body, multiple lacerations and road rash, and some nerve damage on my upper face, head, and lower back. I spent 2 days in ICU and nearly 4 days in the hospital. It may be weeks before I can return to work, and of course my beloved carbon fiber road bike has been destroyed.

So this got me thinking about distracted driving and I looked up the statistics on it. Distracted driving now results in more injuries every year than even drunk driving. I am sure that the person that hit me is not a bad person. However, this would have never happened had that individual not been looking at their smartphone rather than watching the road. So I was thinking as dangerous as smartphone distracted driving is, why are the penalties for it not as bad as drunk driving? There are a lot of people now getting killed or seriously injured by drivers that are looking at their smartphones rather than looking at the road. It seems to me that we really need to crack down on it for public safety.

Is Texting While Driving More Dangerous Than Drunk Driving?

Click to expand...

How about about a law requiring manufacturers to put technology in the phones so that if it is moving faster than 5 mph it becomes disabled?

It would be annoying for passengers, bus riders, and etc. But it would save tens of thousands of lives and it would not be hard or expensive to do using current technology.

Mr Person said:

As to DUI...

Maybe a prosecutor can weigh in, but I cannot fathom how it is that here in MA, the acquittal and dismissal rates of DUI charges are ludicrously high. (I say this as someone on the defense side, appeals). Something like 90% combined.

Now, I've never actually bothered with a DUI case. (Murder and other violent crime mainly, and again, appeals). But basically, I've seen the most ridiculous testimony from police officers stand - say, in a suppression hearing - so long as it wasn't directly contradicted by something like a video, physical evidence, or their own prior statements. I cannot fathom why it is that apparently, people suddenly stop believing the cops when they talk about how someone reeking of alcohol couldn't walk in a straight line, etc.

How are people getting off on DUI so easily? With everything else, it's the conviction/plea rate that is sky high.


And anyway, the penalties are absurdly low. I think they should get worse the higher your BAC, since your rate of causing an accident increases more or less exponentially per drink's worth of BAC increase. Once you're up around 0.2 or perhaps 0.3, you might as well be running down a street blindfolded, firing a gun off.

I also think the police should be required to take a DUI arrestee to a hospital for a blood draw and the state should pay to make sure such facilities are available. This is the most accurate thing to do if you do it quickly. Further, they could easily get a warrant for blood draw via phone to emergency magistrates.

Click to expand...

From my experience, thirty years as a cop, and my opinion, it has a lot to do with the pervasive cultural of alcohol. Some of our judges were famous drunks and it was almost impossible to get a trial much less a conviction. Deputy D.A.s often didn't take drunken driving seriously for the same reason. Then there were the legislators. When I first started we had one, a state senator, that the police routinely drove home and delivered his car after he was stopped driving drunk. The City Attorney was also a drunk and got a pass. An officer arrested a drunken driver who called a buddy in the Elk's Club and a few minutes later a Deputy Chief showed up the tear up the ticket and escort his friend home.

We went through a period where we had to read a page, in Spanish, to every drunk driver before they were given a breathalyzer or blood test. It didn't matter whether they spoke Spanish or not. We had a lengthy questionnaire to read with questions like, "What city are we in right now?"

We had defense attorneys coming up with bizarre defenses and instructing drunks how to avoid convictions. For example, carry a bottle of vodka in the glove box and if you have a wreck make sure you're drinking when the police arrive. Then you can say you were sober when you had the accident but you were so upset you had to have a lot to drink. The defense attorneys came up with the burp defense, too. They got a doctor to say that burping could cause the breathalyzer to give a false reading. So, the drunks they trained would force a burp or two as they got ready to take the breathalyzer test.

If it gets to a jury, most of the people on the jury have driven drunk at least once. The defense attorneys go heavy on how the poor man was celebrating and didn't realize he was drunk because he didn't drink often. One defendant, a sheriff's deputy, got off by saying he was a teetotaler and didn't realize the drinks he was being given had vodka in them.

Our city at one time had the highest per capita DUI arrests in the country. Drunks started leaving town to drink. I was working downtown one day and got a couple of hot dogs from a push cart and sat down on a bench to eat them. I was joined by two construction workers. One said, "Harvey here got a DUI ticket not long ago. How you feel about cops, Harvey?" Harvey surprised his buddy by saying, "They're okay. I was drunk. And when I went to the mandatory program they have I met two bankers, three attorneys, and a judge. I don't mind getting caught as long as everyone else gets caught, too, and these bastards nail everyone." We laughed and I said it was true. People don 't mind being nailed if they know the state senator, the City Attorney, the judge, and members of the Elks Club get nailed, too.

Patrickt said:

We had defense attorneys coming up with bizarre defenses and instructing drunks how to avoid convictions. For example, carry a bottle of vodka in the glove box and if you have a wreck make sure you're drinking when the police arrive. Then you can say you were sober when you had the accident but you were so upset you had to have a lot to drink. The defense attorneys came up with the burp defense, too. They got a doctor to say that burping could cause the breathalyzer to give a false reading. So, the drunks they trained would force a burp or two as they got ready to take the breathalyzer test.

.

Click to expand...

The first bit of this gives me pause, though. Is this an assumption based on the fact that it seemed that a bunch of defendants suddenly testifying that way at trial, roughly around the same time?

Because,

1. It would be the grossest of direct ethical violations for a defense attorney to prospectively instruct people on how to go about breaking the law.

2. It would be tied for the grossest of direct ethical violations for a defense attorney to instruct defendants who just-so-happened to have an open container to explain it away in that manner at trial, if in fact it were not true. It would also be the crime of suborning perjury.

3. While there definitely are bad apples out there - they sometimes, for example, get arrested for helping launder millions of dollars in drug money as happened to one small Boston firm a while back - I have never known any defense attorney to be less than completely scrupulous. Granted, "scrupulous" means zealously defending your client, which in turn means doing everything that is lawful and ethical to maximize the chance of the best outcome for your client - - - something that results in "bizarre defenses" when nothing else is viable. But to cheat like that? I'd be surprised if it happened en masse, rather than perhaps one particular bad apple.




Part 2 to follow.

Patrickt said:

From my experience, thirty years as a cop, and my opinion, it has a lot to do with the pervasive cultural of alcohol. Some of our judges were famous drunks and it was almost impossible to get a trial much less a conviction. Deputy D.A.s often didn't take drunken driving seriously for the same reason. Then there were the legislators. When I first started we had one, a state senator, that the police routinely drove home and delivered his car after he was stopped driving drunk. The City Attorney was also a drunk and got a pass. An officer arrested a drunken driver who called a buddy in the Elk's Club and a few minutes later a Deputy Chief showed up the tear up the ticket and escort his friend home.

We went through a period where we had to read a page, in Spanish, to every drunk driver before they were given a breathalyzer or blood test. It didn't matter whether they spoke Spanish or not. We had a lengthy questionnaire to read with questions like, "What city are we in right now?"

[omitted]

If it gets to a jury, most of the people on the jury have driven drunk at least once. The defense attorneys go heavy on how the poor man was celebrating and didn't realize he was drunk because he didn't drink often. One defendant, a sheriff's deputy, got off by saying he was a teetotaler and didn't realize the drinks he was being given had vodka in them.

Our city at one time had the highest per capita DUI arrests in the country. Drunks started leaving town to drink. I was working downtown one day and got a couple of hot dogs from a push cart and sat down on a bench to eat them. I was joined by two construction workers. One said, "Harvey here got a DUI ticket not long ago. How you feel about cops, Harvey?" Harvey surprised his buddy by saying, "They're okay. I was drunk. And when I went to the mandatory program they have I met two bankers, three attorneys, and a judge. I don't mind getting caught as long as everyone else gets caught, too, and these bastards nail everyone." We laughed and I said it was true. People don 't mind being nailed if they know the state senator, the City Attorney, the judge, and members of the Elks Club get nailed, too.

Click to expand...

Thank you. I actually feel rather foolish for not having thought of the strand that runs through your comment: booze is common, and sense is not. Put two and two together, and it seems obvious that there will be many outs at every level of the system for a drunk, even though the drunk driver is - in my opinion - one of the very worst sort of criminals.

That is....it's bad enough to specifically intend to kill another human being.

But might it not be worse, even, to simply not care whether you're going to kill another human being? And that, simply because you're having some fun?

Ugh.




In my opinion, drunk driving should come with a huge penalty on first offense, and a permanent loss of license on the second (coupled with other serious penalties). To me, it really seems no different than running down a street blind-folded, firing off shots randomly, on a dare (or for whatever reason).

Mr Person said:

Thank you. I actually feel rather foolish for not having thought of the strand that runs through your comment: booze is common, and sense is not. Put two and two together, and it seems obvious that there will be many outs at every level of the system for a drunk, even though the drunk driver is - in my opinion - one of the very worst sort of criminals.

That is....it's bad enough to specifically intend to kill another human being.

But might it not be worse, even, to simply not care whether you're going to kill another human being? And that, simply because you're having some fun?

Ugh.




In my opinion, drunk driving should come with a huge penalty on first offense, and a permanent loss of license on the second (coupled with other serious penalties). To me, it really seems no different than running down a street blind-folded, firing off shots randomly, on a dare (or for whatever reason).

Click to expand...

I agree. It bothers me a lot to see articles about a drunken driver arrested for the 30th, 50th, or 100th time. We had a driver one night running into things. He ran over a half-dozen mailboxes on posts, a number of stop signs and streets signs, and a nun on a bicycle. He killed the nun. He had a number of arrests for drunken driving, drunken burglaries, drunken assaults, but the "system" waited till a woman was dead to lock him up. He's been on probation for a drunken burglary for six months when he killed the woman but he'd never actually seen a probation officer. He's received a list of the rules in the mail.

I don't like seeing people using a cell phone to either talk or text while they're driving but it isnt' close to drunken driving for risk to others.

While I had dinner I was thinking. My vehicle is a 1998 Nissan Frontier. A few days ago I rode with a friend in a new car. It had a Bluetooth sound system that my friend was fiddling with. My sister's car has a GPS that talks to her and shows maps. And, I've heard that some new cars have internet connection built into the dashboard. Do I want guys driving down the road watching porn videos?

It's getting crazy.

Patrickt said:

While I had dinner I was thinking. My vehicle is a 1998 Nissan Frontier. A few days ago I rode with a friend in a new car. It had a Bluetooth sound system that my friend was fiddling with. My sister's car has a GPS that talks to her and shows maps. And, I've heard that some new cars have internet connection built into the dashboard. Do I want guys driving down the road watching porn videos?

It's getting crazy.

Click to expand...

I don't know if this is true, but when I was a kid (1970s) I was told that it was illegal to have any kind of video screen in the front seat where a driver could see it. Safety and distractions and all that. You could have one in the back seat, but not the front.

That made sense to me, but then years later I start seeing things like GPS and other similar type screens and to me these would violate the intent and purpose of that law. (If it indeed was/is a law.) To be honest, I'm not sure I want people looking at their GPS screen while driving... but then I look at my paper map sometimes, so six of one half a dozen of the other.