And I specifically never made such a comment. Instead, I said drunk drivers don’t expect to kill anyone. Not that they don’t expect to be caught. They don’t expect that to happen either, but they are probably much more afraid of being caught than they are of causing an accident.
26,000 people are caught drinking and driving in Austria each year. In 2014, 2,900 people were injured and 32 people died. The risk of being caught is more than eight hundred times higher than the risk of killing somebody. So the penalty for drinking and driving is also about eight hundred times more relevant for deterrence than the penalty for vehicular manslaughter.
I would say the risk of killing someone when firing a gun at a crowd for celebration is a tad higher than one in eight hundred. What are you getting at? Are you saying that Afghanistan-style shooting into the air at a wedding and accidentally killing someone should be punished the same way as shooting at the crowd? Or are you saying that drunk driving is worse than irresponsible shooting?
No, I haven’t. I have just read the “twelve steps” that the programme is based on. I see now there secular groups that modify those twelve steps. Do they exist everywhere that judges like to sentence people to mandatory AA?
Or he might need to learn about probability theory, or to better estimate his own skill level. Someone who causes a drunk driving accident might be an alcoholic who is unable to keep himself from drinking, or someone who was too dumb to realize that no, he’s not a genius driver who can drive safely even with a high BAC, so that nothing bad will ever happen.
Which in turn is better than the death penalty. Which in turn is better than being slowly tortured to death.
But it’s not always that easy to compare. Ten years of being not allowed to leave your country, and being threatened with 10 years of prison for drinking any alcohol, that’s definitely worse than a few months in prison.
I only just now realized that the video that “recently surfaced” was not something that someone innocently posted to a facebook page, but a deliberate attempt by someone to snitch on him. I wonder what kind of person that was. As in “look here, he’s at a party, so please put him in jail for 10 years”. That’s first-rate Blockwart mentality in my book.
I did a little bit more reading on the case and found this LA Times article that says that prosecutors want to add as many conditions as possible to his probation, and then just “sit back and wait for him to fail” and spend 40 years in jail. WTF?
Dear Americans, I deeply respect American constitutional tradition for having the strongest interpretation of free speech rights that I know of, but are you sure that the Eighth amendment is anything but a colossal waste of the paper that it’s printed on? Save the trees!
