Crash Course - Turning points

Turning points
By AMY LINN of the Missoulian

Just ask Kalispell resident Sharon Snell what happens to your life after a drunken driver kills your 15-year-old daughter. She wishes she didn't know the answer.

In the early morning hours of Oct. 5, 1996, Eric Eslick, 25, who had been drinking since the previous afternoon, crossed the center line on Highway 35 east of Kalispell and slammed his pickup truck head-on into a Mercury Sable driven by Tiffany Snell. The impact killed Snell instantly and left her car resting sideways across the road; Eslick's truck bumped to a halt in a nearby field.

Eslick, a repeat DUI offender, would later tell lawyers he'd had as many as 22 drinks in the previous 11 hours. He got out of his truck, uninjured, and lit a cigarette, a witness told police. Snell's car was struck a second time when an oncoming driver, who escaped without injury, didn't see it in time to swerve.

"The car just looked like a piece of paper wadded up," Snell says. "That's how her car looked."

Tiffany Snell had stayed up late to watch videos with a friend that night and decided to drive her friend back home.

"If only I'd told her, 'Don't go back to town,' " says Sharon Snell. "Or if only I'd told her friend to sleep over."

The story of her daughter's death, Snell says, seems to be all about timing or fate, those seemingly minor things that made Tiffany stay up past midnight, or the fact that Sharon Snell went to bed and mumbled a mid-sleep assent to Tiffany about driving the friend home, when she should have forbidden it.

"What if I hadn't gone to sleep when I did that night?" Snell says to herself, even now, nearly six years after the crash.

But the real story, observers say, is not about what any loving mother did not do. It is about Montana, and what Montana did not do. What if Montana had better laws?

"When some stranger comes into your life and absolutely wrecks it, you've got to have something like that – some bigger picture," says Karen Oakland, director of Yellowstone County's Mothers Against Drunk Driving. In 1993, Oakland's daughter and her daughter's friend were both killed by a drunken driver in Wyoming. "Losing your only daughter frees your calendar up a lot, believe me" she says.

A wide array of different groups over the years, from MADD to nearly every traffic-safety organization and alcoholism-research center, has outlined the ways in which Montana could embrace the bigger picture. The following are a selection of laws and programs in other states – and in Montana – that have proved effective in the war against drunk driving.

Those who oppose lowering Montana's 0.10 blood alcohol content (BAC) limit to the federal standard argue that the 0.08 limit would punish social drinkers who have two or three drinks. The government's focus, they say, should be on fighting hardcore DUI offenders with BAC levels of 0.15 or more; people with a BAC of 0.08 are not seriously impaired.

Others take exception to the science behind the issue: for example, impairment charts.

"You're telling me that a 180-pound man can have four drinks on an empty stomach and not be at 0.08? It's horsesh--," says Mark Staples, legal counsel for the Montana Tavern Association, who thinks people would hit 0.08 with far less to drink. "Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to see a public test."

"He's just wrong," says Marcelline Burns, executive director, research psychologist and investigator for the Southern California Research Institute, and one the nation's leading experts on the effects of alcohol. Burns has written papers on the subject for 25 years.

"People who say 'I'm not impaired at 0.08' are also wrong," Burns says. "You can be impaired for driving without feeling intoxicated or acting intoxicated. People think you're OK when you're not falling down drunk, but that's not the case."

To date, nearly 300 studies have established that drivers are significantly impaired at the 0.08 percent BAC level and are "at risk for causing harm to themselves and others," according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

A large number of other studies, the NHTSA reports, provide consistent and persuasive evidence that 0.08 laws, particularly in combination with other anti-DUI measures, are associated with fewer alcohol-related fatal crashes and fatalities. "Multi-state studies have reported reductions ranging from
6 percent to 16 percent," the NHTSA says.

As for the 0.10 percent BAC limit, many countries consider that amount of alcohol in the blood to constitute "gross drunkenness."

"The United States, in fact, is the only industrialized nation to have a BAC limit this high," the NIAAA says. In most other countries, the standard BAC level is 0.05, a limit Norway, for example, adopted in 1936. In Sweden, the legal limit is 0.02.

Some of the steepest reductions in alcohol-related traffic fatalities have occurred in states with a wide variety of laws that serve as companion pieces, working together to deter drunken driving or separate DUI offenders from their licenses or vehicles. Measures that work particularly well in tandem, research shows, are 0.08 BAC limits and administrative license suspension (ALS) laws.

Currently on the books in 41 states and the District of Columbia, ALS laws (also known as administrative license revocation laws) allow police to seize and suspend drivers' licenses on the spot when people fail or refuse a blood-alcohol test. Drivers are given temporary permits that stay valid for days or weeks. Drivers during that period have the right to a prompt administrative hearing at which they can appeal the suspension. If they don't appeal, or lose their appeal, the license suspension stands for a prescribed time period, typically from 90 days to one year, or until their criminal cases have been resolved.

The American Civil Liberties Union and public defenders have argued that the laws violate due process. But in numerous legal challenges, the laws have been declared constitutional, in particular because of the prompt hearings they offer. Fans of the measures say they reduce offenders' incentives to use delay tactics in criminal cases so they can hold onto their licenses. And in one study, DUI offenders who had their licenses confiscated had lower rates of re-offending over the next two years than those whose licenses were not taken away, the NIAAA reports. The laws also boost deterrence among teen-age drivers, up to 90 percent of whom say they would not drink and drive if it meant losing their license, surveys show.

For DUI offenders and others who continue to drive after their driver's license is suspended, some states offer instant punishment, from "boots" that disable their cars to special stickers on their license plates that give police instant cause to pull them over. In California, drivers caught with a suspended or revoked license face the immediate 30-day impoundment of their vehicle. "If people fear anything, it's the car impoundment," says Lt. Wayne Bridges, a 15-year veteran of the California Highway Patrol in Sacramento. Offenders have to pay the tow and storage fees to get vehicles back, which defrays program costs.

Thirty-five states have enacted laws that ban open alcohol containers in vehicles and, by inference, ban drinking while driving.

"I think without open container laws, the message we're sending is, 'It's OK to drink and drive, just don't over-drink,' " says Attorney General Mike McGrath, who supports an open container law for Montana. "Maybe we ought to have a standard that says 'Just don't drink and drive. Period.' "

In 2001,when the NHTSA sent a team to Montana to assess the state's impaired driving problems, the resulting 69-page report mentioned one thing at least five times: The state needed to restore funding to its system of DUI task forces. For 15 years the groups had been boosting enforcement efforts, providing a public service and saving lives, the report concluded.

Unfortunately, they were also shut down by the 2001 Legislature, which diverted money earmarked for their program and used it to help balance the state budget. Until then, and as required by state law, the task forces received a portion of the $100 fines that DUI offenders paid to have their driver's licenses reinstated. Recently, the fines brought the Department of Transportation about $250,000 each year; half of it was sent to the groups.

"In our county, we would hire extra officers to work shifts to look for drunk drivers," says Deputy Lewis and Clark County Attorney Michael Menahan. "And that loss of money means we're going to have less officers out on the street." Legislators "gutted a successful program," he says.

The Flathead County task force provided free server training to educate employees at local taverns, says Sharon Snell, who has been active in a number of anti-DUI efforts since her daughter's death.

The Missoula task force used the money to pay for extra patrols during holidays or events such as the Testicle Festival at Rock Creek.

"This program saved lives," says Lonie Hutchison, former traffic safety coordinator for Missoula County and current director of Safe Kids/Safe Communities for Missoula. "People in the Legislature don't care if Joe Blow gets whacked by a drunk driver," she says. "They really don't."

Gov. Martz and the Department of Transportation say there is an equivalent federal program for former task force members to join: Safe Kids/Safe Communities gives three-year grants to groups who launch new traffic safety programs.

But Montana doesn't need a new program, Hutchison says. It just needs to revive the old one.

By the time someone is a convicted of their third DUI offense, they have a serious problem, prosecutors say. So does Edward Fiandach, one of New York state's leading DUI attorneys and author of three books on the subject. "Having a fourth-time felony is a big mistake," Fiandach says. In New York, he notes, the second DUI conviction in a 10-year period is a felony.

"What's important is that it gets perpetrators into the system and keeps them there, which can potentially help keep them in line, or increase their penalties if they step out of line.

"You need probation and what we call 'shock probation'... that first six months behind bars," he says. "That sends home the message that tells people this is serious business." It's also important to have vigilant and aggressive probation officers, he says.

In New York, "they will Breathalyze people (give them breath tests) in their homes and when they show up for appointments."

Montana will get no results, no matter how many new laws it passes, if there is no law enforcement to back the laws up. The state is currently trying to enforce a meager palette of laws with a meager force of Highway Patrol road officers: just 167 for the state, the same staffing level as in the 1970s.

"It'll cost money to beef up patrols," says Bill Muhs, president of the Gallatin Valley chapter of MADD, "but sometimes you have to pay the piper."

Among the ways the state could cover some of the costs: DUI offenders with no money could contribute work hours; first-time DUI fines could be doubled to $1,000, he says.

Reducing drunken driving, moreover, would save money in the long run, since every alcohol-related fatality costs thousands of dollars in lost wages, hospital bills, increased health and auto insurance premiums, property damage, and imprisonment costs, which run to about $23,000 annually for an adult male – almost the same as the $26,800 yearly starting salary for a state trooper.

"If people could just see what these crashes leave behind," says Lt. Bridges of the California Highway Patrol. "You can't imagine the number of accidents I've seen that take out a mother and father and leave orphaned children."

"I was really shocked at what I saw about Montana and how liberal the DUI laws are," he says. "I was amazed that the whole state wasn't completely banged up by drunk drivers."

Reporter Amy Linn can be reached at alinn@missoulian.com or at 523-5358 .