Crime and punishment, drunk driving edition

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/06/2024 (447 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some crimes are just plain treated differently than others by the justice system.

They just don’t carry the same weight, and sometimes haven’t for years.

Perhaps part of it is that the fact that others can see themselves in the offender’s shoes, and because of that, don’t weigh culpability in the same way.

Heck, maybe you’ve actually been in their shoes. It wasn’t really a crime, you might say as you justified your own behaviour to yourself, “I’m not a criminal. It was just a mistake.”

Perhaps you can’t conceive that you’d ever pull a knife on someone and demand they hand over their cash. You might not ever think you could break a basement window, squeeze in and loot someone’s house. But at the same time, you can very easily imagine either of those situations with you being the victim.

You probably can’t conceive of actually killing someone by pulling a gun and shooting them. But if you did kill someone, you’d understand right away that you’d be going to jail for a considerable period of time.

Not so with drinking and driving offences. It’s almost as if they are treated as an odd sort of “crime-light,” with traditionally lower sentences than you might expect, even when someone is killed.

We’re oddly willing to call drunk-driving collisions accidents, when it really isn’t anything of the kind. It’s an accident when a wasp blows in the window of a car and stings the driver on the eye, and the driver loses control. It’s an accident when a car hits spilled oil and slides off the road.

It stops being an accident when someone makes the choice to get behind the wheel after knowing they’ve been drinking to the point of intoxication.

It’s a crime, and bit by bit, thankfully, it’s being fully and publicly accepted as a crime.

Likewise, there’s the legal responsibility of aiding and abetting that crime.

You’ve probably been in the uncomfortable position of feeling like you really should take the keys from an acquaintance or a friend — or even a customer — yet at the same time, feeling the acute embarrassment of actually having to go ahead and do it.

And perhaps, you’ve even woken up the next morning and heaved a sigh of relief when you read the texts on your phone and discover that a potentially impaired friend got home safely. Because, frankly, you understand at that point that you had failed that particular test of moral responsibility.

As the family of Jordyn Reimer made clear in an op-ed earlier this week — Jordyn was killed by a drunk driver in 2022 — if you loaned a gun to a friend who used it to shoot and kill someone, you would understand the police showing up to charge you for your role in the sequence of events.

Likewise, if you gave the keys to a friend’s vehicle back to that friend, knowing that they are impaired, you should expect criminal repercussions as well. Reimer died after a drunk driver’s keys were taken away, and then returned to that driver by one of his friends.

The Winnipeg Police Service recommended charges against the man who returned the keys. The province’s justice department didn’t agree.

Because the world doesn’t always work in logical way.

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Because, still, there are “lesser” crimes that society seems willing to excuse, and crimes that deserve serious consequences.

With drinking and driving, things that are deliberate choices still end up being classed as “mistakes with tragic consequences” and that inaccurate word, “accidents.”

Drunk driving isn’t an accident.

Enabling someone to drive drunk isn’t an accident either.

It’s time we recognized that.