Monday, January 4, 2010

I'm for Drunk Driving

I noticed today that a south Florida child abuse prevention group is asking that "The Who" be removed as the halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl. The reason, they say, is that Pete Townsend (lead vocalist) for the band, "is a registered sex offender."

I read the rest of the story... and, Pete Townsend was apparently arrested in 2003 for possessing child pornography but...

He was cleared, never convicted. Yet, in England, apparently they put you on their list of registered sex offenders anyway. Is it fair, oh, not by our standards of innocence until guilt is proven, but it's England, not the USA - and they do things differently about things like that. They have a MUCH more intrusive police presence, including neighborhood watch cameras in places of higher crime or where there is a potential terrorist threat.

No matter, though, this group still uses charged language which, unless you dig a little deeper, makes it sound as if Townsend was CONVICTED of being a sex offender - I mean after all, if you weren't convicted why are you registered as a sex offender. The average citizen will not dig deeply enough, and the group wasn't responsible enough to apparently check facts or if it did, to properly convey reality about the nature of Townsend's arrest and reason for his presence on a watch list. Townsend, were he in the US, might have a claim of defamation against the government for placing him on a watch list when he was never convicted of any crime and was, to all accounts, exonerated, but this ain't the US, and he probably has no recourse.

Which brings me to the point - in the US (and elsewhere it seems) we seem ready to use 'zero tolerance' programs to usurp rights, to expel children from school, to leap to these kinds of illogical extremes, not bothering to weigh the validity of the complaint or supposed offense. We do so because it's easier for administrators to NOT have to use their judgement about appropriate punishment, and we seem to get some satisfaction in pretending to be tough by creating mandatory sentencing guidelines which give judges no latitude to use juris prudence when they should have such liberty. We instead hide behind ubiquitous one-size fits all justice like the stupid sex offender registry list program which the UK employs, and which we emulate in other areas.

When did discernment become impossible? When did a person's responsibility to treat others with fairness and consideration of the ACTUAL facts become void? Moreover, when did our fear of things like pen-knifes in a 10 year-old boy's backpack become so overwhelming that we would rather stigmatize that boy with expulsion than allow the Principal to look at the actual facts - in some vain and useless and horribly overblown attempt to keep our kids safe? Franklin Roosevelt, in one of the most prophetic quotes of our age once said, "The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." I believe he meant that we cannot allow our fear of .. Fascism, crime, terrorism, whatever, to allow us to destroy our basic freedoms, we cannot allow it to control our judgement and lead us into diluting our liberties and our common requirement to use good ethical standards. In fact, I believe it is in the worst of times, just as Roosevelt pointed out, that our true ethical mettle is tested, and it is either found strong, or found - due to fear - wanting.

Yet, in cases like Townsend, or those who parade around as 'against drunk driving' - we feel somewhat intimidated to stand up and say, "Shame on you - this had NOTHING to do with protecting kids, it had to do with you not checking your facts and overreaching, you were wrong and you were irresponsible." The reason we don't is that we don't want to be labeled as 'weak on .. (sex offenders/crime/drunken driving)" or appear to be defending them, it's not politically correct - and make no mistake, it's endemic to both the left and the right - it's some people's PC'ism of choice (to advocate to be "tough on " X - whether it's illegal immigration, terror suspects or criminals) - and they'll put a spit thru anyone who speaks out against such excess.

Well, sometimes you stand up and say, "What the hell??" - saying you're against drunk driving or want to be tough on crime implies others are FOR drunk driving or want to give criminals your valuables and access to your daughters (and sons) - there isn't anyone (credible) who is anything like in support of drunken driving or not putting violent or dangerous offenders in jail - it's the height of self-promotional deceit to claim otherwise or to phumper and thump your chest that you are MORE against terrorism because you advocate putting people in prison without charge - so I choose today to stand up to this sophomoric reasoning.. I oppose putting people on sex offender lists when they are never even brought to trial (frankly if they aren't ever convicted), but what's more, I oppose the reckless use of terms like 'registered sex offender' and so if that means in order to fight this PC bullcrap that I need to be for the obverse, so be it.

I support Drunk Driving - and I'm going to print up bumper stickers saying the same and get some blood-red ribbons to tie around my car antennae because after all THAT's really saying something. I'm a Father Advocating Drunken Driving - you may call my cause stupid, but me, I'll call it a FADD.

10 comments:

  1. Interesting perspective.

    I deal with drunken driving laws all the time. The law on this subject has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, from once being very lenient on a DUI defendant, to today being nothing short of draconian. In many if not most states, three or more DUI within a certain period (lifetime for Kansas) means a felony conviction. Loss of license is often almost automatic, even if one is eventually found not guilty of DUI, because the state invented the term "remedial suspension", as if its something less than punishment to suspend a license if one has over 0.08 percent blood alcohol concentration. Missouri is currently starting efforts to make it a criminal offense to refuse the breath or blood test, and to make the refusal an automatic conviction for DUI. (constitutional rights to trial, etc.. those aren't important, are they?)

    This attitude has been building in the US for many years, but the "nanny state" attitude has gotten much worse since 9/11/01. Part of it, I think, is that the American people saw leaders along both party lines approve bills and measures which ignored constitutional rights, and which the Supreme Court repeatedly repudiated. (i.e. arrest without charge of gitmo detainees, attempts to suspend habeus corpus, the shameful treatment of Jose Padilla, etc)

    While I do not support DUI, I remind those that it is not illegal in any of the 50 states to drive after drinking. It is illegal to drive with one's BAC above a certain limit, or to the degree that one is unable to safely operate a vehicle.

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  2. ToE,

    I appreciate your perspective, and I think it gets to at least one of two main points - specifically, we seem ready to trade away our freedoms for a measure of 'safety.' That in and of itself is a worthwhile thing to oppose.

    Further, I personally abhore this idea of non-think - of knee-jerk irresponsible overreach toward stigmatization and sound-bite justice. The irresponsible ones, the unpatriotic ones, are those who embrace such draconian 'reflexology' where even the mention of standing up for the rights of the less popular is equated with being 'pro-criminal', pro-terrorist, whatever... it's disgusting, it's certainly anything but liberterian or respectful of individual rights, constitutional rights, or even 'what's right' - and it sure as hell isn't American in the sense that I learned what American means. It's the tyrrany of the majority, and the tyranny of ignominy brought on by a lack of willingness to ferret out the truth.

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  3. Balance seems to be ultimately what is lacking, a pendulum swing too far the other way from too lenient.

    We seem hell-bent on continuing to remove all discretion from those in authority, in the hopes of removing the human element that has failed often enough to enrage people.

    There was a case in the Mpls./ St. Paul Star Tribune (Strib) just this past week about a drunk driver who had just received his 19th or 20th DUI - but it was not going to be a felony because it was only his third DUI in the past decade; the previous DUIs had been earlier.

    Instead of allowing more discretion to a court to impose an appropriate sentence that took into consideration both his many previous offenses, but also his far fewer in more recent years, in finding appropriate sentencing should he be convicted -- there was a proposal to instead add to the existing laws so as to make it a felony if a driver reached a certain threshold total number of DUIs. The suggestion was that after 4, ever, no matter if it was 30 years in between, then instant felony.

    I do not want to see anyone driving while intoxicated. My step-brother was killed by a drunk driver, and three passengers in his vehicle were badly injured --- so please do not think me too indulgent of the offenders. Nor do I wish by any stretch to see our streets overun with sex offenders (either adult oriented or child oriented).

    But at some point, the answer has to lie in a solution that is more oriented to good judgement rather than in trying to pass laws that will cover every possible eventuality. That doesn't work, and the intention of the laws is not achieved.

    We instead seem to come closer to surrealistic than realistic.

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  4. I think Reagan had a quote that fits this also "the scariest thing people can hear is 'I'm from the government and I am hear to help'".
    Seriously this removal of judgement is crazy. When I was in high school I bet 90% of the boys had a knife in their pocket. No one cared. If you pulled it out you could get anything from detention to expulsion depending on what you were doing with it. People in positions of authority used their judgement and took responsibility. Equality before the law should mean that your race, religion, age, or whatever have no bearing on your day in court. Your actions and the circumstances surrounding them should. A 10yr old boy scout with a camping knife in his pocket should not be treated the same as a 10yr old with a knife threatening people. As I am sure you know some of our sex offender laws are just as ridiculous. A kid in NJ, several yrs back when we started with the sex offender lists, was disliked by his girlfriends parents. He turned 18 3 months before she did and NJ apparently has no stipulation in their statutory rape law about a difference in ages other than over or under 18. The parents pressed charges for statutory rape, he was found guilty and given a suspended sentence because the judge said that while he was technically in violation of the law everything was consensual and there was only a 3 month difference in ages. Good job with the suspended sentence but now that he was found guilty of a sex crime he is a registered sex offender. He can never work at a place with children, he cannot buy a house or live within 1000 ft of a school, and lots of opportunities are gone, all because he had sex with someone 3 months younger than him. Kinda stupid.

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  5. tt, that person in NJ is the classic example of why there is a need for an option to undo this kind of travesty of justice.

    There is no purpose served by this man being listed as a sex offender.

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  6. Everything we do in this country we overdo. We have found out that pedophiles cannot be cured and we need to keep track of the ones we know about,ie ones who have committed an offense and done their time. Good idea but then we make the law so broad that we catch teenagers who are sexting and stuff. We find drugs in school and set up zero tolerance and the kid with aspirin is suspended just like the one with crack. People are so afraid that if they give the two different punishments it will look like favoritism of some sort that they make rules where they do not have to use their judgement. They should just say "yes I am showing favoritism, but it is not based on race, sex, or religion, it is based on their actions. Aspirin is not an illegal drug and crack is so I am punishing the person with the crack much more severely." Most of the people who would stand up and do that will never make it to a position where they need to.
    Oh Pen, Great post. Something we agree on, hehe.

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  7. tt wrote:"Oh Pen, Great post. Something we agree on, hehe."

    tt, I sincerely believe that despite some differences, even the most irreconcilable differences, there are many things on which we can agree regardless of where we fall on the right/left spectrum.

    One of the things I mentioned privately off-blog to Pen was the ways in which the comments on his last two posts reflected that, more specifically the way the comments made it possible to discuss both areas of agreement and disagreement. (So, tt, write something new instead of just commenting already, LOL.)

    I have a concern that is over-arching the individual topics that the different sides (and there clearly can be more than just two) NEED to listen and even to learn from each other, that we need to engage each other. There is a fine line between defining differences, and polarizing or dividing each other into dysfunctional fragments.

    We need to value the views that are different from our own, not consider them something to be ground into the dirt under our heel and spit on...or worse.

    Which doesn't contradict the benefits of a passionate disagreement either. Done well that is not only useful, it's fun.

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  8. "They have a MUCH more intrusive police presence [in England]."

    This is a glib, overly generalized statement--and in point of fact it is only partially true. (It somewhat undercuts this otherwise solid and thoughtful posting.)

    The suggestion regarding police cameras in Britain is correct. (Still, we Americans are adding police cameras and otherwise-surveillance cameras here all the time....)

    Yet one of the various arguments the British authorities use to justify the existence of so many cameras is because arrest procedures for British law enforcement officers are actually rather restrictive in comparison with U.S. arrest procedures.

    Though police officers are required to read Miranda Rights here in the U.S. (a requirement I support fully, by the way), American police are given far more lattitude to use force (and to arrest suspects in general) than their counterparts in the British system.

    Simply put, it's easier for an officer to arrest a suspect in the U.S. than it is in Britain, and it is far more culturally and legally acceptable for an American officer to use considerable force in an arrest here than in Britain.

    Furthermore, when a Brizilian national was shot to death by an arresting officer in London in 2005, the British press was all over the chief of police (who later resigned) for a full year or more, and an official investigation was conducted which lasted months upon months. I was living there at the time, and though there were some extenuating circumstances, I doubt highly if such a scenario would have spiralled into such a national debate were it to have happened in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, or even Minneapolis.

    Then there's this--while I was teaching in Britaish schools, though the suggestion was certainly made, police were not allowed to patrol the halls of some of the worst British schools due to the fact that they were very often restricted from doing such things. Not so here--police personnel often act as school security personnel in the U.S. I know several of them.

    (I supported the idea of some British police officers acting as security personnel in schools, by the way.)

    Finally, though some now are armed, the overall percentages of British police who are armed with guns is still far lower than the percentages of American police who are armed with guns.

    By the way, the British sex offenders lists--which have indeed gotten out of control--did not exist until they learned about the idea from another country. That country is the United States of America.

    (This is not to even deal with the issue of the IRA's role in the growth of "surveillance culture" in, say, London in the 1970s through the late 1990s. Can you imagine how surveillance-heavy we would be given such a scenario in our nation's capitol?...)

    I am not attempting to argue one way or the other, but rather to suggest that making cultural generalizations regarding such things tends to get awfully slippery. Or, put another way, just like us, the British could also justifiably say that "Americans have a MUCH more intrusive police presence" than they do.

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  9. Hass,

    I certainly mean no slight, in fact, in terms of honesty in politics and standing up to not being run by corporations, England could teach us a lot.

    However, standards of evidence, ability to interrogate and intimidate, etc.. are more permissive.

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  10. Pen, I know you meant no offense. For my part, I simply wanted to point out that this stuff is very, very slippery when looked at in "broad" manners, and therefore it tends to get oversimplified (by people in both countries) often.

    For instance, though surveillance is sometimes heightened in the U.K. in comparison with the U.S., it's often compensated by the fact that it's very difficult for, say, a British law enforcement officer to do a lot of things that an American law enforcement officer can do.

    It's interesting--many (though not all) people in the U.K. tend to think of the U.S. as a far more "police-oriented state" than their country.

    Yet many (though not all) people here in the U.S. tend to think that the U.K. is a far more "police-oriented state" than our country.

    I can speak only for my own experiences and knowledge of both countries, but I think both sides are correct, and both sides are incorrect.

    People often like "definitive" answers because they seem easy to digest intellectually. What I've written may not sound like a "definitive" answer, but in this case I think it's closer to the truth than a seemingly "definitive" answer would be.

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