TX Man Sentenced to Life in Prison for 9th DWI

[PaulConventionWV]

"Risk factor" = driving drunk. Swerving on the road. Inability to stay in lane because of foreign substance. Visual impairment.

Yeah, said drunk driver might not crash, or society might get lucky and they take only themselves out by crashing into a tree instead of another motorist. But as someone who's been behind drunk drivers late at night, there is no f-ing way you can let these people drive freely on the road, anymore than legalizing driving for the blind. If it was something like motorcycle helmet laws, and the risk was only to themselves, sure, go for it; but they're a distinct danger to everyone driving near them.

Have you ever seen a blind person attempt to drive? No? There's a reason for that. It's because people can learn consequences without laws. I don't need a law to know that driving while blind is a bad idea. What makes you think a law is going to help decrease the occurrence of drunk driving? They haven't worked with anything else. At the risk of being redundant, alcohol prohibition did not work, drug prohibition does not work, gun laws do not work, speeding laws do not work, and obviously, DUI laws don't work either because everyone still does it. What makes you think a law is going to make it any better?

 

[PaulConventionWV]

Yep, we've got people like you pretending drunk driving should be a-okay and acceptable until someone is injured.

Nobody's saying drunk driving is okay, but social forces are a much better way to prevent that than laws are. Laws can't prevent anything, as we've seen with speeding laws. Everyone speeds even though it's illegal. DUI laws don't prevent anything because a lot of people still drives under the influence. Maybe pulling someone over for drunk driving has prevented a wreck, but it has also made people run from the police, which almost always ends in a crash of some sort. It has also ruined the lives of many people who have done nothing wrong and were never going to.

 

[Danan]

Why would they? If an accident happens in a store, the owner loses business. If an accident happens on a road, nobody bats an eye. The only thing the road-owner has an incentive to do is have the proper signals, signs and markings and cleanup crews for when accidents do happen. The road owner does not have any incentive to chase people down frantically searching for risk factors. It's severely impractical. Roads are on wide open spaces that people use to get places. Stores and gun ranges are in confined places people have a choice to go to or not go to.

In a system of competing forms of transportation (different roads, rail, etc.) customers would like to know statistics regarding safety as well as average speed to come from A to B. Everyone providing these statistics would have an advantage, everyone good at those statistics would win customers.

It's true, not every driver would switch roads and drive longer just because of a lower chance to die there. But that's not necessary. Only the marginal costumer is relevant to a business man. That's not only true for roads but everywhere in the market.

Those people wating in front of Apple-stores are not the ones for which the product is designed, they are going to buy anyway. The ones that might or might not buy are important. The same is true for roads. Road-owners would only compete for the marginal customer, the driver who is the most cautious to use that road if an internet statistic says that per driver twice as many people die on road A than on road B with harsher regulations (for which there is obviously an optimum level and I can't tell you for sure if road regulations would indeed be harsher in a free market, than they are today).

 

[NCGOPer_for_Paul]

Yep, we've got people like you pretending drunk driving should be a-okay and acceptable until someone is injured.

No, it's not a-okay and acceptable, but I'd appreciate it if you'd actually THINK first instead of overreact about what is a really a very small problem, which has become a MAJOR infringment on Constitutional rights, which has also paved the way for even more government intrusions in the name of "safety".

DUI laws have also had a major effect on society over the past 25-30 years that have not necessarily been for the better. Again, it would require you to THINK, rather than react.

 

[nobody's_hero]

Some laws aren't necessarily meant to prevent events from occuring, but rather to offer some grounds for court decisions after the fact.

For example:

Laws requiring people to obey stop signs don't magically cause people to stop, but if you blow through an intersection and cause an accident, the officer will most-likely want to know which direction of traffic was required to stop. If you were supposed to stop, then you get ticketed.


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But I don't know how I feel about the life-sentence. Seems more like a sentence that was given out of frustration, rather than justice.

 

[thequietkid10]

I just saw this story on Fox news on Megan Kelly's show and they were agreeing with the judges decision. Complete insanity!


T.X. -- The ninth conviction was the breaking point for one Texas judge who earlier this week sentenced a habitual drunken driver to life in prison.

Bobby Stovall, 54, was driving his truck in Round Rock, Texas, in early July when he weaved through several lanes of traffic and hit another vehicle, injuring the driver. It was later determined that Stovall had a blood alcohol concentration of .32, four times the legal limit in Texas.

And while that DWI was certainly enough to get Stovall in trouble with the law, when the judge found out the defendant had eight prior DWI convictions across several different counties in Texas, he ordered up a life sentence for Stovall.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-man-life-sentence-ninth-dwi/story?id=11395058#.UK07zeTokbA

A little excessive for sure, but would you rather wait until he kills someone.

Clearly this guy has no respect at all for the life liberty or property of those around him. That's negligence.

 

[John F Kennedy III]

shouldn't you have to infringe on another persons life, liberty, or property before having yours removed permanently?

He did injure someone...but life?

 

[tod evans]

"Risk factor" = driving drunk. Swerving on the road. Inability to stay in lane because of foreign substance. Visual impairment.

Yeah, said drunk driver might not crash, or society might get lucky and they take only themselves out by crashing into a tree instead of another motorist. But as someone who's been behind drunk drivers late at night, there is no f-ing way you can let these people drive freely on the road, anymore than legalizing driving for the blind. If it was something like motorcycle helmet laws, and the risk was only to themselves, sure, go for it; but they're a distinct danger to everyone driving near them.

Deer cause far more accidents than drunks....And any sane driver knows to pay attention for deer..

Driving is inherently unsafe, every other driver on the road is an idiot...If you don't understand these simple facts there's probably an accident in your future.......Booze or not.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

In a system of competing forms of transportation (different roads, rail, etc.) customers would like to know statistics regarding safety as well as average speed to come from A to B. Everyone providing these statistics would have an advantage, everyone good at those statistics would win customers.

It's true, not every driver would switch roads and drive longer just because of a lower chance to die there. But that's not necessary. Only the marginal costumer is relevant to a business man. That's not only true for roads but everywhere in the market.

Those people wating in front of Apple-stores are not the ones for which the product is designed, they are going to buy anyway. The ones that might or might not buy are important. The same is true for roads. Road-owners would only compete for the marginal customer, the driver who is the most cautious to use that road if an internet statistic says that per driver twice as many people die on road A than on road B with harsher regulations (for which there is obviously an optimum level and I can't tell you for sure if road regulations would indeed be harsher in a free market, than they are today).

You act as if there are several roads running alongside each other that are all owned by different people. How is that efficient? Some roads are more convenient than others and people aren't going to stop using them because there is a slightly higher risk involved. Also, people are very rarely educated on the risks of anything. When is the last time you went searching for statistics on a certain road to decide whether you should drive on it? You probably took it because it was the easiest way to get where you wanted to go. If people wanted statistics on accidents on a certain road, why would they wait until roads are privately owned? We have places that are notorious for accidents even now and yet people still use them because they are convenient. Competition in roads is not the same as competition between other businesses. You can't just open a road that runs parallel to your competitor's road like opening a fast food chain across the street from mom and pop's restaurant. It would be incredibly wasteful and useless to open two roads right beside each other.

 

[VoluntaryAmerican]

A "competing highway"? Good lord, how many roads are there to one place in this society of yours? People aren't going to go miles out of their way or give up driving in the comfort of their own car just to make a point about the person who owns the road. Nobody cares about that. In many cases, one road is responsible for a lot of traffic, and people aren't going to just give that up to make a point. It's not like a regular business where people can easily avoid it if they don't like it. Roads are a necessity, and many of them are virtually unavoidable. When you expand authority like that over such a large area that would be needed to build a road, the owner has a lot more power than any store-owner would.

This is a very weak arguement: The free market is more efficent than the government, no, no, no, the roads are too important!

Private citizens having too much power over society in an industry is a liberal arguement for socializing everything. Trains are too important to society! The government must take over. Airports are too important to society the government must take over! Telephones are too important to society the government must take over!

Plenty of people already avoid shitty roads that the government never paves, roads that are completly falling apart, or bridges with insanely high tolls.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

A little excessive for sure, but would you rather wait until he kills someone.

Clearly this guy has no respect at all for the life liberty or property of those around him. That's negligence.

It may be negligence, but it's only negligent homicide if there is actually homicide involved. Being stupid is not against the law. Saying we can't wait until they kill someone is like Goerge W. Bush saying we should attack Iraq before we find evidence of weapons so that the evidence doesn't come in the form of a mushroom cloud. According to your logic, you should have supported the war in Iraq.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

This is a very weak arguement: The free market is more efficent than the government, no, no, no, the roads are too important!

Private citizens having too much power over society in an industry is a liberal arguement for socializing everything. Trains are too important to society! The government must take over. Airports are too important to society the government must take over! Telephones are too important to society the government must take over!

Plenty of people already avoid shitty roads that the government never paves, roads that are completly falling apart, or bridges with insanely high tolls.

Nice straw man there. I never said private citizens having too much power is a good reason for socializing everything. Some roads are avoidable, granted, but some simply are not. There are tons of roads in rural areas that span for hundreds of miles which people would have to go hundreds more miles out of their way to avoid.

Nobody is going to avoid that road just because there's a 5% higher chance that you could get in an accident. People tend to respect the autonomy of other drivers, and they don't hold landowners responsible for someone else's bad driving. They also trust their own driving, so they're not going to decide which road to drive on based on risks.

Hell, how many people do you think would avoid these private roads just to get away from all the ridiculous speeding rules you want to enforce on them? I bet it would be a lot more than would avoid the road because of a lack of such rules. People like their freedom and they're not going to stop driving in places just because there may or may not be a bad driver along the route somewhere.

 

[VoluntaryAmerican]

The free market would eliminate speeding laws because nobody has an incentive to chase down people who might cause an accident some day. You have it completely backwards. The government doesn't enact laws that are less strict than private laws. The government already has tons of draconian laws. What you seem to think is that these laws would be even more draconian under private management. So, the government is bad, but the laws it produces are good, just not good enough? Is that really what you're telling me? Tell me, if I'm a road owner, why I should care if somebody drives 80mph on my road. Chances are, they probably won't get in an accident. If they do, so what? I'm not losing any business because some idiot crashed his car. Crashes are a daily occurrence on roads, so it's not like people are going to stop using my road because some idiot crashed his car, and he just happened to be on my road when he did it. The only thing I have an incentive to do is provide adequate safety features like signs, signals, and markings. I do NOT have any reason to care how fast or in what condition someone is driving in on my road. It's not my fault if an idiot gets killed because he was engaging in risky behavior, and my customers will either not care, or they will not care enough to sacrifice the convenience of a road just so that I start trying to control people's lives by chasing down people who do something that might, some day, lead to a wreck.

What happens when the same guy comes back and uses the road later? Do I keep a database of all the people I've tracked down for speeding and screen them to see if they are safe enough to drive on my road? That's very inefficient. Also, you are ignoring the fact that everybody speeds, despite the fact that there are speeding laws in place. In a free market, these rules would be shown to be completely ineffective at increasing the safety of roads at all.

I don't believe I have a right to be on anyones property that is not mine. If I behave in a way that endangers others and gives an incentive to the property owner to remove me from there, than yes, this is perfectly fine in libertarian philosophy and also makes a huge deal of sense.


Am I allowed to behave how I want on your property? Actually, those private security enforcers would have a huge incentive not to pull you over for something that is not serious, because you - the customer - wouldn't want that. In contrast to the police, that gets paid by how many people they screw each day.



And you don't know what liberty means, apparently.

Nobody can predict all the different management styles the road owners would implement. That's the way entrepenuer's make a service more cost effective and better for the customer. If you have ever researched owning a business, then you know what I mean. We can bullshit about owning a laundromat in this thread, but if you talk to a group of laundromat owners (I have) you realize their expertise and knowledge is far superior on the subject - the same would true for road owners.

As far as crashes go - that would be bad for business. For one there might be damage to the road, rails, etc. On major highways if there are continual crashes this would also affect business, people may choose to use a competing highway. But again - road owners would decide what a "safe" speed for their road is and they would be much more accurate than a Federal edict of 55 mph.

 

[donnay]

I'd rather have private road owners determine what is safe behavior for their roads and deal with it accordingly, not a centralized government.

A lot of tax payer roads are being bought up by foreigners--that is a slippery slope. Do you think they are going to follow the guidelines of the Constitution?

Sources:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-15-u.s.-highways_x.htm
http://ppjg.me/2012/02/17/congress-...ons-new-toll-roads-planned-for-all-50-states/
http://www.wnd.com/2006/11/38811/
http://startelegraph.blogspot.com/2011/04/who-owns-road.html
http://www.garynorth.com/public/1426print.cfm
http://theintelhub.com/2012/04/15/u...nies-as-american-economy-teeters-on-collapse/

 

[truelies]

................ Laws can't prevent anything, as we've seen with speeding laws. ......................

Get removed from Society for a first offense & ya won't commit a second will ya.

 

[truelies]

.................... There is nothing "anti-liberty" about that.

You are dealing with a crew of moral retards or quite possibly trolls out to discredit liberty with their inane claims that 'liberty' gives them a 'right' to drive hammered. They can't be reasoned with.

 

[Origanalist]

Get removed from Society for a first offense & ya won't commit a second will ya.

Yes sir! That right Officer Freindly!

 

[truelies]

Because people who drive drunk don't necessarily drive to endanger or commit vehicular homicide. ..................

no but by their actions they CLEARLY demonstrate that they really don't give a shit who they maim or kill. There is simply no excuse for driving drunk or hammered by someother substance.

 

[tod evans]

Get removed from Society for a first offense & ya won't commit a second will ya.

You are dealing with a crew of moral retards or quite possibly trolls out to discredit liberty with their inane claims that 'liberty' gives them a 'right' to drive hammered. They can't be reasoned with.

More pearls of wisdom licked from the shiny tip of propaganda...

You're belief system is scary dude!

 

[truelies]

Be reasonable. You know there are other things that impair your driving besides alcohol.

All of which I would treat in the same manner. Thing is right here in this forum driving hammered is what is being excused by the trolls on grounds of 'liberty'.