Ah, ok, gotcha. :yep:

Naturally, I somewhat disagree but only over the point that .07 is sober and .08 is drunk. .07 is not drunk enough to warrant a citation, :) that's how I see it. I'm being facetious, I know one or beers does not = drunk, but the more alky-hal one consumes, the more impaired they are. There's no real breakover point to it. But I am glad you did not have any trouble with the police.


I dunno what to say about that. Yeah, you're right, while he was attending to you, he could have missed a really intoxicated driver. At least you didn't get tased, bro.

Haha, I can't let that go by. How old are you? I thought you were still young? :O:

Almost sickening to see the defense he gets here. I guess y'all would be screaming tho if he hit someone.

This kinda defense indicates to me that we really need to automate cars. Decades of tough drunk driver enforcement has failed to phase people like Aramike in my view.

Automated cars with mandatory onboard breathalyzer test to activate the overide would save many lives and keep many drunks away from innocents.

Hopefully next time tho they will catch you when it becomes clearer how much you drank or next time you will do the right thing and not drink and drive.

Ah! 'young' is relative.
Perhaps I should have said, back when I was foolish...
or perhaps that leaves me open to worse matters of relativity.

Ok Zachstar - so should every vehicle have a breathalizer? I don't drink - should I be so inconvienenced to satisfy your sense of whats ok? Don't think so.

What your suggesting is that every person, drinker or not, be driven nuts by some automated gadget that gets to decide whether or not I get to drive my car.

Maybe the person needs to get caught once first before thats a mandatory thing? Well it only takes one time to kill someone.

There has to be a better option than that. Cmon, your a smart fella - consider what is reasonable for every person, and come up with some ideas to solve the problem. I have a few if you care to bandy them about reasonably.

Now if we fully automated cars - just tell it where you wanna go and let it do the driving -that would work, but people wouldn't use it even if it was possible.

Somebody perfect that Star Trek transporter.... but what happens if the red shirt ensign at the controls is drunk????

Edit - don't drink and transport!

Here it is quite common for the police to do raids against drunk driving by randomly stopping drivers for breath tests. Would this be terrible out of question in the States? I don't quite understand why. The whole point of raids like this is to catch the drunk drivers who drive 'normally'. They are still dangerous, no matter what they themselves might think.

So far the courts have ruled in favor of stops so its not so outrageous here.

This is not banning guns. Few actually mean to kill when they are behind the wheel drunk. But often enough it results in terrible accidents that often involve harming innocent people.

Unlike the drunk who in my view choose to ruin his life by drinking and driving. The innocent did not.

And unlike banning guns. The cops cant come to your house to test you. They can only do so on public funded ways. Driving on them is a privilege not a right.

Zachstar, you seem to be having trouble wrapping your noodle around a simple concept: I was not drunk. Any alcohol does not necessarily equal drunk, or dangerous. If your high-horse is safety of other drivers, how come you're not railing out against fatigued driving?

If have any alcohol and driving is so damned dangerous, the legal limit would be zero, nada, zilch. People at .06 (or even .08) aren't the ones out the killing people.If I were to hit someone while legally sober than the cause would be something other than alcohol.Failed to phase people like me from what, exactly? Driving sober, safely?You know how I know they won't catch me driving drunk, ever?

I don't do it.

Now please hop off your high horse as I have no idea how you could possibly suggest that I was too drunk to drive, when a POLICE OFFICER decided I was fine. Were you there?

:haha:

He wouldn't tase me ... both the deputy and I got along just fine.

You're right ... however, those people that are out there, dangerously risking lives aren't blowing a .06 BAC ... usually its a lot higher.

.06 isn't drunk. Certain people (such as yourself) seem unable to comprehend that simply consuming alcohol does not make one drunk. It is the consumption of enough alcohol to significantly impair you, hence the reason for legal limits. I agree that should someone be on the road significantly impaired due to alcohol, we should throw the book at them. That being said, I'm not going to take the easy way out and state that any alcohol consumption should result in the same thing.

I'm not so concerned about the limit. What gets me is the arbitrary stopping and testing of people for that limit. Doing so removes resources from being used to combat those who are actually a threat to kill someone.

Think about it - while the cop testing someone who's sober, there is certainly someone who's intoxicated out there.

No matter What,
Anyone Driving under the Influence Of Drink Or Drugs,
Should be locked Up,Period,
and Throw away the Key,
Why?
Getting behind any Motor with Drink Or Drugs,
Within a 24hr period consumed?
Is Lethal,Like A Gun,
12 months ago in a small town near me,
Some Idiot backed out of his Drive fast,
late for work,Hungover,
Drove over his Neighbours child,
2yr old Girl,
Killed,
Consuming any of the above?
Gives you a Right to Drive???
To do so in any 24hr Period,
No matter how good a driver you are?
Makes me Sick,
Zero Tolerence Worldwide,
Will be implemented,
To save Our Children,
from those who Take,
and get behind a Wheel,
Lets hope anyone Consuming Alcohol,
Drugs & Driving in a 24hr period?
Get Caught & Jailed Hard Time,
If Your Daughter was Killed like that?
What would You Do?
Finally to the Person who started this thread?
Shame on You Sir,
Try Alcohol free drinks in the Future,
before you Drive.

Having arrested over 4,000 people for "Driving Under the Influence" in the course of my employment.,I am truly gratified to see so many of you take the course of action that is "Don't Drink and Drive". There is no number that can substantiate whether or not someone is "Under the Influence". Some people are intoxicated at .05% and some only show symptoms at .20%. The problem for the officers is that they have to testify that you were in fact under the influence below the "number.....08%". Very hard to get by a good defense lawyer when you talk about someones objective symptoms. And he says " Officer, did you ever meet my client before this night." That question now opens up all avenues of questioning. "Is his speech always slurred?" "Does he always have bloodshot eyes?" Have you seen him walk before tonight?"
Yes numbers are always arbitary, but the question begs, "What about probable cause?" Folks lets set the record straight. In the U.S. of A. there needs to be probable cause. I never rode around saying "Lets stop that A__hole just because."
I mean to tell you that a great "DUI Officer" will "Always" come up with probable cause.......:D :D When and only when the suspect is indeed "DUI". Theres no place for "Hummers" (that is below the limit)......:salute::salute:

Lets keep this simple. You drink a can of beer you don't belong on the road because no matter how much you trust yourself it does have an affect on you.

You don't have my respect. You tried to make this a topic of your so called rights (Funny how it becomes an issue when you are involved eh?) instead of how lucky you got for not being arrested.

I'm not about to comprehend anything from you! Not in the face of friends killed due to drunk drivers who say they just had a few cans. People like you in my view are a road danger because in my view yall view that a few cans is fine and if someone stops to test you about it. OMG WTF cops violate mah civiL rights !!!11!! Is all we hear instead of "Damn, maybe next time I will pass and drink soda or water instead. Glad to see the police out protecting the lives on PUBLIC roadways"

Given that everything is as you said (as you agreed, you were in the "sober zone" rather than "stone cold sober"):

1)It is deontologically improper, no question about it - your rights were infringed to your detriment (though a small one).

1. However, when we get into the depths of deontology, even a "probable cause" (what is probable anyway? 10%? 50%? 90%? Or whoever happens to be the most probable "available target" compared to the background probability?) stop or arrest is an infringement of your rights if ultimately you did nothing wrong.
2. For that matter, even if your BAC is 0.3 and you are clearly weaving all over the place, it does not necessarily follow you will hurt someone, so restricting your rights there, deontologically speaking, is wrong.

2) On the other hand, you may also be deontologically wrong for driving, even with a BAC of 0.06.

1. Sure, maybe in the previous test your driving really didn't differ until BAC hit .12, but can you really be sure it is the same that night? Maybe your tolerance was subtly lowered because it is late at night (presumably your test was in daytime and your mental state was close-to-optimum except for the alcohol in the comparison test) and you are tired to start with (and thus the point where significant degradation by alcohol started sooner).
   1. In that case you drove in an elevated risk situation - the "may" covers the scenario where you really aren't affected in any significant way by BAC0.06.
2. Of course, a similar logic applies if you drove while tired or in anything else that may have significantly affected your mental readiness.
3. And of course, to counter that, you had a right of freedom to freely move. Further, in the event of an accident, UNLESS it is one you could have avoided if only you were in better mental readiness, you are morally guilty of no more than taking an elevated risk, not for the accident itself . Though legally you are f*cked of course.

3) However, in the end, the law can only be written in a way that compromises between:

1. your various rights
2. your elevated risk to others using a utilitarian balance
3. the practical limitations in our ability to determine all the reasons an accident's.

When the smoke cleared, 0.08 was the compromise decided by the people for the law.

4) Similarily, the "Stop, Test and Arrest" enforcement policy is a compromise between your rights (of not being stopped) and the rights of others - in this sense, even the Probable Cause thing is but a utilitarian compromise, so not having it is NOT necessarily wrong in a utilitarian sense.

5) In conclusion, given that the damage to a stopped person is very small compared to the potential harm, the policy and law is probably justified. In your particular case:

1. Sure, maybe based on superficially available evidence, the probability of you being significantly impaired is very small, and the probability of that impairment actually harming someone even smaller. However, the potential harm is arguably so great, and the inconvenience to you so small by comparison, that even a small probability should be guarded against, and so he was substantiated in pulling you over.
2. As he moves in to get you ("little fish"), of course he has to take an elevated chance that he would miss a "bigger fish" while working with you. He evaluates the probabilities and decides to get you. His gamble turned out to be wrong, but that's arguably less an indictment of the policy than the officer's individual judgment and ability. If he had better situational awareness, he might have noticed the second car and stopped you both.
3. Or it may just be a bad roll of the dice which hit both you and the officer - a policy inevitably has some leakers, and you were in one of them. Without getting a larger overview of the statistical probabilities, an indictment of the policy based on your one disappointment may be subjective and premature.

Before you get too disgusted, OK, let's say he had an accident. In that case, regardless of legality, he will only be morally responsible IF not only was there some degradation, but also that the degradation CAUSED him to be unable to avoid the accident. If what hit him was something even a F1 driver on his best day won't be able to avoid or even mitigate anyway, then he's still not morally responsible for the accident, even if he drank all the way to .3 and still drove. He took a stupid risk, but that's all.

Of course, in reality we can't cut it that fine, and the compromise that society agreed on, 0.08, became the law.

Nice rhetorical tactics. While it is a sad story, can you prove, to a reasonable confidence, that if only Idiot didn't drink last night (or wasn't under the time pressure of being late for work for that matter), he WON'T have ran over that 2-year-old girl?

I don't know the details of the case, but what if 2 year old girl wasn't even in LOS because she was so short. Then he can't have avoided her anyway.

I would react differently, but it won't be for objective reasons.