Victims Talk, and Drunk Drivers Listen : Court Imposes a Face-to-Face Penalty

Nancy Brower, then a candidate for a master’s degree in social work at USC, and her boyfriend, Mike Martin, were on their way to her apartment in his BMW the evening of May 24, 1986, when they were broadsided by a drunk driver who had run a red light.

The 26-year-old Fountain Valley woman almost lost an eye. Her face was badly scarred, and several teeth were knocked out. Before plastic surgery began, her left eyelid sagged horribly, and her 4-year-old daughter by an earlier marriage was afraid to look at her.

Martin, a 32-year-old hospital administrator, had to wear a neck brace for 3 1/2 months after the accident and says now that “not a day, not an hour, not a minute” goes by when he’s not in pain.

“Don’t drunk drivers know the pain they cause?” he asked.

To make sure some of them do know--and to channel the anger and sadness felt by Brower, Martin and other victims of drunk drivers--a new sentencing program has begun in Central Orange County Municipal Court in Santa Ana. It is intended to let people convicted of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol know how their good times often turn into bad times for everyone else.

All those convicted of drunk driving in Central Municipal Court are required to participate in the program as a condition of their probation, said Judge RandellWilkinson, who handles the bulk of drunk-driving cases in central Orange County.

Called the Drinking Under the Influence (DUI) Victims’ Panel, the program involves one-hour-a-month sessions at which victims of drunk drivers, or their families, tell their stories. They talk about deaths, injuries and lost dreams while newly sentenced drunk drivers listen.

“We’re not just talking about having a drink too many,” Brower told about 60 convicted drunk drivers during a recent evening session in the City Council chambers of Orange City Hall. “We’re talking about people not giving a damn about others.

“If you can’t think about the other person, then at least think about yourself. Look at my face! Do you want the same thing to happen to you?”

The porcelain beauty of Brower’s face is gone forever, although she has had the best plastic surgery that $45,000 could buy. Eighteen months and five painful operations--”that I still haven’t paid for”--haven’t erased the accident’s scars.

The messages from Brower and others like her, as well as those from the men and women who have lost their loved ones, are raw and from the heart. That’s the way Judge Wilkinson wants it.

“I want it up-close and personal,” Wilkinson said. “People who get behind the wheel after having a few drinks don’t understand the kind of impact they can have on someone else’s life, or family.”

He added: “It only hits home when they hear firsthand, from the people who’ve been hurt, what kind of terrible, really awful things have happened to them. And all because somebody’s gone out and had a good time and ended up maiming and killing them, their sons, daughters, husbands and wives.”

Wilkinson, the other judges in Central Municipal Court and Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD) began the DUI Victims’ Panel last September because of a belief that jail, fines, alcohol education classes and Alcoholics Anonymous programs weren’t enough to prevent a drunk driver from winding up in the criminal justice system again. The panel sessions are in addition to the more traditional penalties imposed on drunk drivers.

Besides drunk drivers from the Santa Ana court, the panel’s message has reached some young offenders from a juvenile diversion program in Westminster and Marines from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, according to Janet Cater.

Cater, who heads the 700-member MADD chapter in Orange County, is one of the founders of the DUI Victims’ Panel. She persuaded Municipal Judge James P. Gray, who has taken a special interest in curbing drunk driving, to present the idea to his colleagues on the Municipal Court bench.

Cater said she would like to see the program operating countywide; the jurisdictional areas of the Municipal Courts in Fullerton, Westminster, Newport Beach and Laguna Niguel are not covered now. But she is hampered by a limited number of volunteers, she said, because many victims feel uncomfortable talking about their experiences, especially in front of convicted drunk drivers.

“And with the ones that agree to help out,” Cater said, “we don’t want to use the same people over and over again. . . . This is the kind of thing where you can get burned out very quickly.

“When you’ve lost your wife, your son . . . your sister, it’s sometimes therapeutic to talk out your loss. But it’s a painful experience--like reliving a nightmare that never ends.”

This was the message that Sandy Gar brought to a recent panel session in Orange as she talked about her son, Chris Gar. Chris loved surfing, clowning around with his family and partying with friends.

But even Chris, who his mother described as “a big goof,” thought things had gotten out of hand at an April Fool’s party when a friend--who had been drinking, according to a police report--insisted on getting into her car and going for a joy ride.

Chris, 16, didn’t have a driver’s license, his mother said. Finally, she said, he persuaded his friend to go home and, according to the police report, rode along to make sure she got there safely.

They never made it. Chris was killed instantly when the car in which he was riding plowed into the rear of a truck stopped at a red light in Huntington Beach, according to the police report.

Despite the drain on Gar and other volunteers, Cater said, four to six of them show up for the panel sessions each month.

“It’s not easy for me to be up here tonight,” said Craig Gini s as he looked out at the audience of strangers and talked about his sister, Lisa, who was killed in July half a mile from their parents’ house. The car in which she was riding was broadsided by a drunk driver as he traveled at 60 m.p.h. through a red light, Gini said.

“But I owe it to my sister’s memory,” he said, “to let you know that if you do decide to drink and drive, you could end up injuring somebody--and it could be you.

“You don’t know what something like this does to you until it happens to you: When I looked at my sister in the casket, and knew someone else had taken her life, I kept asking myself where was the justice in it.”

Gini, tears welling in his eyes, continued: “I can be angry at the person who did that to my sister. But that wouldn’t bring her back . . . or her laughter or her smile.”

The DUI Victims’ Panel has taken its message to 300 drunk drivers in the four months it has existed, Cater said.

And it is still too soon to tell how effective the panel will be in keeping drunk drivers from becoming repeat offenders, its sponsors said.

But since the first of a similar group of panels sprang up in Redmond, Wash., in 1984, the idea has spread to Alaska, Oregon, Indiana and South Dakota, as well as California, said Shirley Anderson, one of the founders of the movement.

In California, such panels operate in Orange, San Diego and Tulare counties, said Anderson, a clerk for the King County Northeast District Court in Redmond. Anderson, who founded a DUI Victims’ Panel there after her son was killed by a drunk driver, said a study is under way at the University of Washington to determine how successful such programs are in preventing drunk-driving recidivism.

“In the absence of this kind of statistical information, all I can say is, it must be working,” Anderson said. “How else to you explain its spread to other parts of the country?”

Marine Wing Communications Squadron 38 at El Toro believes the DUI Victims’ Panel is effective. It has sent three men convicted in military courts to its sessions, said Lt. Donald R. Smith, the legal affairs officer for the 500-man unit. The men also wrote 1,000-word essays on what they learned during the panel discussion.

“From what they wrote,” Smith said, “we think they’ve gotten some benefits. They had to relate on a human basis with the victims on the panel.

“It was almost as if they saw their mothers, brothers or sisters up there,” he said. “It was kind of a shock treatment of sorts.”

The men and women who streamed out of the recent victims’ panel meeting in Orange seemed not so much shocked as embarrassed and chastened.

“I got a lot of insight from those people (on the panel),” said Randy Tillman, 26, of Orange. “They had a lot of good stuff to say about why you shouldn’t drink and drive.”

Tillman said he had “given up drinking” since the Nov. 1 accident that resulted in his drunk-driving conviction.

Drunk driving was a costly adventure for him.

“I don’t know about some of those people in there, but I work hard for a living,” said Tillman, who installs automatic garage door openers. “My car got pretty banged up; I had to pay $1,200 in fines, and I’m going to five (alcohol education) classes. . . . And I had to come out to this thing tonight.”

Tillman continued: “This has taken a lot of time and money. I wish I’d never did what I did.”

He added: “One thing I’ve learned from all this is that if I ever start drinking again--and I pray to God I don’t--I’ll at least have the common sense to have a friend do the driving for me.”