Award Should Sharpen DMV Awareness : * There’s No Arguing Verdict for Those Hit by Legally Blind--and Licensed--Driver

Is there a chance that some state employee, toiling deep within the bureaucracy of the Department of Motor Vehicles, will be motivated to an ounce of extra care by the recent jury verdict in Santa Ana? The public ought to hope so. The DMV should insist that those who process licenses take the lessons of the case to heart.

A jury found that the department was negligent when it gave a driver’s license to a legally blind Brea man who later hit three people crossing a street in 1990. Then it decided the DMV should pay $4.1 million to the pedestrians.

The DMV had granted the driver a license in 1985 and renewed it five years later, even though he had been turned down three times previously and was receiving federal disability payments because of a debilitating eye disease.

There was not much to argue with in the assertion of one victim who said she suffered brain damage and other injuries in the accident: “It’s just common sense that a blind person should not be driving.” The DMV still hasn’t offered a very convincing explanation of how this oversight could occur, and what might be done to prevent it from happening again.

The case was considered unusual by some legal observers because state agencies often are able to claim immunity when they are blamed for actions of an individual. But a state appellate court previously had held the agency liable for an accident involving an 87-year-old driver who was found unfit to drive.

And state courts have held that the DMV can be held responsible when officials have prior knowledge that a person’s physical disability has rendered that person unfit to drive. In the case of the accident in this case, the DMV had granted the license on the applicant’s fourth try even though he failed the vision test.

The DMV’s response in the case has been, according to Evan Nossoff, a spokesman in Sacramento, that the agency was “constantly re-evaluating and attempting to weigh public safety as a major factor in issuing licenses to those with physical impairments.” The spokesman noted that the agency has to handle 20 million licenses a year.

Perhaps it is a wonder that more mistakes don’t occur. But for bureaucrats handling a mountain of license renewal applications, there is a reminder in this case that each and every decision is important, not just for the applicant but for everybody else who is out and about.

Each person who gets behind the wheel of an automobile has access to a potentially lethal weapon.