New Laws Won’t Stop Worst DUI Cases : Hard-core drunk drivers require more prison time--nothing less will prove effective

At the very least, you want a drunk driver off the road before he or she becomes a “Watson” case. Watson is the term used by the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to refer to the 1982 appellate court decision allowing certain vehicular manslaughter cases to be tried instead as second-degree murder. On average, there have been more than six such prosecutions per year. At best, you want to frighten or sanction first- and second-time misdemeanor DUI offenders so severely that they never do it again.

According to Herbert Lapin, deputy district attorney in charge of the Van Nuys preliminary hearing unit, we are having some success with second-time offenders. Driving-under-the-influence arrests and fatalities are down. New laws on the books this year will help, including one by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) that allows police to confiscate--sometimes permanently--automobiles driven by unlicensed drivers who have prior convictions for driving with suspended or revoked licenses.

But what about the hard-core offenders like Linwood Rose? He is a former Van Nuys resident who has nine drunk driving convictions. The law finally caught up to him for a 1987 incident, and he was sentenced in October to two years in prison. But Rose managed to evade authorities for nearly seven years while he continued to rack up DUI incidents. Will the new laws ensure that these rolling hazards will not be able to get behind the wheel? The answer is no.

Lapin puts its this way: “That kind of drunk driver does not care whether he has a license. He doesn’t care whose car he is driving. If he is stupid enough to have it (the car) registered in his name, he won’t care if it gets confiscated.”

The only thing that will keep such people off the road, in Lapin’s view, is more prison time. Currently, the maximum sentence for felony DUI is three years, plus one additional year for each additional conviction. Lapin says the penalty ought to be stiffer.

But this is also the first full year for the state’s “three strikes” law, an overly broad measure that mandates life imprisonment without parole for a third conviction on any one of several felonies. The statute will require much in the way of new prison space, or the release of current inmates to make way for three-strikers. Felony DUI cases, Lapin says, do not fall under the reach of three strikes. Any new law requiring stiffer penalties for felony DUI cases will strain the corrections system even more.

The hard-core drunk drivers like Linwood Rose may require additional prison time. The costs to be weighed are these: the burden of a spiraling corrections budget, or the burden of the wreckage such drivers place on their innocent victims every time they get behind the wheel.