Drinking N Driving
The Problems Of Drinking And Driving
Harman Singh Gahir
Roll Number
August 09 2010
On the night of May 14, 1988, Larry Mahoney was drunk, so drunk that his blood-alcohol concentration—the percentage of alcohol in his blood—was more than twice Kentucky’s legal limit at the time of .10 percent. Regardless, Mahoney got behind the wheel of his pickup truck and proceeded to drive northbound in the southbound lane of Interstate 71 near Carrollton, Kentucky, crashing head-on into a church bus returning from an amusement park. The collision ruptured the bus’s gas tank, causing a fire that killed twenty-three children and four adults and injured a dozen others, mostly as a result of smoke inhalation. Mahoney had no recollection that he had caused the deaths of twenty-seven people until he woke up in a hospital bed the following morning with minor injuries. He was subsequently convicted of assault, manslaughter, wanton endangerment, and drunken driving and was sent to the Kentucky State Reformatory, where he served a nine-and-a-half-year sentence.
Many observers believe Mahoney deserved a more severe sentence for his crime. This fact is a testament to how much the public’s attitude toward drunk driving has changed since the late 1970s, when it was not perceived as criminal behavior. This sea change in public perception was what Candy Lightner set out to accomplish when she founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 1980. Lightner’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Cari, was killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver as she walked down a suburban street in California. The driver, who had been convicted four times of driving while intoxicated (DWI) prior to taking Cari’s life, received a two-year prison sentence, but was permitted to serve time in a work camp and a halfway house. Outraged by the leniency of the sentence, Lightner focused MADD on raising public awareness of drinking and driving as a serious crime and advocated tough legislation to deter and apprehend
Harman Singh Gahir
Roll Number
August 09 2010
On the night of May 14, 1988, Larry Mahoney was drunk, so drunk that his blood-alcohol concentration—the percentage of alcohol in his blood—was more than twice Kentucky’s legal limit at the time of .10 percent. Regardless, Mahoney got behind the wheel of his pickup truck and proceeded to drive northbound in the southbound lane of Interstate 71 near Carrollton, Kentucky, crashing head-on into a church bus returning from an amusement park. The collision ruptured the bus’s gas tank, causing a fire that killed twenty-three children and four adults and injured a dozen others, mostly as a result of smoke inhalation. Mahoney had no recollection that he had caused the deaths of twenty-seven people until he woke up in a hospital bed the following morning with minor injuries. He was subsequently convicted of assault, manslaughter, wanton endangerment, and drunken driving and was sent to the Kentucky State Reformatory, where he served a nine-and-a-half-year sentence.
Many observers believe Mahoney deserved a more severe sentence for his crime. This fact is a testament to how much the public’s attitude toward drunk driving has changed since the late 1970s, when it was not perceived as criminal behavior. This sea change in public perception was what Candy Lightner set out to accomplish when she founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 1980. Lightner’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Cari, was killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver as she walked down a suburban street in California. The driver, who had been convicted four times of driving while intoxicated (DWI) prior to taking Cari’s life, received a two-year prison sentence, but was permitted to serve time in a work camp and a halfway house. Outraged by the leniency of the sentence, Lightner focused MADD on raising public awareness of drinking and driving as a serious crime and advocated tough legislation to deter and apprehend