Drunk Drivers: Impervious to Rational Decision-Making

"It's not a deterrent. It never has been. It never will. ... There's other things that deter them [drunk drivers], the penalties given out in court are not part of that."
Andrew Murie, CEO, Mothers Against Drunk Driving Canada

"There's going to be some people out there, it doesn't matter how strict the laws are, how tough the sentences are, there's this perception that they can get away with it [undetected, driving while under the influence of alcohol]."
Steve Brown, research associate, Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) 

Photograph by Cole Garside

"The reality is that the message about the dangers of impaired driving has been repeated, loudly and clearly, for decades now."
"For those who continue to ignore a message they have heard for most of their lives, moral blameworthiness is increased, just as societal tolerance is decreased."
Judge Cary Boswell, Ontario Court Justice

A new study by the federal Justice Department has found that tougher sentences don't appear to deter convicted impaired drivers from repeating the offence. (Jon Castell/CBC )

Acknowledging that new precedents have been established in Canadian courts by judges choosing to impose stricter, more serious prison time for drunk driving offenders whose decision to drive while drunk has resulted in someone else's death through an accident, the hope lingers that these more representative sentences will dissuade people from driving while under the influence of alcohol for fear they will end up with a punishment designed to fit the crime if they are responsible for causing death while behind the wheel.

There was the ten-year prison sentence given to Marco Muzzo of Toronto. He had pleaded guilty in the deaths of three children and their grandfather, when his vehicle broadsided theirs while he was under the influence of alcohol. This was a well-connected businessman, scion of a well-known and -respected establishment family. That Mr. Muzzo recognized after the fact the fault in his supposition that he could drive without penalty or threat to anyone else, will not bring back those lost lives, nor the years he will lose of his own life, in prison.

After citing that precedent Justice Boswell sentenced a 34-year-old, a father himself who, while intoxicated had chosen to drive his vehicle, striking two city workers in Alliston, Ontario, one of whom was badly injured, while the other, Geoffrey Gaston, a father of two, suffered injuries that proved fatal. In Justice Boswell's decision sentencing Marcello Francassi to six years in prison, minus time already served, the judge spoke of the young man's remorse and as well he cited a number of precedents apart from the Muzzo case.

Experts in the field of assessing the phenomenon of driving while intoxicated and the penalties meted out up to the present, while acknowledging that those penalties have increased to reflect the seriousness of the crime, also speak of their conviction that those tougher sentences do little to deter people who drink and drive from continuing that practise. The harsher sentences answer to the need to match the punishment to the crime, but the hoped-for effect of dissuading others appears not to work.

What some, like Mr. Murie of MADD are convinced of, is that the fear of a harsh sentence has made little inroads in the consciousness of drunk drivers; they are concerned solely with the prospect of being caught. And despite an energetic, well-publicized campaign to warn, shame and convince people who drink and drive that they are gambling with their lives and the lives of others, the incidence of driving while under the influence remains a constant on Canadian highways.

According to TIRF, which tracks fatalities using police and coroner databases, drunk driving continues to account for close to a third of deaths on Canada's roads, as they have done for years. According to the latest available data for the year 2013, 480 people representing 28 percent of all fatalities died, resulting from impaired driving consequences. TIRF's 2016 Road Safety Monitor found a rise in the numbers who have admitted to driving within two  hours of consuming alcohol.

Their annual online poll, surveying close to two thousand Canadians on drinking and driving, found that close to 22 percent admitted to doing just that, a rise of five percent from the previous year. Some 4.6 percent felt they had driven with a blood alcohol content over the legal limit, another increase from the year before. And many felt confident that there was no good reason why they couldn't continue doing so.

RCMP Cnst. Faz Majid removes an open bottle of beer from a motorist's car during a roadside check in Surrey, B.C., on September 24, 2010. An internal report by the federal Justice Department raises doubts about the effectiveness of harsher sentences, the linchpin of the Tory government's tough-on-crime policies. (DARRYL DYCK / CP)