In his The New York Times editorial "Is the Driver Drunk?", Lincoln Caplan approves of the decision by the Supreme Court of Missouri to rule illegal a forced blood test on a drunk driving suspect done by police without first obtaining a court warrant (2013). The State of Missouri and the US government is now appealing to the US Supreme Court to reverse the lower courts decision, which Caplan argues would violate the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.
My first reaction when I read Caplan's opinion piece was that it's a good example of a common mistake made by people with genuinely good intentions. The Missouri State government, in agreement with the US government, and I am sure Caplan, the judges on the Missouri Supreme Court and everyone else, wants to reduce deaths from road accidents. Everyone agrees that this is a good aim. Similarly, I am sure that everyone agrees that drug use, in particular alcohol use, is a major cause of road deaths - the statistics for this are overwhelming, as the report in Thailand's Nation makes clear, and repeats annually every New Year and Songkran: surely no one doubts that alcohol is the truly harmful drug here. The solution, surely, is also agreed on by all: reduce drunk driving. So far, everyone is in agreement about a serious social problem and a highly desirable goal; however, as the ruling against the State of Missouri police department by the Missouri Supreme Court shows, there is great disagreement on the means to reach that goal, with the government thinking it's OK to allow the police to force blood or other tests without getting a court warrant to permit it first, and the judges and others thinking that such a procedure is very definitely not OK. I think we see the same sort of situation in other social issues: people tend, for example, to agree that teenage pregnancies are a bad thing, but the solutions they propose are often in violent disagreement: some sensibly think that teenage girls who fall pregnant should be offered a safe, legal abortion, whilst others irrationally and immorally think that such unhappy young women, often still in school, should be forced to bear a child that is not wanted and have their lives destroyed, to the benefit of no one and the great harm of themselves and society. (Can you infer which solution I favour in this example?)
In the specific case of suspected drinking and driving, I would agree with Caplan who argues that the alcohol in someone's blood does not disappear so quickly that the police do not have time to get permission from a court for their search of the person's blood. Certainly, it is a good thing to check the alcohol use of drivers and to punish those are guilty of endangering or actually killing other people because they have a couple of glasses of wine at dinner and then decide to drive home instead of getting a taxi or making some other safe arrangement that does not put the lives of other people at risk. I think it's perfectly OK, although perhaps very stupid, for people to put themselves at risk or actually harm themselves, so that we cannot, for example, use the fact that yaa baa is very unhealthy, like alcohol and cigarettes, as a reason to ban people from using it: if they want to harm themselves, for whatever reason, that's their choice. The law may only justly interfere to stop them if they are harming or threatening others, and drinking wine before you drive definitely threatens, and often harms, other people on the road.
Saving lives is good thing, but not every effective way to do that is acceptable.
__________
Reference
First 6 days of New Year Holiday see 332 deaths. (2013, January 3). The Nation. Retrieved January 8, 2013 from http://www.nationmultimedia.com/national/First-6-days-of-New-Year-Holiday-see-332-deaths-30197146.html
The Nation is not on my list of suggested reading on the right, but it's OK to cite it because it's not the source I chose to respond to. I used it to give some useful facts to get reader's interest in the the introduction.
ReplyDeleteIt also provided a convenient reason for me to show the different examples of how to cite the source in your paragraphs and the two different ways to write your reference list entry.
I actually checked a couple of other sources as I was writing the introduction, but in the end I decided to keep it short and simple. It is not, after all, an academic writing assignment.
Well...I'm not sure that I agree to stop the force blood test on driver. I've experienced about the drunk driver who almost hit my family'car during New year period, because there was no police gate around the street. And I'm not sure that the force blood test on driver is a good way to decrease a road accidents or not. But in last New year, my friends drank liquor less than the past because they fear the punishment from force blood test.
ReplyDeleteThe court has not ruled forced blood tests illegal, only forced blood tests without first obtaining a court warrant. The judges arguing that this is what the US Constitution requires in order to protect citizens from abuse by police.
DeleteI agree with the judges: police everywhere have a bad habit of acting unjustly and abusing their power to harm citizens, so it is very important to have strong laws to control police and protect citizens from official abuse. Since the police cannot then, for example, so easily pull motorists over and threaten them with a charge, this also helps greatly to reduce corruption in addition to protecting citizens from state officials, who often have immoral motives.
DeleteThanks for your explain which make me understand clearer. I partly agree with this rule. I'm not sure that it can solve police corruption in Thailand. Actually, I don't believe in justice affairs in Thailand that let money more important and power than right.
DeleteBut I agree that many Thai police have a disguised habit to use their power to abuse citizen for money, particularly opening semester of students.
I didn't know that there were like that many cars droven by the drunken drivers on the street in Thailand
ReplyDeleteyet. Sometimes I feel that I'm just a stranger in this country in spite of living here almost 2years. In Korea we have also same problem the road accidents by drunken drivers during holidays but most of Korean accept blood test, I'm not sure the procedure could not different with other countries'. The punishment also be tend to be stronger than before for the drunken driving.
Before I moved Bangkok, in Korea, it was an increasing tendency for drunken people to hire proxy driver who drives a customer's car when a customer comes to drink till he/she cannot drive, because the punishment came to stronger and the frequency of a crackdown on drunken drivers increased. The side effect of proxy driver business was the drivers’ poor job circumstance. This became another social problem.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this kind of tendency says that people came to know the fact that the drunken driving is a crime even though it doesn’t make any accident. All know drunken driving is dangerous, and some ads say it’s like having killing intention. The problem is in forced blood test without a court warrant. Which one is more important in our world: the individual person or the community? It might be depends on where the social consciousness is based.
Katie,
ReplyDeleteI thought the idea of a paid proxy driver sounds like a good solution for everyone: the partiers can enjoy their drug of choice knowing that they don't have to drive and thereby threaten the safety of others, and the proxy drivers get paid.
Could you explain a little more what you mean by "the drivers’ poor job circumstance", which in turn became a social problem?
I think both individuals and society are important, but if history teaches us anything, it is surely that governments, and especially armies and police, need to be strictly controlled by civil authorities.
I also think that drinking and driving is like intentionally going out onto the street and firing a gun at random - you might not hit and kill anyone, but you certainly might, and other people have a right not to be put under your threat. People who drink (or use other intoxicating drugs) and drive should be imprisoned.
The driver's poor job circumstance means that they aren't in decent company which provid them social insuarance or some things should follow the government's gudies. That is, they are not legal laborers who are protected by law. Since they have to work during night time almost till dawn, when people easily cannot find public transportations, they have to wait until the public works or have to walk to the downtown to get their home. To earn money, they cann't use a night time taxi, it's more expensive than day time. Most of them were multi-job workers.
ReplyDeleteI know both individuals and soiety are important, but in cases of Korea, we usually think less important individuals than society. This expamle can be seen in our language, we usually say 'our', not 'my': our mom, our home, our school, our country, etc. Maybe it's because of an influence of Confucianism. So, like Jeniffer's example, most Koreans don't resist the blood test without a warrant. And, about the article's report, Koreans might find some different new thing that a individual person could have the kind of right not to accept the authority's power for the sake of his right.