EVERY 15 MINUTES SPEECH

( 5/20/04 – SUBSTANTIALLY MODIFIED WHEN DELIVERED):

My first profession was as a high school teacher, but I found that to be too stressful so I decided to become a criminal trial lawyer instead, a prosecutor.  I chose this job because I thought I could help people.  I thought I could help improve our society.  And I thought I knew what I was getting into, since my father, my uncle, and my aunt were all prosecutors.  But nothing I ever saw in a courtroom, nothing my family said around the dinner table, and nothing I learned in law school even began to prepare me for the experience of sitting in the living room of a single mother of an only teenage daughter who had just been crushed to death on highway 70 in Sierra Valley by her intoxicated boyfriend’s car.  It was part of my job to sit in that lonely, tragic room and explain things to that mother who had just buried her only child because of something as pointless as drunk driving.  And of course other than laying out the law, I had nothing very meaningful to say to her.

Or there was the case of the guy coming home with his friend from working on a car in Chester .  He thought it was a good idea for him to drive since he’d drank less beer than his buddy.  He changed his mind about it being a good idea though when he woke up upside down on the side of highway 89.  All that was left inside the car of his best friend since kindergarten was the young man’s right arm, which had stayed wedged between the door and the passenger seat while the rest of him went out the window to be killed.  By the time that guy got to court he didn’t care what we did to him.  Probation or hanging, he just didn’t care.  He’d killed his best friend.

We see it time and time again.  “I’m so sorry.  I didn’t mean it.  If I’d only known….”  Well you do know.  The remarkable thing isn’t so much the tragedy of these real cases, it’s the fact that there are so many of them.  Everybody here who’s in the business of dealing with alcohol-related car crashes knows what I’m talking about.  I didn’t have to open a file or stretch my memory for those two examples; I just had to cull through in my mind the 40 or 50 such cases I’ve handled. 

I said to Dave Hollister, our new felony deputy DA, who moonlights occasionally as the Grim Reaper, “DUI fatalities, what comes to mind?”  Without a pause he said, “Timothy Perry,” and then explained why.  Timothy had been the rare 6year old kid who listened to his parents and carefully obeyed their safety rules.  Before stepping into the crosswalk holding the hand of his 3year old sister, he waited for the WALK light to change, then looked both ways before starting to cross the street.  His killer, who’d only had a few beers, just didn’t notice the red light or Timothy and his sister in the crosswalk.  Witnesses say that in the last moment of his life 6year old Timothy had the presence of mind to shove his sister out of the way before being hit full on.  His body ended up over 100 feet from his tennis shoes, which stayed in the crosswalk without him.

In these cases, and in most of the tens of thousands of such cases that happen in America each year, hundreds of thousands if you add serious injury cases to the death cases, in these cases the killer is some ordinary person much like any one of us here.  Alcohol related homicides are the atrocity of the common American man and woman.  Good drivers.  Mostly good people.  But raised in a culture that somehow encourages people to believe that bad things only happen to other people.  A culture that so far has branded drinking and driving as only moderately anti-social.  More people drink and drive in America than fish without a license.  Yet since the start of the war in Iraq , more than thirty times more Americans have died violently on the road due to alcohol and drugs than Americans killed violently in warfare.  All over America , right now, real memorial services for real vehicular homicide victims are going on.

And every single one of us in this room will face alcohol related questions in our futures.  You can choose to perpetuate this terrible problem, or you can choose, right now, to be part of the solution.

THE CHOICE YOU MAKE TODAY ABOUT DRINKING AND DRIVING NOT ONLY AFFECTS YOU BUT IT ALSO PROFOUNDLY AFFECTS: (read before each agency named)

            Law enforcement:         Law enforcement please stand.

            Fire Departments:         Fire Department please stand.

            Emergency Medical personnel:  Emergency Medical personnel please stand

            School Personnel:         School personnel please stand

            Church Staff:                Church Staff please stand

            Funeral Personnel:        Funeral Personnel please stand

            Tow Truck Drivers:      Tow Truck Drivers please stand

            Family Members:          Family members please stand

            Friends and everyone you know or knows you.  Everyone please stand:

I’m not telling you what to do.  I’m not really in a very good position to do that since I’m part of a generation of adults that has failed badly with this issue.  Instead I’m asking you to please consider that you are free to shape your own generation however you want to.  Please consider being the wisest generation so far, the one that makes drinking and driving unthinkable. Thank you.