Lawmakers To Target Drunken Drivers Lowering Blood-Alcohol Level To .08 Among Measures To Be Considered

Maybe drunken driving tops the legislative hit list this time because there were 331 traffic deaths linked to drinking in Washington in 1996, compared with 252 murders.

And that’s a trend, not a quirk, backers of tougher measures note.

Or maybe it’s because of two especially ugly cases last summer - a King County woman struck and killed by a woman with a 20-year history of drunken driving, and a Wenatchee woman killed when her car was struck not by one, but by two drunken drivers.

“It is time, it’s way, way past time,” said House Speaker Clyde Ballard, R-East Wenatchee. He says it with feeling. Ballard, a former ambulance service owner, said he can’t forget the years of booze-fueled road carnage he saw on the roads of Chelan and Douglas counties.

When the 1998 session starts Jan. 12, Ballard will join fellow Republican Senate leaders and Democratic Gov. Gary Locke to end years of indecision and push for a bipartisan package of new tools to combat drunken driving.

As always, the particulars will be shaped by powerful forces that will range from the price tag for state and local governments to election-year political grandstanding.

But in the end, Locke and legislative leaders want new laws that, as Senate Law and Justice Chairwoman Pam Roach put it, “will not do much alone but taken together will fill a whole lot of gaps in the system.”

Lawmakers already are sifting through a blizzard of anti-drunken driving bills. Leaders hope a package of new laws will:

Knock a big hole into a drunken driver’s opportunity to drive again. The state would be allowed to impound a person’s vehicle for weeks or months following even a first drunken-driving charge, and do it even before the driver was convicted. Impoundment is allowed now after a second drunken-driving offense, but only after conviction.

The state also could automatically take away a driver’s license after a first offense and before the driver was convicted. License suspensions and revocations now are allowed before conviction only after two offenses or more in five years.

Snare drinking drivers before they get even drunker. The plan is to reduce the legal level of alcohol in a driver’s blood to .08 percent, down from .10. This proposal, considered long overdue, is expected to quickly pass and be signed by Locke.

Increase penalties for drunken driving and for driving with a suspended or revoked license, and tighten current law to make it easier to make serious and repeat offenders forfeit their vehicles after a hearing.

Require drunken drivers with especially high levels of blood alcohol or with repeat offenses to install an “alcohol ignition interlock” - a small breath-testing device linked to the ignition of a car to prevent its operation by an impaired driver. A company in West Seattle can install and lease the device for $2 a day. The procedure already is used sparingly in the state by some judges.

Tighten a much-used loophole in the law by restricting to once-per-life the use of a “deferred prosecution.” The procedure, now allowed once every five years, permits a person to contract with the court to receive alcohol counseling and other treatments as an alternative to prosecution.

Susan West, the Issaquah woman recently sentenced to nine years in prison after she killed pedestrian Mary Johnsen, had two deferred prosecutions going at the same time in two different jurisdictions. Neither jurisdiction was aware of the arrangement in the other court.

Keep a drunken-driving record on file for life, and use it when considering the severity of sentences for repeat offenders. A person’s record now is “washed out” after five years.

“There is no one magic bullet,” Roach said. But together, the new laws will put a dent into drunken driving, she and other backers predict.

One tool that will not be in the package will be a law allowing police to set up roadblocks and randomly check vehicles for drunken drivers. Several states, particularly North Carolina, have reported large drops in drunken driving in recent years as a result of “sobriety checkpoints.”

A proposed law to permit roadblocks in Washington met solid resistance four years ago from the left and the right, both of which saw it as an assault on civil liberties, after the courts ruled against previous roadblocks.

“I don’t see that being on the agenda this year because it pulls everybody over, it’s a civil liberties issue. It’s not a part of our legislation,” Roach said.