They’re resolved to drive change

Gary Young and Anita Kronvall say they’ve seen too many innocent people lose their lives to drunken driving, too many offenders go unpunished.

“Frankly, I’m tired of that,” Young said.

Now, the Idaho State Police chaplains want to see who else in North Idaho is tired of it – and who would support a Mothers Against Drunk Driving chapter in the region.

“We don’t just want people to say, ‘Yeah, we think it should be back here.’ We want people to say, ‘We want it back here,’ ” Kronvall said.

“And, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do to help,’ ” Young added.

The two see too much leniency in driving-under-the-influence laws and the way they are enforced. They believe judges give repeat drunken drivers slaps on the wrist while prosecutors accept plea bargains that keep DUI charges off offenders’ criminal records.

“Some of those were people who had multiple offenses,” Young said. “People are going to continue to have that behavior unless they know there’s a price attached to it.”

That’s where MADD comes in, Kronvall said. The organization has an Idaho chapter, but it is based in Boise and its resources are stretched thin, she said.

Starting a chapter focused on North Idaho would give the region an avenue to push for harsher DUI penalties and for victim advocacy efforts, she said.

“When someone is killed by an impaired driver, there is no place for those people to turn to get help, for them to understand what their next step is,” Kronvall said.

Her daughter was killed by a drugged driver nearly four years ago.

“I didn’t have any idea where to go, what to do, the legal aspect,” she said. “You barely know how to get one foot in front of the other.”

Since her daughter’s death, Kronvall has crusaded for stricter DUI laws, playing an instrumental role in a law passed by the Washington Legislature this year that makes a fifth DUI within 10 years a felony.

Kronvall works with the Spokane and Kootenai County substance abuse councils but said victim advocacy and court monitoring are things the councils don’t have the funds or the personnel to do.

The court-monitoring program is a way of supervising the judicial system to see how impaired drivers are punished – or not punished.

“It makes a tremendous amount of difference when the judge knows there is a representative of Mothers Against Drunk Driving there when he’s doing DUI cases,” Kronvall said.

Young and Kronvall hope to compile a database of all DUI cases in the region to see which judges are most lenient and how many cases are pleaded down to something less than a DUI charge.

“We can start developing a database that tells us which judges, which prosecutors are doing the jobs that they ought to be doing,” Young said.

The two chaplains said their goal is prevention.

By monitoring DUI court cases and advocating for victims, they hope to raise awareness of what they say is a crime that too often is ignored.

“Most people don’t think very much about impaired driving until they’re personally affected,” Young said.

He spent the single term he served in the Idaho House of Representatives trying to strengthen the state’s DUI laws but says he saw little progress.

“There are too many legislators who drink and drive,” he said.

Raising public awareness about what impaired driving does to society could put pressure on lawmakers and law enforcement officials to punish DUI motorists more stringently, he said.

“If people understood the economic cost that’s associated with it as well as the human cost that’s associated with it, then they would be more up in arms,” Young said.

So what’s keeping the two from starting a MADD chapter in North Idaho?

“We just need to know if there’s an interest,” Kronvall said.