Law Too harsh or a just punishment?

Yeah I wouldn't use the same method to choose who's drunkest. Some people can still get boners when they're super drunk. And I say that as a joke, and also in reality.

It is not an issue of measuring. In California for instance, it is legal to kill someone if you have a reasonable fear for your life. Reasonable fear means that a reasonable person in the same situation would be likely to believe that their life was in danger. What constitutes the belief of a reasonable person is up to the jury.

For me personally, my biggest thing is that she realized that she couldn't drive - and asked her boyfriend to drive home. To which he apparently agreed to. She didn't force him, he had opportunity to tell her to eff off and call a taxi/friend/walk/whatever. To me, that is on him. He made the judgement call to drive home instead of taking any other action.

Joy already said it, but I don't feel like she is responsible for his state of inebriation, because it very possibly could be hard to tell.

If someone lets a drunk person drive their car and they get in an accident that kills both someone else and the driver of the car, but not the owner of the car, would it be right to let the owner off the hook? Or what if someone let someone underage or without a license or permit drive their car and that person crashed and killed someone?

Nobody is talking about giving her an equal punishment, they're trying to prosecute her for the same crime. Obviously the driver is going to wind up with a harsher sentence than she is assuming they both get convicted.

I thought about it for a while and my conclusion is that the State has a reasonable case against the woman.

1. A homicide due to criminal negligence can result in an involuntary manslaughter conviction.

2. Under the laws of the State, knowingly allowing someone who was intoxicated past their ability to safely operate a vehicle is a criminal act.

3. A homicide was committed as a result of that crime (knowingly allowing a drunk to drive her vehicle).

Ergo, she could be guilty of involuntary/vehicular manslaughter provided that the prosecutor can establish the following.

1) She knowingly allowed her boyfriend to drive.
2) A reasonable person in her situation would know her boyfriend was likely to be over the legal alcohol limit.
3) A reasonable person would know that driving drunk is likely to lead to a significantly increased chance of homicide (this one is pretty much a given).

Now, in a State where it was not illegal to allow a drunk person to drive, there would probably be no case. Since this is a crime in Tennessee and the crime resulted in a death, that is reasonable grounds for the criminal negligence.

My thing is though, did she really know he was too drunk to drive?

Several years ago, Kim and I went to a bar for some drinks. She drove. We got pretty drunk and decided that when we left, we'd call a cab and I'd take her to her car the next day. Then a guy we knew showed up. He hung out with us for at least an hour, and then when we were ready to leave, he told us we were too drunk to drive. We told him we knew that, and that we were going to get a cab. He told us not to bother, he had no problem taking us home, and we were happy to save the cash, so he took us home. The next day he was laughing about how drunk he had been when he took us home. Kim was livid, as he had driven her car. We never saw him drink, but he wasn't sober and we didn't know. We were so drunk by the time he showed up that it would have been hard for us to realize he was drunk. Why should we have been to blame? We knew we were drunk, we knew we were not fit to drive, and someone else offered to take us home. In this case, she knew she was drunk, she knew she couldn't drive, and her boyfriend agreed to drive. If I am so drunk that I can barely operate a toilet let alone a car, why should I be held accountable when I ask someone else to drive that I think is sober enough to handle it and they say yes? He had the option to say he was too drunk to drive and refuse, but he didn't.

I would think that the prosecutor would have to convince the jury that the evidence proved that a reasonable person in her situation would have believed that the person she gave the keys to was most likely over the legal limit.

I am not certain that a lack of judgement due to the woman being drunk would be a mitigating circumstance. Usually it is not, but since the crime was so indirect the court might take her impairment into account.

If you sign a legal contract while under the influence it isn't binding, implying that one's judgement is skewed. So why would a person be held accountable for noticing another person's drunkenness? It seems unreasonable altogether.

By that precedent, if someone does PCP and murders a bunch of people because of their altered mental state, then they would not be responsible because their judgement was skewed.

Generally speaking, in terms of criminal law you are still responsible for acts you committed while impaired because you made the choice to become impaired in the first place and accept the possible consequences (otherwise you get into the situation where a drunk driver is not responsible for their action because they are impaired).

Civil law is a whole other matter. Just because someone is criminally responsible for their actions while impaired does not mean it is legal for another person to take advantage of their state.

However, that being true, in this case, there is a chain of crimes (she was not ultimately the person responsible for the homicide) so the courts may be more willing to take her impairment into account.

In other words, I was saying that I don't agree with the fact that you can claim rape after consenting to sex while drunk because of your impairment yet be held responsible for the actions of another person driving your car if you are drunk. In my opinion, there is a contradiction there because if you are being held accountable for your judgments while drunk and trying to find a ride home or whatever, shouldn't you be held accountable for your decision to sleep with someone while intoxicated? If you cannot legally consent to one, than how can you legally consent to the other? Hell, maybe she should of reported the car stolen, since she was obviously not in the right frame of mind to give him legal consent to drive her car.

I believe she could and probably should be charged with something, but not to the extent that he is.

In many States, having sex with someone who is too intoxicated to reasonably be expected to give legal consent is rape by intoxication.

The reason there is no contradiction here is because the person who is being raped is not the person who is committing the crime. The person who knowingly gives their keys to an inebriate is, in this particular State, is the person committing the crime. Generally speaking, impairment of your own volition is not a mitigating factor or an excuse to commit crimes.

There's a difference. In some situations you've got a sober person taking advantage of a drunk person's lowered inhibitions and altered mental state to deceive or take advantage of them. In those cases the drunk person is the victim and the sober person is the purportrator.

But in this case, and in others like it, the drunk person is the criminal. If we were too excuse the car owner from deciding who can drive her car, what's next? Do we excuse a bunch of drunk frat boys for going along with a drunk upperclassman's plan to vandalize a rival frat? Do we excuse a meth-head who steals jewelry from his parents? Do we excuse a raging alcoholic from beating her kids? Where do we draw the line?

I think the heart of the issue that she's the car owner and willing passenger. She has allowed the driver to have keys and has chosen to ride with that driver.

But the person who is doing the "raping" is probably intoxicated also, and by rights shouldn't be accountable for their actions either. To me, this whole thing seems stupid, because who knows which one is the "rapist". It's going to be whoever reports it first, because if they are that inebriated, they aren't going to remember much about how the night went. Unless, of course, date rape drugs were involved. Then it's definitely rape.

Anytime you are drunk it's usually of "your own volition" and you make it sound like she gave him her keys KNOWING that he was too drunk to drive and she knew that he would he was going to go and commit those crimes. If she is too intoxicated to drive and she knows she is, she is also too intoxicated to make proper judgments. She was too drunk to drive, and thought she was doing the right thing by giving him the keys. Most likely she didn't realize he was that drunk, and as an adult it should of been him that said, "You know what? I think we should leave the car here and get a cab." My assumption is, if this goes to trial, a jury will not convict her of anything.

But you're talking about someone directly harming someone else. A rapist or someone on PCP hurting others is the one who decided on those actions.

Signing a contract isn't maleficence. And I don't think what this girl did was either.

The problem is the law needs must be consistent. If you can use the excuse, "I was too drunk to know better," to get out of charges of rape or charges of giving keys to an intoxicated driver, then you can use the excuse to get out of charges of gross vehicular manslaughter if you get behind the wheel and kill someone while drunk or to get out of charges of murder if you are high on PCP.

While there may be some very specific exceptions and mitigating circumstances, as a general rule, if you intentionally put yourself in an altered mental state you are considered just as responsible for your actions as if you were stone sober, for good reason.