If a convicted drunken driver violates probation by drinking, a dozen technologies can detect it.
An interlock device can prevent his car from starting. One ankle bracelet can detect alcohol coming through his skin. Another can make sure he’s home, and now there are bracelets that do both.
A wrist bracelet can identify disturbances in sleep patterns that suggest alcohol or drug use. Probation officers can check for alcohol in an offender’s breath, urine or saliva. Another chemical test hunts for a metabolite of alcohol that remains in his body for days. There’s even a device to detect alcohol use by scanning the retina in his eye.
Meanwhile, the yearly toll of drunken-driving deaths remains tragically consistent.
In the United States, the percentage of passenger-vehicle drivers who were alcohol-impaired when they died in crashes has not improved since 2000, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. Drunken driving is a factor in about one-third of all traffic deaths.
Experts cite several reasons. First, a tiny percentage of drunken drivers get caught. Second, the devices used to monitor drivers who do get caught may have lasting benefits only if coupled with a successful counseling program.
“All these technologies have a place. But you have to consider the human factor,” said Marilyn Rosenberg, the director of Denver’s electronic monitoring program. “You have to get to the bottom of the problem.”
Those caught keep driving
Third, cheating is common.
In Colorado, where about 30,000 people get accused of drunken driving each year, a new law suspends the licenses of first offenders for nine months — unless they apply for an interlock from the Division of Motor Vehicles.
Stephen Hooper, who oversees that program, said about 1,500 drivers have taken that option so far this year, and their numbers are growing. But, he said, “there is evidence out there that as many as 70 to 75 percent of restrained drivers nationwide continue to drive while under restraint.”
Jerry Duran was one.
In Jefferson County, he was charged with vehicular homicide, drunken driving and leaving the scene of a fatal crash after his friend James Sandoval died in a motorcycle accident. According to the arrest report, witnesses recounted a day of heavy drinking, followed by a two-motorcycle collision.
Duran turned himself in the day after the crash. This year a jury acquitted him of the most serious charges. Keith Goman, the case prosecutor, said, “Witnesses were talking about as many as 20 drinks over the course of the evening,” but “there was no physical evidence of a collision.”
Duran did plead guilty to driving without insurance and interlock evasion. He had evaded it simply by climbing onto a motorcycle instead. The judge imposed the maximum sentence: two years in jail.
Six months after Sandoval died, Duran was arrested in Denver for driving drunk, without a license. The judge sentenced him to 520 days, to be served simultaneously with his Jefferson County sentence, for his sixth DUI.
Sandoval’s relatives said they also saw Duran keep driving, even to the courthouse.
When someone is ordered to drive only a car equipped with an interlock, “do they check?” asked Michelle Trujillo, Sandoval’s youngest sister.
Two years after the crash, Sandoval’s mother, Cecilia Vigil, struggles to discuss her son’s death. “It’s not right,” she said, “the way the law is.”
Gadgets pin down drivers
For a Colorado driver suspected of intoxication, the encounters with alcohol monitoring technologies begin with a trip to the police station, where a machine called the Intoxilyzer 5000EN measures alcohol in a pair of breath samples.
With a blood-alcohol content of 0.08 percent, or about four drinks in an hour for a 160-pound man, the driver is presumed drunk. The average reading for a first offender in Colorado: 0.16 percent.
First offenders can qualify to drive after a one-month suspension if they agree to an interlock device. Interlocks measure breath alcohol when the driver blows into a tube.
In Colorado, if the interlock result is above 0.025 percent, the car won’t start. Once the car is on the road, the interlock then requires periodic retests from the driver. Failing to take a retest will set off a loud alarm.
Paul Marques, a leading researcher of alcohol monitoring technologies, said studies have shown interlocks reduce recidivism — while they’re on the car. Once the device is removed, “you get a reversion to old habits,” he said. The interlock’s other problem is “you have no way to insist that that person drive only that car,” he said.
A Colorado company, Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc., makes ankle bracelets that continuously monitor alcohol levels in the skin, and a second Colorado company, BI Inc., is testing a similar device.
With the AMS device, called a SCRAM unit, alcohol readings are transferred to a modem, which calls daily results to the company.
The drawbacks: Ankle bracelets are less precise than Breathalyzers, and they do not prevent a violator from driving.
In Denver, Sandra Jacobson was charged with vehicular homicide and drunken driving after a Jan. 28 crash that killed two Connecticut librarians on their way to the airport. She was ordered to wear a SCRAM bracelet while awaiting trial.
From March 14 to 16, two weeks after the bracelet was applied, AMS reported Jacobson was obstructing it. On March 25, the district attorney’s office moved to revoke her bail. She contested the allegation, and a judge warned her not to slip up again before an April 15 hearing. On April 21, her bond was revoked for a week. In July, the Denver probation department reported her ankle monitor showed a confirmed consumption of alcohol. She again denied drinking.
DUI carries high price
In Colorado, some persistent drunken drivers have spent no time in jail on their fourth, fifth, even seventh convictions. Others have been spared from prison even after killing people while driving drunk.
However, the monetary penalties for a drunken-driving arrest in Colorado can be staggering. A SCRAM unit can cost the offender more than $300 a month. An interlock can cost $69 a month, plus a $70 installation fee. Alcohol counseling and treatment can range from $150 to $1,075, depending on the defendant’s blood-alcohol level and prior record. Probation costs $50 a month.
Alcohol monitoring is a growth industry. AMS, which applied its first SCRAM bracelet in 2003, projects revenues of $21 million this year from monitoring about 10,000 people daily in 48 states. The number of interlocks in use nationwide has nearly doubled in three years to about 180,000.
And monitoring is just a fraction of the offender’s costs. Add court fines and fees, hiring a lawyer and years of higher insurance premiums, and the price of a drunken-driving conviction can reach $10,000, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation.
Nathan Centz wouldn’t dispute that. A 28-year-old worker at an oil-change shop, he estimates he has spent $10,000 to $15,000 for a drunken-driving case and a series of other cases that tagged him as a habitual traffic offender.
Now he needs to drive with an interlock for two years before he can regain an unrestricted license.
“I hate it,” he said. “For example, I went to pick up a friend from a bar — I was the sober driver — and his aroma from the night failed my vehicle three or four times just in the course of getting him home. At one point I had to ask him to step outside so I could start the car.”
Tom Kissler, director of program development for interlock maker Smart Start, doubts that.
“Even one positive alcohol reading would be extremely unlikely, if not impossible,” he said.
Two states find success
Two states, South Dakota and New Mexico, launched aggressive monitoring programs that have been followed by dramatic reductions in fatal crashes involving drunken drivers.
Their strategies differ. South Dakota, a state with no interlock law, requires drivers in its 2 4/7 sobriety project to report to the sheriff’s office twice a day for Breathalyzer tests. Failing a breath test brings a short but immediate trip to jail. In rural areas, SCRAM bracelets are used to monitor offenders who cannot drive to the sheriff’s office twice a day.
To date, participants have passed 99.3 percent of the breath tests.
In the past two years, alcohol-related deaths on South Dakota roads dropped by 40 percent, and deaths are declining slightly again this year.
New Mexico, by contrast, adopted the country’s most aggressive interlock program.
Colorado uses interlocks strictly as an administrative enforcement tool of its motor vehicle agency.
New Mexico requires judges to order them as well. And the state complemented strong interlock laws with more treatment, drug courts, enforcement and anti-drunken-driving ads.
“We’ve actually reduced drunk-driving fatalities in the last six years by about 37 percent — with a similar reduction in alcohol-involved injuries,” said Richard Roth, a retired physics professor who led efforts to strengthen New Mexico’s interlock program.
In seven years, the number of interlocks installed on New Mexico vehicles has grown from 164 to nearly 10,000. About 45 of every 10,000 residents drive with an interlock — almost twice the number in any other state. Colorado is fourth with about 18 interlocks per 10,000 residents.
Devices for the future
Some foresee a time when drunken- driving deaths will be rare because every car will come with an interlock device.
” ‘Star Wars’ meets drunk driving,” Susan Ferguson labeled it at a traffic safety summit in New Mexico.
The program she manages, Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety, has awarded grants to develop advanced technologies that could detect intoxication without requiring a driver to breathe into a tube.
She estimates that a universal interlock could save 8,000 to 9,000 lives each year in the United States alone.
Any such device would have to be unobtrusive, “accurate, reliable, durable and low-cost” — a daunting but achievable challenge, she said. “I think within 10 years, we could have technologies that would be vehicle-ready.”
And potentially, she said, that could save so much pain. Nearly 12,000 people were killed last year in drunken-driving crashes in the United States, and “when one person dies, it affects those families for years to come.”
