THIS WEEK marks the one-year anniversary of the day a car hit
bicyclist Tim O’Donnell on a rural Washington County road. The car’s
driver was not only uninsured, but also her Oregon license had been
suspended and she’d traveled to Idaho and surreptitiously obtained a
new one. Before her fatal crash with O’Donnell, the driver had already
been in an accident with her new Idaho license.
Now, O’Donnell’s widow, Mary, his friends at the Bicycle
Transportation Alliance (BTA), and some supportive lawyers have drafted
a law to try and close the legal loophole they believe keeps drivers
with suspended licenses on the road.
Oregon is one of only four states without a vehicular homicide law,
which means that if a “witless” but not technically “reckless” driver
(according to BTA’s lawyer, Ray Thomas, “reckless” has a precise legal
definition which includes drunks and drag racers, but not a driver
whose license has been suspended multiple times or is uninsured) runs
over a pedestrian or biker, the courts can’t charge them with homicide
or manslaughter. Thomas noted that in the last year, drivers with
suspended licenses were more than twice as likely as totally legal
drivers to crash.
The BTA’s proposed law would change the legal code so that drivers
with no insurance or suspended licenses who kill bikers or walkers
would be charged with a class-B felony—the same as criminally
negligent homicide.
“Death, fault, driving without a license—those things add up
to vehicular homicide,” explains Thomas. The BTA wants the legal system
to recognize that cars have dangerous potential, so driving one without
a license or insurance could be considered homicidal.
But it’s unclear whether a law that is primarily punitive rather
than preventive will actually decrease biker deaths or just put wild
drivers behind bars after the tragic fact. BTA Government Relations
Director Karl Rohde thinks it can help, mostly by sending a message to
law enforcement that driving witlessly is a serious problem. They hope
the law will cause police who pull over uninsured or unlicensed drivers
to give the drivers more than a light slap on the wrist.
“Right now, the situation is if you have a suspended driver’s
license and you get pulled over, the penalty is, they suspend your
driver’s license. And then the second time that happens, they suspend
your driver’s license. And it just keeps going like that,” Rohde says.
“We need a law that takes these drivers off the road… they need to be
taken out of society.”