On this cloudy day last year, a car hit bicyclist Tim O’Donnell on a rural Washington County road. The car’s driver was not only uninsured, the state had suspended her license, she’d gone to Idaho and surreptitiously obtained a new one, then been in an accident with the new license before finally fatally crashing with O’Donnell.
Now, O’Donnell’s widow, Mary, his friends at the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (B.T.A.) and some supportive lawyers have drafted a law to try and close the legal loopholes that keep drivers with suspended licenses on the road.
Here’s Mary at B.T.A’s press conference this morning – that pin is a photo of her husband.
Oregon is one of only four states without a vehicular homicide law, which means that if a “witless” but not technically “reckless” driver (in the words of 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.
The B.T.A’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,” explained Thomas, simply. Basically, the Bike Alliance wants the legal system to recognize that cars themselves have seriously dangerous potential, so driving one without a license or insurance could potentially be considered homicidal.
“Right now, the situation is if you have a suspended drivers license and you get pulled over, the penalty is, they suspend your drivers license. And then the second time that that happens, they suspend your drivers’ license. And it just keeps going like that,” said BTA government relations director Karl Rohde at this morning’s press conference announcing the idea for the law, “We need a law that takes these drivers off the road… they need to be taken out of society.”
Right, so it’s great that O’Donnell’s family and bikers around Portland are being proactive about changing a situation they think led to his death, but will a law like this which is punitive rather than preventative actually help keep bikers safer? Or will it just funnel more people into our (overcrowded, expensive, dehumanizing) prisons?
Rohde and Thomas agree that the preventative potential of the proposed law is somewhat weak, but believe it’s still an important one to get on the books, mostly to send 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.
“It may not immediately make a difference, but in the long run it will,” said Thomas. “I think that, more and more, there’s probably a criminal element out there that’s driving while suspended that’s realizing, wow, there’s really no consequence, so ‘So what?’”
The bike legal team will be visiting Senator Floyd Prozanksi and Representative Tobias Read this summer and hope to have the law come to a vote during the legislative session next year.
Another funny note about the proposed law: to get support down in state legislature and senate, the B.T.A. is partnering an unusual alliance of truckers and the automotive insurance agency. That caused guys like motorcyclist Randy Phipps (below) to turn up at the press conference. Randy rides a 1000cc Sportster motorcycle and thinks the punitive nature of the proposed law is great – it just doesn’t go far enough.
“On a second or third suspension, we should be done with it,” he told me, “Lock ‘em up. We could lock up a few of them, and the others see it happening, they might change their habits.”
posted by Sarah Mirk
New intern! Whoo-hoo!
If you get pulled over driving on a suspended license, you should be put in jail for a few days and fined, second offense, a few months and a fine, third a few years. And if you kill someone while driving on a suspended license, at least 5 years. That might make the violators think twice.
Unfortunately, suspended licenses usually disproportionately effect poor folks. A whole lot of people are suspended because they can’t afford the DMV fees stacked up against them, not because they are really bad drivers. In a culture built around the car, to restrict access on a class scale is unsettling at least. To call it homicide because of poverty is a crime itself. Let’s think twice about this before the prisons get even bigger.
I would be in favor of stricter enforcement of bicycle safety laws – seeing bikers pulled over for traffic violations, especially people who bomb down hills or do not have lights on at night.
This is absurd. No proof of insurance changes the crime into a homicide? It must take a willful stretch of the imagination to pull out a correlation between these two things.
I feel for the victim’s family, but their efforts to save lives would be much better spent on prevention, rather than punitive actions. I don’t think there’s many people around thinking “Well, I was thinking about plowing my car into some cyclists today, but with that new law, gosh, maybe I’ll just stay home and watch Top Chef.”
Not only the poor will be disproportionatly affected, but immigrants (illegal and otherwise). There needs to be punative punishments levied for driving without insurance that are meaningful, but this legistlation seems to be beyond what is reasonable.
This is more or less the best blog entry I’ve ever read. Insightful, edgy, etc. I have high hopes for whoever wrote this.
This is more or less the best blog entry I’ve ever read. Insightful, edgy, etc. I have high hopes for whoever wrote this.
I think you have the answer to your question:
“We need a law that takes these drivers off the road… they need to be taken out of society.”
They don’t want to put them into a McDonalds, or a Gymnasium somewhere. They want them put in prison.
The problem isn’t that there isn’t a law against this sort of thing: Its ALREADY against the law to drive with a suspended licence. The problem isn’t that the Police aren’t enforcing that law–they are, and the do…its that the law doesn’t have any teeth.
I don’t think the answer is a NEW law, but rather, a revamp of the existing law. Change it to allow for serious jail time for infractions.
I laud the bill’s proponents for their spirit, but they get a zero for execution.
Further: I see the dilemma regarding the class issues, but this law isn’t the proper place to address those issues. Heck, LEGISLATION isn’t even the place to address those issues. Those fees and fines take place in a lala land all it’s own at the state organizational level, called “Administrative Rules.” IIRC, those are reviewed every 4 years. good luck getting them changed however.
Now, before people start shitting on me from atop an oh-so-lofty perch, please keep in mind that I rode my bike 4x the miles I drove my car last week. Indeed, I hung out with Scott and Amy last friday night…downtown…where I went by bicycle.
tab writes:
“Unfortunately, suspended licenses usually disproportionately effect poor folks. ”
So do traffic tickets, arrests for drunk driving, and smog checks. The problem isn’t that we’re too hard on poor drivers. It’s that poor folks are disproportionately affected by a lack of transportation options besides driving. THAT is the problem.
The solution to that problem, the big problem, is not to ask those people to be less careful or responsible on the roads. It is to provide them with transportation options. One of those is bicycling but poor folks don’t like bicycling under deadly conditions either.