NHTSA/NCJA Criminal Justice Summit on Impaired Driving

Introduction

NHTSA's Charge to Participants During her address to participants at the forum, former NHTSA Deputy Administrator Annette Sandberg stated that NHTSA's biggest concern with regard to impaired driving is keeping repeat offenders off the nation's streets and highways where they continue to do harm.  She stated that NHTSA is not looking for the "silver bullet" from the summit or new ground to be broken.  NHTSA is looking to focus only on what works, directing their resources to areas where there are problems.  She issued a charge to participants, first by asking them to answer the following pointed questions: If you are in enforcement: Is your evidence solid? If you are a prosecutor: Is the DWI charge on a second or third offense given a priority status? If the enforcement cases need improvement are you providing feedback? If you are a judge: Do you consider the full list of options for sentencing? Have you considered graduated sentencing for high BAC? If the prosecutors' cases need improvement, are you providing feedback? In closing, she charged participants to: Determine where the breakdowns in the system are occurring. Provide solutions to the problems. Provide a measure that can be used to determine accomplishments. Provide a system that is seamless. Identify strategies they  (and their organization associations) can employ immediately after leaving the summit.

 

Each year approximately 17,000 individuals are killed in alcohol-related traffic crashes and individuals with prior convictions for driving while impaired (DWI) and high blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels are too frequently involved.²   These drivers comprise only a small percentage (1 percent) of the population of nighttime drivers, according to the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF), yet they account for more than 50 percent of the alcohol-related crashes occurring around that time.³  Additionally, according to a 1995 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study, they make up about one-third of the individuals arrested or convicted for DWI offenses annually.⁴ While hundreds of laws have been enacted to prevent and control impaired driving, research suggests that repeat and high BAC impaired drivers have found ways to "slip through the cracks" in the system. In many cases these are the drivers avoiding detection, evading arrest, and escaping prosecution and sanctions. Identifying where exactly those cracks exist and how they can be fixed are among the challenges facing criminal justice practitioners involved in the DWI system.

At the same time, national statistics on impaired driving fatalities suggest that progress made during the 1980s and early 1990s to reduce impaired driving incidents has stalled, with the percentage of alcohol-related traffic deaths hovering at about 40 percent of all crashes annually.  Following a dramatic 35 percent drop in impaired driving fatalities between 1982 and 1994, the percentage of traffic deaths involving alcohol-positive drivers has remained stagnant, according to statistics from NHTSA.  In 2000 and again in 2001, the percentage of alcohol-related traffic fatalities rose to 41 percent, suggesting that DWI fatalities are on the rise, and that the nation has become somewhat apathetic toward the issue.  If the nation is to reach the goal of no more than 1.0 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by 2008, some drastic measures need to be employed to increase efficiency in dealing with chronic DWI offenders.

To help breathe new life into the fight against impaired driving and identify ways the criminal justice system can better deal with DWI offenders, particularly chronic DWI offenders, the NHTSA and the NCJA convened a Criminal Justice Summit on Impaired Driving on November 21-22, 2002, in Washington, DC.  Participants were charged with identifying gaps, problems and challenges in the criminal justice system in the handling of impaired drivers. They explored these issues by dividing the criminal justice process for handling impaired drivers into three phases for ease of organization—the enforcement phase, prosecution phase and the adjudication phase. Using this framework of the criminal justice process, loopholes in the system were identified with regard to the repeat DWI offender in particular. Current and proposed solutions and strategies for improving the system were assessed and priority areas that require immediate action were highlighted.  The final charge of the Criminal Justice Summit on Impaired Driving was the formulation of solutions and strategies to improve the system and development of implementation plans for action steps and resources to be committed. An agenda for this meeting is included in Appendix A.

The products of this Summit include the identification of the challenges to the entire criminal justice system in the handling of impaired drivers and recommended guidelines applicable to a variety of disciplines offering solutions, action planning and implementation, and follow up steps. This report is intended to offer the collective input of the criminal justice system practitioners who provided the expertise and practical guidance to bring about positive change in the system to more effectively reduce the incidence of impaired driving and the related fatalities and raise the issue to priority status nationally.

The points of view and opinions expressed at the Summit and in this report are those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or the National Criminal Justice Association.

The Criminal Justice Summit on Impaired Driving

The NHTSA/NCJA Summit drew a cadre of approximately 100 participants representing law enforcement, prosecutors, public defenders, victim services, judges, state and tribal court administrators, treatment providers, probation, jail administrators, motor vehicle administrators, corrections officials, state criminal justice administrative agencies, state highway safety agencies, state legislators, county officials, and tribal leaders.  A list of participants attending is included in Appendix B.  The goal of the Summit was to work collaboratively to identify the challenges and solutions in the criminal justice system in the handling of impaired drivers. 

Research informed the discussions by providing concrete information regarding identified problems in the criminal justice system and some suggested solutions. The TIRF recently published a series of reports focusing on DWI system improvements.⁵   The first report dealt with problems in the detection and apprehension of hard core (repeat and high blood alcohol content [BAC]) drinking drivers; the second report examined ways to improve prosecution of these drivers; and the third report focused on ways to improve the adjudication and sanctioning of hard core DWI offenders. This research was developed out of a series of focus groups and follow up surveys conducted with a few select criminal justice practitioner groups with extensive experience in the handling of DWI cases.  Beer brewer company Anheuser Busch funded the reports.

Research also was provided from the report and recommendations published by the American Automobile Association (AAA) Foundation for Traffic Safety which proposed that the best ways to address the problem of impaired driving are to strengthen the criminal justice system as a whole and recognize that simple solutions will not work.⁶ The AAA study cited three strategies that would improve performance in the system: 1) better information sharing among system components; 2) better management of the overall system and the components; and 3) increased funding for the issue and all parts of the criminal justice system.

Summit Design

The Criminal Justice Summit on Impaired Driving was organized by dividing the process of handling impaired drivers into enforcement, prosecution and adjudication phases. These phases were viewed broadly and considered as each related to or encompassed the responsibilities and roles of each of the criminal justice professional components represented at the Summit. 

After organizing the criminal justice process broadly into the three phases, multidisciplinary work groups discussed each phase to identify the gaps and challenges in the system as a whole and develop possible solutions to meet the identified challenges.  Using multidisciplinary workgroups enabled the challenges and the solutions to be more comprehensively defined and less directed at specific professional groups or components of the system. This meeting design encouraged group consensus on system challenges and encouraged creative problem solving solutions. It also provided opportunities to work with other criminal justice partners and to begin building relationships with practitioners who may not always work closely together.  A plenary session followed each breakout session and began with an opportunity to debrief the outcomes of the breakout sessions as a whole.  These debriefing sessions allowed all practitioners to see the ideas generated and the progress made by all Summit participants.

After identifying the challenges to the criminal justice system as a whole in the context of three broad phases, breakout sessions met by discipline to review and apply the first day's recommendations to their practitioner group.  Each practitioner group selected priorities from among the recommendations developed by the full Summit and devised implementation plans for their profession.  These practitioner group implementation plans identified next steps, resources and key stakeholders required to accomplish the priorities adopted by their discipline. At the closing session, the priorities selected, the implementation plans developed, and the commitments to action made, were reported to all Summit participants and to NHTSA Administrator Dr. Jeffrey Runge, for response.