Effective tomorrow, the State of Michigan standard for defining drunk driving will be reduced from 0.10 percent to 0.08 percent. The state will then be in compliance with a three-year-old federal law requiring the change be made by the Wednesday deadline. The alternative would be to forfeit 2 percent of their federal highway funding.
Interestingly, Ohio's DUI law was changed recently and it doesn't seem to have had any significant impact on the number of drunk driving arrests. According to David Patch of the Toledo Blade,
Lt. Kevin Keel, head of the Toledo police traffic section, said that between July 1, when Ohio's 0.08 law went into effect, and Sept. 22, only three people out of 113 charged by city police with driving while under the influence had blood-alcohol concentrations of between 0.08 and 0.10.In the case where laws are made for purposes of political appeasement, one might expect diminishing returns.
No comments:
Post a Comment