Jail Terms Advised for Drunken Drivers

This article appeared in the newspaper in the mid-50s when Glenn Cogswell was judge of the probate and juvenile courts of Shawnee County, Kan.

[Editor’s note: The Daily Capital has invited several judges and law enforcement officers to write articles expressing their opinions on how best to curb drunken driving. This us the second article in the series.]

By Glenn D. Cogswell, Judge, Probate and Juvenile Courts, Shawnee County (Kansas)

As long as history has been recorded, society has had the problem of the excessive drinker. When we combine this age-old problem with the relatively modern problem of safety on our streets and highways, we have the extremely serious and complex problem of drunken driving.

The problem of the drunken driver will not be legislated away. It is easy to fall into the fallacy of thinking that all we must do to solve a problem is to “pass a law.” This fallacy is convenient because it is a means of passing the responsibility on to someone else.

Our first excuse for doing nothing is to blame the legislature for not passing the law and if and when the law is passed, we can always complain that it is not being enforced by the law enforcement officers and the courts.

There are many sincere persons who believe that the punishment for those convicted should be made more severe. By giving the convicted drunken driver a heavy jail sentence or handing him a heavy fine he may be kept out of circulation for the immediate present but I doubt if it has any great general retarding effect.

In my experience as judge of the Court of Topeka, I do not recall a single case where a man was convicted a second time for driving while drunk. This is not to say that no one has ever been convicted a second time but certainly this occurs infrequently.

Thus it would seem that the punishment is severe enough to have a deterring effect on the offender himself. The effect upon the general public is not great because most people do not seem to concern themselves with what happens to others.

Making the punishment more severe may have the opposite from the desired effect. It is a fact well known to the prosecutors and those experienced with criminal jurisprudence that by making the penalty too severe, the chance for a conviction is lessened.

I believe our present law provides for ample punishment. It provides for up to one year imprisonment, a find from $100 to $500 for the first offense along with a mandatory revocation of the driver’s license.
The great success of the English criminal law has often been attributed to the philosophy that it is not the severity but the certainty of punishment that deters others. Under this philosophy the criminal incidence rate in England is much lower than in this country.

If imprisonment in jail is to be the manner of dealing with criminals as it has been for a good long time, then drunken drivers, being criminals, should be imprisoned in jail. The length of time to be served should be left to the trial judge who has all the facts of the offense and the mitigating circumstances.

No law can be enforced as a mathematical equation as A commits B type of crime thereafter sentenced to C type of punishment. An attempt to apply such an equation is an oversimplification and cannot result in just administration of the law. The judges who dispose of cases of drunken driving need more than to be honest and conscientious, they need the support of the community.

It is one thing as a private citizen to say blandly that every drunken driver should be jailed and given severe punishment and quite another to sit as the sentencing magistrate and look down upon the offender who is now quite sober and who looks very human and like the man next door and to see his sad-faced wife and a stair-stepped line of children; to hear his attorney making a plea for leniency and even to hear the prosecuting attorney, who is also human after all, suggest to you that about the only result from imprisonment (sic) this man will be to take him from his family and require the county to support his family for him.

From the judge’s standpoint these cases are not cold statistics but individual persons with families and in individual and unusual circumstances.

All this leads up to these recommendations for the curbing of drunken driving:

1. All offenders should serve some time in jail.

2. The certainty of jail punishment for drunken driving should be publicized.

3. The law enforcement officers and courts should be supported by a great majority of the citizens of the community and the judges should know they are supported.

In order to carry out these three points, a committee or committees might be formed of persons who are interested in this problem to add influence and to spearhead a program of education through campaigns and advertising projects of civic-minded groups, newspapers, radio and television that would help to make everyone fully aware that if he drives under the influence of liquor he is a criminal and since criminals go to jail, he will go to jail.

A good many conscientious citizens as the result of such a program might well stop short of the drink that will impair their driving ability, or think ahead to make arrangements to get home in some other manner than to run the risk of driving while drunk.

Through the efforts of this committee or similar committees, the judges would be kept aware that the community is backing them in their endeavor to administer justice fairly and reasonably and they will be able to overcome the influences for leniency in cases where leniency is not justifiable.

These suggestions are not intended as a solution to the problem. There is no solution. I do believe they constitute a possible line of approach in attempting to curb the serious problem of drunken driving.