Are our courts too lenient with motorists convicted of driving during suspension or revocation of license?
Utah jurists in particular and the public in general might well ponder this question in the light of recent trends and disclosures.
The Utah Code (Section 41-2-30) provides that any person convicted of driving while license is suspended or revoked “shall be punished by imprisonment in the county or municipal jail for a period of not more than six months and there may be imposed in addition thereto a fine of not more than $300.”
Yet, the Utah Safety Council reported Monday that only 25 per cent of these drivers, many of them dangerous and accident-prone, received the mandatory jail sentence in 1958. Of 456 suspended and revoked driving convictions handled last year by county and city judges, only 113 of the offending driver were jailed.
The trend in 1959 is similar. In January, the courts considered 53 cases where licenses had been suspended or revoked, but only 10 drivers were jailed. In February, 18 drivers were fined and 14 others were jailed.
The Safety Council noted that the state’s city judges are doing a better job of applying the law than are county and rural jurists – usually justices of the peace.
City judges in Provo, Logan, Ogden and Salt Lake City last year considered convictions of 67 persons accused of driving while under suspension or revocation. Of these, 38 were jailed.
But of 389 driver convictions considered in other areas of the state, only 75 drivers were jailed by court order.
A great many of the motorists convicted of driving during suspension or revocation had lost their licenses for driving while drunk. Many were repeaters.
Here are some sample cases right here in Utah County where the “mandatory” jail sentence was imposed BUT SUSPENDED:
1. A man who pleaded guilty to driving during revocation was sentenced to 30 days in jail, suspended on condition he refrain from driving.
2. A man who pleaded guilty to drunk driving and later to driving during revocation was sentenced to 90 days in jail, suspended on condition he refrain from driving and pay a $100 fine.
3. A man tagged for drunk driving for the fifth time in seven years (three of these times during revocation) was fined $299 for drunken driving and sentenced to five months in jail for driving during revocation, the jail term suspended.
Peace officers, justices of peace and others who attended a three-county traffic conference in Provo last December were told by Ernest Bourne, manager, Utah Safety Council, that failure of many courts to carry out the mandate of traffic statutes is creating lack of respect for the law.
At the same conference, George C. Miller, drivers license division chief, said that some of the most serious accidents in Utah involve drivers whose licenses were revoked or suspended, but were driving anyway.
The intricacies of the judicial system are often not understood by the public in general. Certainly justice is a two-way thing and every defendant is entitled to fair treatment and full protection of his rights. It is part of the court’s duty to see that he gets it. But in the case of conviction for driving during suspension or revocation it is hard for the layman to understand why the “mandatory” jail sentence was bypassed for 75 per cent of the 1958 defendants (as reported by the safety council).
Jurists have a weighty chore of tempering justice with lenience. Why punish the family by jailing the bread winner, has been the attitude of the courts in many cases.
But some of the law officers who clean up the wreckage, load broken bodies into ambulances, and haul drunken drivers to jail, see the question from a different angle. One of them said the other day, “Maybe if more families had to face the hard realities while the head of the household served out a sentence, some of our potential violators would learn a lesson.”
Judging by the variance in handling revocation cases, as indicated by the safety council report, there needs to be a more uniform statewide policy as well as closer adherence with the statutes in sentencing.
Do we need tougher statues and more severe penalties? Maybe there’s a lot of good sense in a statement made by Justice J. Allen Crockett of the Utah Supreme Court when he presided at the Provo traffic conference. Instead of ever raising the penalties for drunk and revocation driving, he said, let’s lower the penalties and ENFORCE THE LAW!