Drunk Driving & Mens Rea (cross-posted at TEM)

 

This post originally appeared at The Excluded Middle. It also appeared in the 49th Philosophers’ Carnival here.

Well, here goes nothing! This is my first post on TEM and I am glad to be here. Most of my philosophical inspirations come from the news and other media (I am somewhat of a headline junkie). I anticipate that many of my blog entries will concern such topics; here is the first of such postings - I hope it is of some interest to you.

Last week, an episode of a popular talk show (Oprah, actually) featured the tragic story of a family that was deeply impacted by a drunk driving accident. The case was interesting from a legal standpoint because the young man involved was charged with second degree murder instead of involuntary manslaughter. (The victims were Katie Flynn and Stanley Rabinowitz and the driver was Martin Heidgen, if you want to Google for details).

Public opinion concerning this and other drunk driving cases seems especially harsh. Anecdotally speaking, I have found that many people think that drunk drivers who kill should be convicted of first-degree murder and maybe even face the death penalty. These sentiments are especially understandable coming from people whose lives have been profoundly affected by drunk driving. I cannot comprehend, for instance, the horror that Katie Flynn’s mother experienced when she discovered her daughter had been decapitated in the crash. Surely the drunk driver must be held responsible for his unspeakable crime. However, I am of the mind that intuitions are not enough to justify punishing Martin Heidgen or any other drunk driver. And, the more I thought about the circumstances of drunk driving cases, the more conflicted I became in my opinion as to what should become of the offenders.

Traditionally, systems of punishment seem to operate in accordance with two fundamental principles: lex talionis (retributive justice, a topic for another time) and mens rea (guilty mind - intent). Typically, premeditated and/or intentional crimes are considered more immoral than those which are unintentional or unforseen, and offenders are therefore sentenced to harsher punishments. Exceptions are sometimes made for those persons who are incapable of mens rea, such as young children, the mentally handicapped and the mentally ill. In a system where mens rea matters, a burden is placed on the prosecution to prove the state of mind of the criminal; such proof can mean the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor or even a conviction and an acquittal.

Evaluating the presence of mens rea in drunk driving is problematic because alcohol is an intoxicant that impairs one’s ability to reason. Like a child or a mentally retarded adult, a driver who has been drinking might lack the capacity to intend to kill anyone or even to appreciate the risks of her being behind the wheel. Presumably, higher levels of alcohol consumptions entail diminished capability for having mens rea or forseeing the risks of driving. In the absence of mens rea, we may not punish a drunk driver as severely as our intuitions dictate we should. Someone who has had two or three drinks might be physically unable to drive safely, but still functioning well enough mentally to recognize that she should not be driving. If this person were to drive anyway, she would be acting in a consciously reckless manner, fulfilling the mens rea requirement for punishment. Take now someone who has had fifteen or more drinks. She is barely coordinated enough to turn the key, and yet manages to drive home without any recollection of the trip. How can this driver’s mind be considered “guilty” in any way when it was physiologically stripped of its capacity for reason and was essentially performing only autonomic functions? Ironically, the more one has had to drink, the less responsible she becomes for her actions.

The matter is complicated (and the analogy weakened) by the fact that drunk drivers choose to drink, whereas children and the mentally ill don’t choose their impaired state. However, I’m not sure how important this fact really is. The only fully-reasoned choice that drunk drivers make is to drink. The subsequent choice whether to drive or not is made in the drinker’s more or less inebriated state - a state which might preclude mens rea. The reasoned choice (to drink) is only sometimes correlated with the un-reasoned one (to drive drunk), and so we may not take the choice to drink as identical with the choice to drink and drive. As such, drunk drivers might lack mens rea for driving, the choice regarding the criminal act.

Please do not construe this discussion as a defense of drunk drivers. I am merely interested in how we might resolve the mens rea paradox which suggests that more drinking means less responsibility. Perhaps another concept might step in to fill the mens rea gap. In utilitarianism, for instance, punishing a drunk driver might be the right thing to do even though she lacked mens rea. Or maybe the disanalogy between children or the mentally ill and drunk drivers is significant enough to reject my argument outright. In any case, I suspect that there is a good reason out there - mens rea or not - for punishing the drunk drivers who wreak havoc on our roads.