Lori Phillips, a South Anchorage resident in her mid-50s, was arrested for DUI in March of last year, after police found she’d driven off the road in the early afternoon, beer sitting on the seat beside her. This was her fourth DUI charge; out of the previous three, she’d pled one down for a 1983 arrest, but was convicted in 1986 and 2005.

After the March arrest, Phillips’ license was revoked and, as a condition of her bail, she wasn’t allowed to drink alcohol.

But in November, late in the afternoon on a Thursday, Phillips showed up to get her hair done at Hot Heads salon, where the staff noticed she was intoxicated. When Phillips drove away from the salon, the worried staff called police. The police put out a locate on Phillips white SUV, but had no luck finding her until an enforcement officer at a weigh station on the Seward Highway noticed the SUV driving erratically from the road into the driveway to the scales. He called police, but Phillips pulled back on to the highway. Half a mile later Phillips crossed the center line and collided head-on with a Toyota sedan. The driver of the sedan, 24-year-old Louis Clement, was killed, and his girlfriend, the mother of his 1-year-old daughter, Joyua Stovall, was critically injured.

Unsurprisingly, the public was outraged. Why was this woman driving when she was out on bail for another DUI offense? Where did the system fail in this case, or in the case of the 15 other alcohol-related traffic fatalities in the state in 2009? In 2008, nearly a third of the 5,888 DUI convictions were by repeat offenders; how did we let that happen? And how do we better deter people from driving while intoxicated?

Those are questions some in the legislature are examining right now.

Representative Mike Hawker (R-Anchorage) has introduced House Bill 271, which aims to significantly increase the penalties for DUI. The bill has two parts: The first would require as a condition of bail that anyone arrested for DUI be prohibited from driving a vehicle that didn’t have an ignition interlock device installed. (Ignition interlocks require the driver to blow into the device to start the vehicle; if any alcohol is detected the vehicle won’t start.) The offender’s own vehicle would also have to have an ignition interlock device installed before it could be released from impound.

The second part of Hawker’s bill would bump the sentencing schedule up by one offense—in other words, it would apply the current minimum sentences, fines and other penalties (including permanent revocation of the offender’s drivers license) for a third DUI in a ten-year time frame to the second DUI in ten years. The current punishments for a fourth DUI would apply after three offenses, and so on up the line.

“People are dying unnecessarily on the Seward Highway and my constituents are outraged,” Hawker says. “[This bill] responds to constituent requests I have received to make drunk driving a capital offense punishable by drawing and quartering, hanging, burning at the stake and then shooting the corpse. That is an exaggeration, but the community is fed up with repeat DUI offenders killing people and want the legislature to do something about it.”

In 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available, there were 466 third-time DUI offenders, 138 fourth-time offenders, 32 fifth-time offenders, 10 sixth-time offenders, and one seventh-time offender in the state. If Hawker’s bill becomes law, a second DUI offense in a ten-year time period would be a felony rather than a misdemeanor, and the statutory minimum punishments would be 120 days imprisonment, permanent revocation of the drivers license, a $10,000 fine, and mandatory forfeiture of the vehicle (these are currently the mandatory minimums for a third offense in a ten-year time period).

As attractive as the bill may sound to a public incensed by offenders like Lori Phillips, it may be flawed. Whether it’s constitutional for the courts to impose the interlock device on someone arrested for DUI before they’ve been convicted remains unclear (Arkansas, Texas and Connecticut impose similar measures under certain circumstances), but it’s possible the Department of Motor Vehicles could administratively impose the condition, the same way an offender’s drivers license is immediately suspended upon arrest.

Then there’s the question of how harshly the courts should punish a second-time offender. What if it’s someone who blew just over the legal threshold of .08 percent blood alcohol content twice, nine years apart? Should that offender be a Class C felon and have their drivers license permanently revoked? Is the cost worth it? Hawker says the Department of Corrections estimates it would cost an additional $7 million a year to house the extra offenders, and the required expenditures for processing them through the court system are estimated at $962,500 the first year and $825,900 each year after.

More importantly, would these harsh penalties deter people from driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs?

“We introduced this bill with the intent of triggering that exact discussion,” Hawker says. The bill had its first hearing before the House Judiciary Committee last Friday. “If the approach in this bill is not deemed appropriate, I will ask the Committee for their recommendation of how to address the community concerns involved and keep drunks off the road,” he wrote just prior to the hearing.

Representative Max Gruenberg (D-Anchorage) sits on the House Judiciary Committee, and is skeptical that harsher penalties are the answer to keeping intoxicated drivers off the road. With repeat offenders, such as Lori Phillips, it’s likely that they have an addiction that’s out of control, and for those people, treatment is the key, Gruenberg says.

“We’ve got to deal with this and not just answer in a draconian manner,” he says. “Just passing this will do several things—it will not necessarily get the person changed or into treatment, but it will make it illegal for the person to drive ever again. I think most people would drive, and be illegal. Unless you give them lots of public transportation, they won’t be able to get around and get to their medical appointments and get their kids to school and go to the grocery store and, most importantly, work. You’ll have these people sitting in front of the TV with nothing to do, no income, and they’ll drink more beer. It’s a very facile way of dealing with the problem.”

Hawker’s bill has no elements that deal with treatment, and Gruenberg says he’d have trouble voting for it without significant amendments. “Goodness knows nobody wants to spend a dime in treating these people,” he says. “Locking them up is a form of treatment that’s very ineffective and very expensive, although a lot of contractors make a lot of money from building jails, and a lot of probation officers and corrections officers get jobs.”

Jennifer Messick is Anchorage’s Traffic Safety Resource Prosecutor, and part of her job is public outreach to prevent people from driving while intoxicated. She says that in her experience, much of the public doesn’t even know what the penalties for a first time DUI are, much less what the penalties for repeat offenses are. (The minimums are 72 hours in jail, suspension of your drivers license for 90 days, a $1,500 fine, and you’re required to have an ignition interlock for a year after your license is reinstated.)

Deterrence, she says, “starts with people becoming more responsible for their own actions, and one way they do that is by becoming aware of the effects of their actions, and the effects of other people’s actions. So when you’re at a bar and you’re ready to go home, there’s a discussion of the safest way to get home. Without the raised public awareness it doesn’t get discussed.”

Messick gives presentations on DUI prevention to different groups in the community; she’s giving one to ConocoPhillips employees soon at their quarterly safety meeting. But the education should start in the schools, she says, targeting the next generation of drivers. She’d also like to see more education about DUI prevention targeted at people like truck drivers, taxi drivers, and airplane pilots, who rely on their drivers license to make a living.

She describes a bell curve of offenders, with the bulk in the middle, the weekend warriors who make bad decisions leaving the bar but aren’t necessarily addicts; at one of the small ends are the people who had no idea they were DUI, who may have taken a prescription medicine on the way home from the doctor’s office without realizing it would impair them, and at the other end of the bell curve are the addicts. Messick thinks public outreach could have a significant deterrent effect on the former two categories.

There are outside-the-box ideas for deterrence as well—maybe print coasters describing the penalties for first-time DUI and distribute them at bars, or have breathalyzers available for bars to take into their establishments so drinkers could see how intoxicated they are.

“I think a lot can be deterred if they knew exactly what constituted DUI, if they knew what the penalties were, and all the different ways you can be DUI,” Messick says.

In the end, while incidents like the Lori Phillips case are infuriating, it seems likely that we haven’t fully explored more cost-effective deterrents like public outreach and more funding for treatment, rather than for courts and incarceration costs. Cases like Phillips’ are splashed across the headlines, but the reality is that those 16 alcohol-related traffic fatalities in the state in 2009 represent a decline compared with 28 in 2008 and 35 in 2007, according to the Alaska Highway Safety Office.

And although Hawker’s bill seems unlikely to pass as is, having the legislature examine the issue can only be a good thing.

bjk@anchoragepress.com