MADD is model for anti-texting while driving group
St. Louis, MO
Over and over, the comparison is made to a battle that started 30 years ago with the death of a 13-year-old California girl.St. Louis, MO DWI Criminal Defense Attorney
The loss of Cari Lightner, who was run down by a drunk driver, served as a catalyst for change by spawning Mothers Against Drunk Driving, one of the best known nonprofit advocacy groups in the nation's history.
For those wanting to take cell phones out of the hands of drivers, MADD provides both inspiration and a road map for how to use the power of public opinion, political pressure and heart-wrenching stories of lost mothers, sons and daughters to force change.
"We're just borrowing their game plan. Law by law, they got it done," said Jennifer Smith, founder of fledgling FocusDriven, a Texas-based nonprofit that wants to reshape how society treats cell phones.
Already, a nationwide movement is underway to regulate their use in cars. Seven states ban handheld phones, while 19 others, including Illinois, ban all text messaging. Another nine states, including Missouri, ban texting for younger drivers — though it appears Missouri could expand the ban to all drivers this year.
Legislatures across the nation are debating dozens of new laws. And the federal government, which recently banned texting for all commercial truck and bus drivers, is making noise about tying highway funding to texting bans.
"People think they can drive safely while using a cell phone, but they can't," U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a news conference last week. "We take this texting while driving as an epidemic."
Opponents of distracted driving are facing obstacles similar to those encountered by drunk-driving opponents back in the 1980s. Chief among them is the fact that many people don't see a problem with using a cell phone, or even texting, while driving.
This, despite numerous studies, including one in 2005 by researchers at the University of Utah, showing cell phone users' reaction times are on par with those of drunk drivers. For many, it comes down to the simple issue of personal freedom and not wanting to be told what to do.
Even in areas where texting or using a handheld phone is illegal, penalties are often relatively light. Along with education and public awareness campaigns, stiffer penalties is an area of focus for safety advocates such as Douglas Horn, a lawyer from Independence, Mo., who argues that cell phone violators should face the same consequences as drunk drivers.
"If you take away their driving privileges and you make some examples, you are going to get people's attention," Horn said.
Often, punishments can vary widely, even in deadly traffic accidents where cell phones are a contributing factor. Consider a pair of fatal accidents that occurred in the St. Louis area in 2008.
The first, in July, was the highly publicized Highway 40 incident in which a truck driver plowed through a line of cars, killing three people and injuring 15 others. According to police records, driver Jeffrey Knight, 49, of Muscle Shoals, Ala., said he was reaching for his cell phone when he realized the cars ahead had stopped. Knight was charged with three counts of involuntary manslaughter, felonies punishable by up to four years in prison each.
The second occurred in Arnold in August, when a pickup driver veered out of his lane and struck and killed a motorcyclist coming the opposite direction. According to police reports, driver Michael Oldani, 20, of Arnold, said he was answering his cell phone just before the accident occurred. And although Arnold police recommended manslaughter charges, prosecutors opted for a lesser charge of careless and imprudent driving, a misdemeanor punishable by a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney Forrest Wegge would not discuss Oldani's case while it is pending. But he said manslaughter charges in general require the prosecution to prove criminal negligence.
"A lot of the time, it's a judgment call on the prosecutor's part," Wegge said.
It's one of the areas where distracted driving opponents want changes. They say it's reminiscent of the days before MADD, when drunk driving was more or less ignored by society and a legal system that often handed out slaps on the wrist for violators.
"It was a joke on late-night TV. It was perfectly acceptable," said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD.
That was until Candace Lightner's daughter was killed while walking to a church carnival. The fiery Lightner unleashed a grass-roots campaign — fueled by tearful stories of lost loved ones — that spread rapidly across the country. The organization, which has hundreds of chapters across the nation and raises millions of dollars each year, is often looked upon as a model for effecting change.
Lightner and an army of volunteers attacked the issue at the local, state and national levels, pushing for increasingly strict laws and penalties for those who broke them. When they started, there were 30,000 drunk-driving deaths each year in the United States. The number was down to fewer than 12,000 in 2008.
Scoring a similar victory in the distracted driving battle won't be easy, suggests MADD founder Lightner, now a real estate agent in Florida. She empathizes with the distracted driving movement but sees obstacles that didn't exist when she started MADD.
The economy was better. There weren't nearly as many nonprofits competing for donations. And most importantly, no one had ever seen an organization like it before.
"I don't think I would be as successful today as I was then," Lightner said. "In the 1980s, we were unique. We were one of a kind."
Distracted driving opponents also face a relative dearth of statistics showing the size of the problem. According to government estimates, nearly 6,000 people die each year as result of distracted driving, with officials citing cell phones as a major source of those distractions. But the data are far from complete, with many states — until recently, Illinois was among them — doing little to track cell phone-related accidents.
Still, FocusDriven, which launched last month and has just five regional chapters, does have one of the key ingredients of MADD's success: the victims.
More specifically, they have the willingness to put names, faces and stories to the thousands of people killed each year in cell phone-related accidents. They've set up victim memorials on social network Facebook and photo-sharing site Flickr, where survivors post images and tell stories. They plan to testify and speak on the issue whenever possible.
And in today's world of instant communication, that's easier than ever.
"That's one advantage we have. They didn't have social networking," said founder Smith, whose mother was killed by a distracted driver in Oklahoma City in September 2008 while driving to get cat food.
But social networks and the Internet have their drawbacks — as anyone who has tried to reach the masses can attest.
"It's easy to create an authentic message and spread it to some people," said Matt Carlson, an assistant professor of communications at St. Louis University. "The problem is, how do you reach everybody? It's not easy."
Labels: Jefferson County MO DWI-DUI-BAC, MADD Missouri, St. Louis MO Traffic Law
