Alcohol-related traffic fatalities in Maryland are on the rise because of public apathy and an overloaded judicial system, officials said yesterday in releasing the most extensive federal report to date on drunken driving.
After years of progress in reducing the number of drunken driving deaths from stunning highs in the early 1980s, Maryland is backsliding. Last year, 44 percent of state traffic fatalities were linked to alcohol -- the highest such rate since 1990, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
"We've evened out and gone the wrong way," said Elizabeth Baker, NHTSA's mid-Atlantic regional administrator. "I think a lot of people think the drunk-driving problem has been solved. But people are still dying at an alarming rate."
The report shows that 290 people died in alcohol-related crashes in Maryland last year, a sharp increase over the 240 who died the year before and the 215 who died in 1999. But some state officials say those numbers are bogus.
State Highway Administrator Parker Williams said yesterday that he has initiated an inquiry with NHTSA challenging the report. Numbers that his staff produced showed 216 alcohol-related fatalities last year.
"We've got a major difference in numbers," Williams said. "There's something not right there." Williams said the difference might result from the federal and state agencies using different criteria to determine whether a fatality is alcohol-related.
Baker said she had received Williams' request and asked the research department to go over the numbers once more. She added that she was confident in NHTSA's report and she stood by the numbers.
State and federal officials agree, however, that drunken driving has not received the attention it once did, and that has hurt.
While alcohol accounted for 60 percent of the nation's fatal crashes in 1982, it accounted for 41 percent last year -- a figure that has not changed in five years.
Advocates say the public and the media have shifted their focus to issues such as aggressive driving and cell phone use in cars, which are not nearly as deadly.
"We've gotten complacent. People say they're tired and it's the same old song and dance," said Leslie Thomas, head of the Central Maryland chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "Our new national platform is we have to get mad all over again."
Too often, she said, overworked prosecutors don't push for tough penalties for drunken drivers and judges give offenders probation before judgment -- essentially, a slap on the wrist that promises the charge will be dropped if there are no more offenses in five years.
"The judges are not doing the Maryland motoring public any favors by simply issuing probation before judgment to first-time offenders," said state Del. William A. Bronrott, a Montgomery County Democrat who plans to introduce a bill in the General Assembly session that begins next month to extend that probation period to 10 years. "We need to draw a stronger, bolder line with first-time offenders instead of treating them as the victim."
Bronrott sponsored legislation this year that provided tougher penalties for repeat offenders and made it illegal for anyone in a car to be carrying an open container of alcohol, not just the driver.
Last year, Maryland lowered the legal level of blood-alcohol content from 0.10 to 0.08.
More must be done, Bronrott said.
"I think [the report] should be a call to action for the entire system in Maryland to tighten its belt and tighten the net around drunk drivers, which has loosened, apparently, so much that we have far more Marylanders getting killed in alcohol-related crashes," he said.
In releasing the report yesterday, NHTSA also began what it called the longest-ever crackdown on drunken driving in the nation's history. From tomorrow through Jan. 5, police departments will be conducting more sobriety checkpoints and sending out more saturation patrols at night.
Maryland State Police have significantly stepped up their checkpoints, with more than 100 of them this year compared with 25 last year.
Under the state's new repeat offender law, drivers with two DUI convictions in a five-year period will lose their license for a year.
Victims say it's not enough.
"It seems like making it tougher on repeat offenders is too little too late," said Colleen Fee Miller, whose husband and two others were killed by a drunken driver this year.
Last week, the man who caused the crash that killed her husband was sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison and fined the maximum $15,000.
"Maybe the word will get out to other people who are casual about drunk driving," Miller said in a phone interview yesterday. "People think drunk driving is acceptable behavior that's gotten out of control. There's this sense that you're ruining somebody's good time" by cracking down.