February 15, 2003 -- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) defines a fatal traffic crash as being alcohol-related if either a driver or a non-occupant (e.g., pedestrian) has a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.01 grams per deciliter (g/dl) or greater in a police-reported traffic crash. To put 0.01 g/dl in perspective, eight times that amount is required to achieve a BAC of 0.08 g/dl, which is now the legal limit of intoxication in most states.

Simply put, if a legally sober driver is involved in a traffic accident in which another legally sober person is killed, and the person killed happened to drink one beer 30 minutes prior to the accident, NHTSA will classify that fatality as alcohol-related.  That particular fatality will then be compiled with other alcohol-related traffic fatalities, which will then be used by outside organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to fortify the perception that mindless, epidemic-type numbers of drunk drivers are blindly hurling down our highways, aimlessly killing innocent bystanders.

 

To further illustrate, there were 16,653 alcohol-related traffic fatalities in 2000, according to NHTSA. Of these 16,653 alcohol-related fatalities, 12,892 involved at least one driver or non-occupant with a BAC of 0.10 g/dl or greater. (In 2000, .10 BAC was the legal limit in many states.) 7,326 were the intoxicated drivers themselves, and 1,594 were legally intoxicated pedestrians and pedal-cyclists. The remaining 3,972 fatalities were non-intoxicated drivers, passengers, and non-occupants.

 

Excluding the 7,326 legally intoxicated drivers and 1,594 legally intoxicated pedestrians/pedal-cyclists, there remain 3,972 fatalities -but even these deaths cannot be classified as victims simply because NHTSA does not indicate which driver was at fault. For example, if a sober driver runs a red light and crashes into a driver who has a BAC of 0.08 or greater, and the sober driver dies, NHTSA will proclaim that this fatality is alcohol-related, even though alcohol had nothing to do with the accident.  Essentially, if alcohol is detected or suspected, it is automatically to blame.

 

Unfortunately, the distortion does not end there. According to NHTSA, on average, in more than 50 percent of the reported alcohol-related fatalities, alcohol involvement, as determined by actual alcohol testing, is not known. Alcohol test results may not be known for several reasons:

 

• The test was given but the results were not obtained by the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)
• The test was refused
• FARS was unable to determine if a test was given 
• The test was not given

 

As a result, NHTSA imputes alcohol involvement in over 50 percent of the reported alcohol-related traffic fatalities. Imputation, as applied by NHTSA, uses characteristics of the person[s] involved in the crash to predict alcohol involvement when it is not known. Those characteristics include police-reported drinking, age, sex, restraint-use, type of crash, time of day, and driver of striking or struck vehicle. Sadly, these predicted, unsubstantiated, fatalities are masqueraded as confirmed victims of drunk driving, and have had an unjust role in the shaping of DUI laws across America, along with serving as justification to erode the Fourth Amendment protecting against unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause, by the establishment of sobriety checkpoints.

 

MADD, in pursuit of nationwide sobriety checkpoints, is partly responsible for the asterisk that was assigned to our Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable search and seizure. In the majority ruling, (Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990)) the United States Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist wrote, “Drunk drivers cause an annual death toll of over 25,000.” That’s simply not accurate data. Assuming that Justice Rehnquist was referring to the statistics of 1989, according to NHTSA, there were 22,404 alcohol-related traffic fatalities, and as illustrated, not all these fatalities are the result of drunk driving, as MADD and the United States Supreme Court contend. The Supreme Court referenced the enormity of the drunk driving problem in our nation to justify the appropriateness of its ruling; that the State has a grave and legitimate interest in curbing drunken driving; yet the statistics they referenced were skewed.

 

Additionally, NHTSA utilizes a peculiar computation method to determine the percentage of alcohol-related traffic fatalities. Most people have heard statements such as ‘half of all traffic fatalities are caused by drunk drivers’ or nearly ‘half of all traffic fatalities are alcohol-related’ or most recently, ‘approximately 40 percent of all traffic fatalities are alcohol-related’. Essentially what NHTSA is claiming is that out of 100 traffic accidents in which a fatality resulted, 40 of them will be alcohol-related, but as illustrated above, not necessarily the result of drunk driving. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that out the 100 traffic accidents in which a fatality resulted, there were indeed 40 drivers who were legally intoxicated. The quick conclusion is that 40 percent of the traffic fatalities are in fact alcohol-related, but that conclusion is incorrect.

 

The best way to demonstrate this fallacy is with a simple analogy. If you have 100 packages of apples, and 40 of the apples are rotten, what is the percentage of rotten apples you have? If you answered 40 percent, you are wrong. You cannot begin to solve this problem until you know how many apples are in each package. Let’s try this problem again, but this time we’ll provide the necessary information. If you have 100 packages of apples, with 4 apples in each package, and 40 apples are rotten, what is the percentage of rotten apples you have? Now the problem can be solved because we know that we have 400 apples and 40 are rotten, which means 10 percent of the apples are rotten; yet NHTSA continuously divides drivers by accidents to develop its deceptively high percentages.  To accurately compute percentages there has to be a common denominator.

 

NHTSA indicates that approximately 55 percent of all traffic accidents are single-vehicle (SV) and 45 percent are multi-vehicle (MV). It stands to reason that a multi-vehicle (MV) accident involves a minimum of 2 vehicles, if not more. That being said, we will assume that all MV accidents had only 2 vehicles involved (realizing that some MV accidents have three or more drivers involved), bringing the number of drivers to a minimum of 90. Next we need to add the SV accident drivers (55) to the MV accident drivers (90) to arrive at a total of 145 drivers. To determine the percentage of alcohol-related traffic fatalities, we divide 40 drivers with a BAC of 0.01(g/dl) by 145 total drivers to arrive at approximately 27 percent.

NHTSA categorizes pedestrian (also pedal cyclists) fatalities within the (SV) statistics, while excluding from its percentage computation, the obvious driver necessary for the pedestrian fatality. If the pedestrian is consider a driver for statistical purposes, then another driver has to also be included in the computation. Historically, approximately 12 percent of alcohol-related fatalities involve pedestrians / pedal cyclists. Consequently, 12 more drivers need to be added to our equation. (12 pedestrians (SV) / 12 drivers who struck and killed the pedestrian).

Considering the aforementioned, the percentage of alcohol-related fatalities is demonstrated as follows: 40 drivers with a BAC of 0.01(g/dl) divided by 157 drivers equals approximately 25 percent of traffic fatalities that are alcohol-related. Remember, 50 percent of these fatalities are predicted due to lack of actual alcohol testing. Additionally, approximately 15 percent of the alcohol-related traffic fatalities involve no driver or pedestrian who is legally intoxicated; that one or more of the participates had a measurable amount of alcohol in his or her blood, but were below the legal limit. That being said, realistically the percentage of substantiated alcohol-related traffic fatalities is approximated 12.5 percent, with approximately 65 percent of these fatalities being the driver themselves.

Certainly statistics vary from state to state, but rest assured that the same distortion is occurring where you live. Also, it is important to remember that approximately 65 percent of all alcohol-related traffic fatalities are in fact the driver themselves, so the actual percentage of innocent victims of drunk driving is minimal.

As a direct result of this deception, over 1.5 million U.S. citizens are arrested each year for DUI. For over 20 years now, these citizens have fallen victim to the propaganda surrounding their crime, while their state government inflicts unjust punishments upon them. It should be anticipated that eventually the victims of such unjust laws would begin to challenge the very underpinning used to justify the laws in the first place.

When analyzing the FARS database (same database used by NHTSA to report statistics) it is discovered that across the entire nation, NHTSA nearly doubles the number of instances of drunk drivers. And this is prior to them implementing its "Multiple Imputation" methodology, which adds in more numbers for "unknowns". In its reports, evidence is seen where NHTSA claims a driver of a fatal accident to be a drunk driver even though that driver was tested and had a blood alcohol content of 0.00, or had a blood alcohol content that was within the legal limit.

To demonstrate the entire scope of this report, consider the statistics obtained from FARS regarding traffic fatalities for 2001 in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. At the time of this analysis, Pennsylvania was a .10 BAC per se commonwealth. The statistics breakdown as follows:

NHTSA lists total Pennsylvania fatalities for 2001 = 1,530

NHTSA lists total drivers in fatal accidents = 2,135

NHTSA lists drunk drivers = 575

Actual numbers:

Actual drivers with BAC over .10 = 294

Actual fatalities involving drivers with BAC over .10 = 332

Percentage of fatalities involving drunk drivers = 21.70%

Number of drunk drivers listed with no proof = 281

Actual percentage of drunk driving in fatal accidents = 13.77%

(.10 BAC was the legal limit in Pennsylvania in 2001)

Recall that earlier in this report, it was indicated that a more realistic percentage for the nation regarding traffic fatalities caused by drunk drivers would be approximately 12.5 percent, bearing in mind that approximately 65 percent of those fatalities were in fact the drivers themselves. Witness how that percentage corresponds closely with the results in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The significance of this analysis is that Pennsylvania arrests approximately 41,500 citizens each year for DUI. To put that in perspective, 41,500 citizens are criminalized each year in Pennsylvania because approximately 137 persons are killed in accidents involving a legally intoxicated driver, while an undetermined percentage of those fatalities were the fault of the sober driver.

 

According to the Pennsylvania DUI Association, in 2001, municipal and state police conducted 302 suspicionless seizures described as sobriety checkpoints. The police contacted 114,959 citizens during these suspicionless seizures, while making only 807 DUI arrests. Alarmingly, the police made 2,227 other arrests while conducted suspicionless seizures under the disguise of sobriety checkpoints.

 

In conclusion, the government’s interest in eradicating DUI is no greater and legitimate then the it’s interest to investigate and prosecute any other ordinary crime. Consequently, suspicionless seizures known as sobriety checkpoints should be immediately recognized as blatant violations of the 4th Amendment of the United States Constitution, and a violation of the heighten protections provided by individual state constitutions prohibiting seizures by police without probable cause. A moratorium should be issued immediately prohibiting the employment of suspicionless seizures to enforce current DUI laws.

 

Finally, although the computation method of imputation maybe useful to identify trends, it should be excluded from shaping laws. Supporters of the current DUI laws and those who advocate even tougher laws, claim that it is their efforts that are responsible for saving lives on our nations highways; yet even this claim cannot be substantiated. In the last 20 years, the leading cause for the reduction of the percentage of traffic fatalities can be attributed to one specific area; the effort to build safer vehicles. Stronger frames, primary restraining systems (seatbelts) and supplementary restraining systems (airbags) are the leading life saving instruments according to the NHTSA, not necessarily tougher laws.