The Woodward family may need to add a keg to their family crest. Three members of the family — Nicholas (right), 19, Joshua (left), 22 and father Brian, 46 — were all arrested on the same day in Vermont on separate incidents of driving under the influence. Perhaps we could call this an intervention for the family? The successive arrests occurred when family members allegedly drove drunk to the scene of an accident involving the first family member.
The drunken chain reaction began when a Vermont Fish and Wildlife Game Warden found a car rolled over around 7:50 p.m. Police found that the driver, Joshua Woodward, had a BAL of about three times the legal limit. After that crash, Joshua’s young brother Nicolas drove to the scene and exited the truck to check on his brother. His father, Brian, then slipped over to the driver’s seat. The warden believed Brian was impaired and ordered him to stop. He was found also to have a BAL that was three times the limit. As troopers arrested Brian however they say that the observed Nicholas drinking intoxicating beverages. He was then arrested as well.
This was the second DUI for Nicholas as well as Joshua. Joshua was also charged with driving with a suspended license.
Source: CBS
Nick,
to be exact, Beldar is from the “South of France”! And a great golfer. 🙂
The gene pool is not very deep with this family.
Because I am aware of what has been called gut fermentation syndrome, or auto-brewery syndrome (see Wikipedia?), and because my gut has been remodeled by a total colectomy with ileo-rectal anastomosis, the better to stave off death from colon cancer such as led to my dad’s and brother’s deaths, and gut fermentation in someone who has had the colon surgically removed may happen higher in the gut than in other people, I bought a BAC meter that reads to 0.001%.
I have never scored above a 0.000% reading. However, I have to travel to meetings to get contact professional development hour credits to be allowed to renew my professional engineer license, and I often eat food that I did not prepare when traveling, and I never know what fungi may have settled on something I eat while traveling that might set of a gut fermentation process in me. So, when traveling any significant distance, I make measurements of gut fermentation effects, which have been unmeasurable thus far.
Life is somewhat unpredictable, so I continue making measurements.
Addiction is an interesting neurological, and therefore also mental phenomenon. What drives addiction, as a form of the psychological defence of displacement, is dishonesty and such deception as drives dishonesty.
To paraphrase a phrase in a book published in 1939, the alternative to addiction is rigorously truthful honesty.
For myself, I find that rigorously truthful honesty totally rules out the use of psychological defences as aspects of any way to actually live decently.
Is, in the manner of the late Robin Williams, comedy other than the Sound(s) of Silence, as in the song of Simon and Garfunkel ?
Is addiction, as a psychological displacement process grounded in, and comprised of, the dishonesty of deception and the deception of dishonesty, other than one of the Sounds of Silence?
How does the story of the Tippler go, in The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?
From my memory, the Little Prince went on a space trip, to various planets, on one of which lived a lone tippler, sitting in a chair at a table on which was a bottle of drink and a glass from which the Tippler drank after pouring drink from the bottle into the glass.
The Little Prince asked the Tippler why he drank.
The Tippler answered, “Because I am ashamed.”
The Little Prince asked the Tippler why he was ashamed.
The Tippler answered, “Because I drink.”
Before the Little Prince could say anything, the Tippler took another drink.
The Little Prince was perplexed, puzzled, perhaps bewildered.
For me, that is the nature of addiction, the nature of a problem which is as though too shameful to resolve and too shameful to escape.
In my life experience so far, addiction is the most utterly vicious and profoundly tragic phenomenon I have ever encountered or ever been able to imagine.
BillH, You’re right about the hardcore alcoholic. The guy of whom I spoke had not had a driver’s license for decades. The hardcore ones never do. But, this guy was able to purchase and register a vehicle w/ DMV! Govt. is incompetent. I am a PI who specialized in insurance fraud surveillance. Many of the fraud shitbirds are drug addicts and alcoholics. I would routinely follow one of these idiots driving all over the place when I knew they had no license.
Well, speaking of addiction, here is one of my favorite songs :
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T–Hg9h4yqo
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
@Nick/Darren, I’m not opposed to harsher sentences, but for the hard core alcoholic they do not serve as a deterrent for the simple reason that, even with a BAC of 0.25, he does not believe that he is drunk. He can be staggering and slurring his words and when someone tries to warn him not to drive he will insist that he is not drunk. In such case the degree of sentence does not matter because he does not believe that he will be violating the law.
Darren, Beldar does tell people he’s “from France.”
The US is one of the most permissive in the world regarding DUI. Some states are tougher than others. I live in Wi. which has the most lenient in the US. The reason is the history of breweries and their influence. Wi. is an alcoholic state w/ lenient laws. The local paper has a continuing series on chronic DUI convictions. Just 2 days ago they did a story of a guy who had 9 DUI’s in Wi. and 2 in neighboring states. He was sentenced to 6 years in prison. He’s in his 40’s. He’ll be out in 3 and will have his 10th within months. It is just by the grace of God he has not killed someone.
Vt. is a pretty bad alcoholic state, along w/ NH and Maine. Alaska is as well. I believe a lot of it has to do w/ long winters and seasonal depression.
Beldar. Didn’t we see you on Saturday Night Live smoking an entire pack of cigarettes at once? You must be outside Remulakian jurisdiction.
Paul
I agree about some DUI sentences. I have said for a long time that the second and subsequent DUIs should be a felony. There finally was a discussion here about repeat offenders and in my view the legislature went too lenient when they made the fifth DUI a felony.
One of the reasons for this is cost. Not that I agree but the issue is that there are a lot of DUI offenders and for a misdemeanor they are some of the most contested ones. I suspect that there are two reasons, the significance of the DUI civil actions such as impoundment, license suspension, and very high insurance are compelling enough for most to fight it. Also, for what it’s worth, DUIs are a crime that average, non-criminal citizens get nailed for. They have greater resources to contest a DUI and will spend between 5,000 and 10,000 out of their pockets to do so. As a result of this and other factors the cost to the criminal justice system for DUIs is one of the highest of misdemeanor crimes. Promoting the offense to a felony would drastically increase the costs because these same demographics will fight against a felony conviction even more aggressively.
A deterrent factor does work with regard to DUI in my experience.
A number of years ago the state lowered the Minor (under 21) DUI presumptive BAC level to a .02. .08 is the presumptive level for those 21 and over and .04 is the presumptive level for drivers operating a commercial vehicle.
Prior to the change to .02 I would estimate off the cuff that probably 20% of my DUI arrests were for those under 21 years of age. A few months after the .02 level became effective, and ever since, it became almost rare to arrest a minor. I would say I got one every six months. That did more to end juvenile DUI than anything I had seen previously. It wasn’t that teens stopped drinking, it was that they became more responsible based upon the DUI risk.
I don’t believe a .02 presumptive BAC level for DUI is workable for adults, but in my view a felony DUI upon second conviction would be a greater deterrent.
Where do typos come from?
Alas, “something in the rage of” was meant by me to be, “something in the range of”…
I really meant to use the “n” word, “range”…
However, I wonder whether “in the rage of” might be vastly more accurate than “in the range of”???
And the Judge who sentenced him was smoking his cigarette and taking his oxycotton for his fake back injury. That behavior affects all of your American society in ways different than drunk guy. The medical bills for the Judge by the time he dies of cancer or heart disease will be more than the cost of building the courthouse. “But this is Legal!”, the Judge says as he smokes his cancer stick as he sends folks off to jail for smoking pot or drinking beer. Think about the big picture here on planet Earth folks before you gang up on the drunks only. Back on Remulak we deny medical care to those who smoke. Of course on Remulak those who smoke, smoke something similar to a car tire.
The horrific social tragedy of addiction, perhaps magnificently illustrated in the life and recent death of Robin Williams, is the incompleteness (and consequent psychotic insanity?) of human understanding of addiction as an epigenetic biological phenomenon which predominantly manifests itself through unconsciously-driven human destructiveness?
Addiction, being manifest expression of the unconscious psychological defence of displacement as a neurological response to moral-injiury induced unresolved trauma, seems to me, based on my field work research findings, to have imprisoned the minds of something in the rage of 98 percent of people in the United States of America.
When the psychological defence of addiction fails to adequately control effects of beyond-unbearable, socially-induced psychological pain, it is the failure of the defence of addiction that, in some variation of a psychotic break, unrelentingly drives people to attempt to, and sadly often succeed to, murder themselves and others, as the final way to cry out one’s shattering anguish.
Who, amongst all of humanity, has the actual physiological power to escape the death penalty implicit in the social blunder of human biological conception in the form of a zygote?
A new episode of Its a Family Affair.
I had a strange one back in the late 80’s. Another deputy and I were working one evening and he called for another unit because he was having trouble with a drunk he was arresting. We got the guy under control and took him to the office to process him for DWI. I believe he blew a .13. Afterward we booked him in jail.
Late the next morning, I came by the office, my partner started earlier than I did, and as I walked past the breathalyzer room I saw the same suspect again. I just shook my head and asked him why he was here again.
He told me he screwed up. Earlier in the morning he went before a judge for his arraignment and the judge PR’ed him pending trial. He then had to walk back to the other end of town and pick up his car. About four blocks from the jail he stopped by a liquor store and bought a fifth of hard booze, drinking it as he walked to his car. When he arrived at the car, he decided to go into this mom & pop convenience store and demanded more booze. The proprietor would not sell to him on account of his intoxication. So he created a scene and began disrupting the business. The proprietor called our office. So dispatch sent my partner out to investigate just in time to see the guy roasting his tires around the parking lot and burning off onto the highway.
So he was arrested again for DWI. This time he had the same arresting officer, and also blew a .13 and he got the next citation number in the citation book. And of course the same judge.
Expectedly, this would not be the last time I arrested the same drunk more than once in the same day.
If they treat them as the typical DUI they will slap the back of their hand with a silk hanky and send them home.
Get serious, everyone of the vehicles involved should be confiscated, driving priviledges (did someone say privileges and not right?) should be revoked for a minimum of 3 years, $1000 fine each, and minimum of 30 days in jail.
If we don’t get serious about drunk drivers we will continue to bury our victims while the drunk continues to drink.
One time I landed at a small town in TN, dropped my freight off, and tried to call a taxi to go to a motel. There was no answer from the number. So I waited until the FBO opened up, and got crew car. I found out that the cops had arrested the husband who drove the one taxi in town. He then called his wife to pick him up, and she was arrested for DUI as well. In one shot, they shut down the taxi business in that town.
Someone spiked the maple syrup….
Is still socially acceptable to call a family trashy and shun them from polite society?
Seriously, I do not understand the ability of some people to consistently lower the bar of expectations in the way we act in public.
Now that’s a Hat Trick.
A friend of mine who retired from the WSP had a guy in his detachment that made a similar chain of arrests. He nixed this guy for DWI and once processed he called a friend to come pick the guy up after he PR’ed him. The friend came by and was drunk, and was arrested. The person who came to pick up the second guy was also drunk and he was arrested.
Stupid is as drunk does.