The National Traffic Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal agency which issues safety recommendations aimed at preventing accidents recently recommended that states lower the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) that results in a DWI arrest from .08 to .05. This was done in an effort to reduce the number of alcohol related accidents and fatalities that occur each year. While this is clearly a worthy objective, the measure proposed of reducing the proscribed BAC to .05 would cast too wide a net in the wrong direction and severely punish individuals who under current rules of law have not committed any crime.
DWI laws date back to the late 1800′s in England and the first state to adopt DWI laws was New York in 1910. The sine qua non of these early DWI laws was the prohibition of driving while one’s ability to do so was impaired by alcohol. These types of DWI laws have become known as Common Law DWI. These offenses relied on the government’s ability to establish a person’s intoxication through opinion testimony and the observance of tell tale signs of intoxication such as slurred speech, unsteady balance and the odor of alcohol on one’s breath, not always easy to prove since most people do not share a common understanding of what intoxication means.
