Am I my brother's keeper?

[DinoDoc]

Can someone explain to me why his car was left out on the side of the road anyway? When I was arrested they towed my car to a lot fairly close to the jail.

cg: With as much alcohol as was in his blood stream?

I'm suprised that the cops put him back out on the streets with that much booze coursing through his veins.

[chequita guevara]

So am I. I expect they thought his friend was taking him home, as any responsible person would have done.

[chequita guevara]

Confession time: I drove drunk once, 'bout fifteen years ago. I'm still terribly ashamed of that.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
So am I. I expect they thought his friend was taking him home, as any responsible person would have done.

Well, you know what they say about assuming things.

[Bereta_Eder]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Well, you know what they say about assuming things.

ass out of me.

[The Mad Monk]

That's right, Paiktis, they make an ass out of you.

[Bereta_Eder]

I need a further explanation on english idioms.

by ass do you mean ass like in bottom?

or ass like in that sympathetic animal?

[Loif]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk
Tell that to someone who actually has the statistics.

What percent of DUIs end up with a fatality?

FWIW, I lost a cousin in a DUI seven years ago. she was twenty-four.

I don't have the statistics. I don't know what percentage of DUI's end up in a fatality either. I'm sure they differ from your country as opposed to mine. What I do know is that a person who is driving drunk does so knowing what they are doing is wrong. Ergo, so does a person who gives the keys to a car to a drunk person.

Sorry about your cousin. I have lost people I care about due to drunk driver accidents myself.

[Tingkai]

The sober guy should be responsible for his actions. He knows his friend is drunk (after all the guy was arrested for drunk driving) and then he drives the guy to his car and then leaves. That's like giving a suicidal person a gun.

Maybe the cops shouldn't have let the drunk guy out of jail, but we don't know what was happening that night. Maybe the jail cells were crowded.

Saying that it was bad judgement or stupidity is no excuse. Criminals routinely commit stupid crimes due to bad judgement.

[Roland]

Let's see this with a couple ifs:

- If it was clear to him that the other guy was way too drunk to drive, and
- if he has promised the police to take the guy home, and
- if he had no compelling reason not to do that (eg the other guy getting violent),

then he has accepted what we call "guarantor status" and behaved negligently.

[Sikander]

The police were negligent on two counts as well:

1) Letting this guy go anywhere.

2) Waking up this guy's friend and making him responsible. Not only is the friend's judgement likely to be somewhat impaired by being woken up in the middle of the night, but the presumption that a drunk driver's friend is going to be responsible is a bit much. He may or may not be, but if the friend was chosen by the drunk I think that the chance that he is either irresponsible himself or easily manipulated by the drunk increases significantly.

[Zkribbler]

I don't know whether I'm yet ready to agree with Sikander , but his arguments are insightful and well reasoned & I must give them some additional thought.

[Rex Little]

Nothing in the story indicates what, if anything, the police told Powell. For all we know, they just let Pangle out of the station and Powell picked him up at the curb. In that case, he couldn't be assumed to know that Pangle was still too drunk to drive, especially since Powell was probably still half-asleep. If anything, he might well figure that the police wouldn't have let Pangle go unless he was OK to drive.

[DinoDoc]

I'm not sure but it looks like the jury deadlocked on the charges. I'll post a link when I find one.

[tandeetaylor]

It is very certain that what he did was unethical, I'm not sure about unlawful.

There was a case here in my city, last year I think, where a girl driving a van fell asleep behind the wheel and also had some drugs and alcohol in her system. She hit, I think, 6 kids cleaning up trash on the highway. She is in jail for a very long time, but the parents of the children who died are also suing to legal system that put their child out in the middle of the highway (between the two sides of traffic). I can certainly understand that.