DM - that may be true, but they can’t prove he hadn’t just had something to drink in the intervening time. At least, I don’t think they can.
Alcohol leaves the body at . The police would be perfectly capable of back-calculating the amount of alcohol present in the drivers body at the time of the accident by measuring his blood/alcohol level when he turned himself in. I know for sure they do thisin the UK and other countries.
It is so easy.
They wont do it.[/quote]
But what about the (probably apocryphal, although I’m pretty sure I remember a farmer friend doing this) tale of the over-the-limit guy who outruns the police, screeches into his driveway and by the time the cops get there he’s standing in his doorway chugging from an enormous tumbler full of neat whisky?
“This is only the second drink I’ve had, oshiffer, so I wanted to make it a stiff one. Who me? Drink driving? I deny it totally.”
about 10 years ago my dad got his second DUI.
His first one cost him his license and his business. He was an owner operater of a semi-truck. He wasnt driving the truck at the time. He lost his house and was homeless for a few years.
His second one got him 90 days in jail and a big fine. I could have bailed him out for a few thousand but I wouldnt.
On his second DUI he got into a very minor scuffle with the arresting officer and he was arreseted near a school zone (at 2am) so he was charged with a felony.
He lost his license for 2 years and has to pay many thousands to get it back. He hasnt driven a car in over 7 years becasue the next one will (might) fall under the 3 strikes rule and get him life in prison.
one more beer and a nisson equals life in prison.
I think the american justice system in regards to DUI’s works rather well.
You are right, but there are ways around it which are very complex and involve a blood test, not a breath test. This is because alcohol absorbs and and defuses at a specific rate and calculations can still be made.
In the UK, it is only usually used in cases where death has resulted. In Taiwan, I doubt anybody could be arsed to do anything at all.
Alot of the time, it is depndant on a defendants first answer. Not all defendants are as switched on as your farmer friend:
“Have you had anything to drink since the accident?”
“No.”
“OK. Blood test.”
If the answer is “yes” then we may be on dodgy ground.
Several friends have witnessed numerous auto accidents where the offenders only got a slap on the wrist. In the case of death of the offender the non-offender often had to pay or the latter would face unpleasant or even dangerous consequences.
If you injuried someone then you might as well kill him/her so the dead would’t come ask for a big compensation. An elderly relative recalls that over two decades ago a bus crashed with a scooter, the scooter rider fell off on to the ground and the bus driver ran him over. Yes, there had been people shouting to get the bus driver’s attention. The driver could claim he didn’t see what had happened, didn’t know he ran the victim over, didn’t know what went on with all the noise…If he had to pay (in monetary term), paying for death would be cheaper than for long-term medical bills.
What did my relative do after having witnessed the accident? He came home, felt deeply sad for days. He failed to report what he saw to the police. He didn’t think that would do any good. He was afraid.
A friend’s friend stopeed at a hit-and-run accident scene to help. The offender had fled. The samaritan was wrongly accused by the injured rider’s family and they demanded him to pay. The police wasn’t helpful at all. It was fortunate that the injured man later set the record straight. What do you think this good guy’s fate would have been if the victim had died? I’ve heard of similar stories many times. I guess there are fewer and fewer “fools” who would stop and help.
If there was good law and if there have been serious implementaion of the law, private citizens wouldn’t resort to viloence to “retaliate”, to “get even” or to “give him a lesson.”
Remeber the guy who was beaten brain-dead after a car accident because he crashed into a car that had an infant in it and the infant died?
Think too much or even care a little and your heart hurts!
unfortunately i have seen and heard about too many deaths of ‘foreigners’ here, i’m not going to get into whose fault it was, but drink driving here is without a doubt far too easy and understandable cos nobody seems to care. only recently has it become ‘stupid’ to DUI, ( raises in fines, licence bans etc ) back home i wouldn’t even think about it cos i would get caught and put away. it’s far too easy to drink and drive here…!
Fairly sure I understood it right - anyone seen those TV commercials for a party house where a bunch of guys in a small car are going around wrapping mattresses around all the lamp posts between home and the pub? When onlookers give them strange faces, they chortle and make drinking gestures to explain that they’re going to get plastered tonight using the special offer being advertised and then they’re going to drive home, probably hitting everything on the way back. Drinking and driving seems to be seen as a rascally mischievous activity out here, not serious until someone gets hurt.
It was that way in the states 20 or 30 years ago, but all that has changed, today the penalties are severe and police, prosecutors and judges take it very seriously. Taiwan is 50 years behind; we can expect them to catch on regarding this issue in a couple of decades.
Sorry to post a bit off topic, but…
Regarding Kending…the wife has made plans for us to have a short vacation at a resort there at the end of the month, is it really as bad a place as is being portrayed in this thread?
We plan on nothing more exciting than a bit of dining, walking around a bit and enjoying the resort.
you should be fine now that the hordes are gone … and you don’t really need to spend much time in the strip itself - get outta the “town”. there are parks, hikes, beaches, and such to wander around. i haven’t stayed in kenting proper for 4 years, prefer to stay just outside, and have some way to get into town if we feel like it.
I was Kenting last weekend for spring scream and saw the aftermath.
I drove past the accident site as the ambulance was leaving and the bystanders said it was a foreigner that got hurt. There is no hospital in the area.
The police were out the night before and put up a road block but they were not stopping anyone that I saw.
On the weekends the town is packed solid. The town of Kenting is not designed as a tourist town. It is basically a typically Taiwanese shanty town with some hotels and a beach that is not public access despite the fact that it is a national park. The South end of the beach in Kenting Township is a dump with an open sewage canal. Apparently the hotels rent the beach out and the rest of the beach is used for disposing of trash and dumping raw sewage into the sea.
There are also no board walks or sidewalks. Tens of thousands of pedestrians are forced to walk in the street with thousands of cars and buses.
Accidents are quite common there on the weekends.
Question: Did you drink before driving?
Lawyer: No, but he was pretty shaken up after coming home so he had a drink.
Good luck proving DUI after that.
Q: Why did you leave the scene?
L: He was shocked and did not know what he was doing.
After that, I would say good luck with anything.
Will be interesting to hear how this ends. Hopefully not out of court.
I’ve always wondered if these stories about running over a second time
to avoid lifetime medical bills are urban legends.
YingFan
[quote=“YingFan”]
I’ve always wondered if these stories about running over a second time
to avoid lifetime medical bills are urban legends.
[/quote]It’s quite well documented, and one incident was captured on security video IIRC last year. Very occasionally some witness has the guts to testify to these events, though it doesn’t make the evening news.
Kending is just a mellow little town. Anybody who says otherwise is a paranoid schytzophrenic. I got into an accident in Kending last autumn. The fucker hit me, then demanded that I pay for his scooter. I told him to fuck off and drove away. That was 7 months ago, and I still have all of my knee-caps in place.
Oh, I get it now…you’re just trying to keep other foriegners away from “your” surfer fantasy land.
The only bad thing about Kending is that, as was already mentioned, the beaches have been resort-ized…It’s the least public National Park I’ve ever seen.
[quote="hsiadogah]
It’s quite well documented, and one incident was captured on security video IIRC last year[/quote]
Yeah, I saw it. Not a legend.
omg, he only 18…damn thats sad…
ppl should warn foreigners about riding a scooter in this climate of drunk drivers. If he was vacationing here he may not have known about how many ppl drive drunk here…$hit this is a crazy sad story, rite up their wid da 4 yr old kid getting killed by her dad…
He wasn’t on holiday. His dad works at the Marine Biology Museum at Hengchun.
It is possible to work out with a fair degree of accuracy how drunk someone was at a given point in time. The amount of alcohol in the blood actually keeps rising for quite a while after one finishes drinking, and cops who wanted to get someone have been know to wait an hour or two until blood alcohol levels are at their maximum before testing. Drinking right after the accident will only raise the blood alcohol level after the three hours or so it will take to metabolise that drink.
They could have got him. It’s just a matter of forensics. A relative of mine (traffic cop) was part of a study group which did extensive research into this about 20 years ago when the fuzz back home started to get really serious about drink driving. I am fairly sure that this is purely a matter of forensic toxicology.
Somehow, with all that’s gone on before, I think CSI:Taiwan will never be more than a situation comedy. Not to be taken seriously.
OOC
Ironically enough, one of the most famous forensic experts in the States is Taiwanese.