AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN
10-year-old makes plea for tougher DWI laws Highway checkpoints among measures considered by Senate committee
Reporter: MIKE WARD
DATE: October 4, 1995
PUBLICATION: Austin American-Statesman
His voice was slightly halting. But his message was clear.
Six years ago, Mitchie Mitchell lay in a hospital bed, connected to more than a dozen tubes, undergoing treatment for critical injuries from a car wreck blamed on a drunken driver.
“I was underneath the car, bleeding. My tummy was cut by the seat belt, and my back had a cut, too,” recalled the Austin boy, now 10. “My legs were paralyzed, and … I couldn’t walk anymore.”
After 18 surgeries and extensive therapy, he still cannot walk. But from a wheelchair on Tuesday, his birthday, Mitchie urged the Senate Criminal Justice Committee to adopt tougher laws to keep drunken drivers off Texas roads.
“(Drunken drivers) have a choice. … But my child and so many other people didn’t have that choice,” Joyce Hunt, Mitchie‘s mother, testified. “Hopefully, by changing the laws, we can deter people so what happened to Mitchie will never happen again.”
As part of a study for the next regular legislative session, which begins in January 1997, the committee is considering whether tougher laws against drunken drivers are needed in Texas. Measures being considered include so-called sobriety checkpoints, a lower blood-alcohol level to determine when a driver is intoxicated and a law banning open containers of alcoholic beverages in vehicles.
Most of the proposals were considered — and not passed into law — during the legislative session that ended in May. But supporters said they are optimistic at the chances for 1997, in part because of the review by the Senate committee.
Hunt said that while Texas laws governing drunken drivers have been strengthened since her son was critically injured, even tougher rules are needed.
Mitchie was injured Sept. 17, 1989, in a crash near Florence, about 40 miles north of Austin. Hunt said Mitchie‘s father, who had three prior convictions for drunken driving and had been drinking, lost control of his car on a curve.
The father, Hunt’s ex-husband, was hospitalized for three weeks after the crash. He was later convicted of felony DWI and received a five-year prison sentence. Mitchie spent 333 days in a hospital, 156 of them in an intensive-care unit — and “it’s not over,” Hunt said.
She endorsed sobriety checkpoints as a way to catch drunken drivers.
“I wish and pray there was a checkpoint … (on) Sept. 17, 1989,” she said.
Under a proposal being considered by the committee, police and state troopers would be allowed to set up checkpoints on Texas roads to determine whether drivers had been drinking.
In 1994, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled DWI checkpoints unconstitutional because there was no statewide procedure for their use. And while the Senate last spring passed a bill legalizing the checkpoints, it died in the House amid a debate over the constitutional rights of sober drivers.
Sen. David Sibley, R-Waco, said he intends to file the legislation again in 1997. He likened the checkpoints to airport security measures.
“I don’t object to going through a metal detector at the airport to make sure there is not a bomb on my plane,” Sibley said. “People don’t object to an intrusion to make sure there is not a bomb on the highway.”
But the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association warned that the checkpoints could lead to unconstitutional excesses in enforcement.
According to the state Department of Public Safety, 1,170 people were killed and more than 34,000 injured in DWI-related accidents on Texas highways in 1994.
Copyright 1995 Austin American-Statesman