Gross inconsistencies fuel reform in sentencing

Ask Georgia Judge William F. Todd what first prompted him to pay closer attention to sentences for drunken drivers and he'll tell you the story of two young brothers and their cousin.

Todd was straight out of law school and on the first day of his first job as assistant district attorney in Statesboro, Ga., when assigned his first case. Three elementary school-age boys had been hit by a drunken driver while crossing a country road to get the mail, and Todd was handed the vehicular homicide case to prosecute.

The boys had just reached the mailbox when the intoxicated driver crossed the road and plowed into them. He carried two boys with him into a barbed wire fence and tossed the third child over the top of the car. All three died instantly.

The experience of seeing that early morning scene shaped the way Todd, who presides in the State Court of Rockdale County, Ga., would develop a program for sentencing drunken drivers that is being adopted as a model nationwide.

"This is something that unless you've seen something like this it's hard to imagine," Todd said, thinking back 22 years to details of the case.

"I'll never forget seeing those boys at the funeral home. The guy's car came to a rest at that fence, then he tried to drive away and backed up over one of the boys. That one had tire tread marks on his back."

Todd, who presides in a court in Georgia's smallest county, is where Utah advocates for stricter laws and sentences for drunken drivers often turn for help and strategies. His program is widely acclaimed and advocates a mixed approach of treatment and punishment, aggressive probation, meticulous research — and above all — consistency in sentencing people who drink and drive,

"Judge Todd has done a tremendous amount to move us ahead on the topic of sentencing the drunken driver," said Mary Phillips of the Utah chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Todd says his philosophy has evolved over 20 years and dates back to those three boys and another tragic drunken-driving death about the same time.

The man who killed the three boys — a working class Georgian with previous DUI convictions — received 18 years in prison, but Todd first noticed abject inconsistencies in the sentencing system in 1980 when he prosecuted another vehicular homicide case where a drunken driver hit a female student at Georgia Southern University.

"He was so drunk he dragged her a long way and didn't even know it," Todd remembered.