Bad Decisions Are Costly

This past Sunday a Bowling Green man, made a series of bad decisions, the least of which was getting drunk and taking to the highways, and was indicted Wednesday by a Warren County grand jury on numerous charges stemming from a police chase and car crash.

The thirty-three-year-old man, was indicted on charges of second-degree assault, first-degree possession of a controlled substance (second offense), first-degree fleeing or evading police, first-degree criminal mischief, tampering with physical evidence, first-degree wanton endangerment (police officer), driving on a license suspended for DUI while under the influence of intoxicants (aggravating circumstances), operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicants (second offense within five years, aggravating circumstances), third-degree possession of a controlled substance, second-degree fleeing or evading police, possession of drug paraphernalia, reckless driving, speeding, failure to produce insurance card and first-degree persistent felony offender.

The probability of a fatal crash rises significantly after 0.05 percent blood alcohol concentration (BAC) and even more rapidly after 0.08 percent.1 Drivers with very high BACs (at or above 0.15 percent) have a very high risk of dying in a crash or getting severely injured.1,2 All states have enacted a law defining impairment as driving with a BAC at or above 0.08 percent.

As an experienced Tennessee car accident lawyer , I want to remind you that driving with a BAC of .08 or higher is illegal in every state. If you follow my blog you will see that in Tennessee we continue to see a tragic number of people with debilitating injuries and deaths as a result of impaired driving. This careless disregard for human life must stop.

Drunk driving is one of America’s deadliest crimes. In Tennessee in 2008, 327 people were killed in crashes where the driver or motorcyclist had a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .08 or higher. That is down from 377 people killed in 2007 with a BAC of .08 or higher. Over the 2008 Labor Day holiday, 12 people were killed in 10 fatal crashes on Tennessee roadways, down from 17 people killed on Tennessee roadways in 2007.

If you are a loved one is injured or killed in a Tennessee car accident caused by a drunk driver you owe it to yourself to contact an experienced Nashville auto accident lawyer like those at Phillip Miller & Associates and take advantage of a free consultation to find out about your rights and remedies.

Stay At Home To Smoke Your Crack

As an experienced Nashville automobile accident attorney I think I tell you with some authority that it is never a good idea to smoke a couple of rocks of crack and engage in a fist fight with another person while you are driving a car. Something bad is likely to happen. That’s exactly what happened to a Nashville man yesterday and the result was that he rammed, at high speed, into a building in an apartment complex. Luckily no one died.

A resident of the apartment was sitting in a lawn chair outside when he saw the car speeding toward him, at the last minute he had to dive out of the way to avoid being hit. His apartment didn’t fair as well.

The principal concern regarding drugged driving is that driving under the influence of any drug that acts on the brain will impair one’s motor skills, reaction time, and judgment. Drugged driving is a public health concern because it puts not only the driver at risk, but also passengers and others who share the road.

Despite these acknowledged concerns, drugged driving laws have lagged behind alcohol legislation, in part because of limitations in the current technology for determining drug levels, and resulting impairment. For alcohol, detection of its blood concentration (BAC) is relatively simple and concentrations greater than .08% have been shown to impair driving performance. Thus, 0.08% is the legal limit in this country. For illicit drugs, there is no agreed upon limit for which impairment has been reliably demonstrated. And determining current drug levels can be difficult, since some drugs linger in the body for a period of days or weeks after initial ingestion.

Some states (Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin), have passed “per se” laws—in which it is illegal to operate a motor vehicle if there is any detectable level of a prohibited drug, or its metabolites, in the driver’s blood. Other state laws define “drugged driving” as driving when a drug “renders the driver incapable of driving safely” or “causes the driver to be impaired.”

If you or a loved one is injured or killed in a Tennessee car crash caused by a drugged driver you owe it to yourself to contact the experienced Tennessee automobile accident attorney’s at Phillip Miller & Associates and take advantage of a free consultation to find out about your rights and remedies.

Bicyclist Killed

Tony Barnes, 38, of Memphis should not even have been driving his 1997 Chevy Tahoe Monday. Mr. Barnes, you see, had had his driver’s license taken away because he couldn’t seem to follow the rules. This wasn’t the first time the state of Tennessee revoked his license. According to The Commercial-Appeal his arrest history includes several convictions for driving with a revoked license, most recently in July 2008.  Mr. Barnes took a chance and another man lost his life because of it. Mr. Barnes now faces a charge of leaving the scene of an accident, driving on a suspended license and after the District Attorney General goes to the Grand Jury he will face some sort of homicide charge.

Shortly after mid-night Mr. Barnes hit and killed an as of yet unidentified bicyclist and left him in the street to die. Barnes was booked into the Shelby County Jail on Monday evening. Maybe this arrest will help this man get the idea, that when the state revokes your license for drinking and driving and other vehicle violations that they mean it. He just wasn’t going to do what he was told and now someone has lost a father, a son, a husband and a loved one. This is the kind of driver that needs to be kept off the streets forever.

If you or a loved one is injured in a Nashville automobile accident by an unlicensed driver contact one of our experienced Tennessee automobile accident attorneys at Phillip Miller & Associates

and learn about your rights and remedies.