The Dui Reporting Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. COHEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the DUI Reporting Act, a bill which I filed yesterday with my Judiciary Committee colleague, Steve Chabot of Ohio. If enacted, this bill would plug a glaring hole in our Nation's drunk driving laws that enables repeat offenders to be tried as first-time offenders, and repeat offenders are the ones most likely to cause serious accidents and death.
Currently, when police make a driving-under-the-influence arrest, they don't always have access to information about all of the driver's previous DUI convictions or arrests. The reason is because not all agencies report DUI arrests and/or convictions to the National Crime Information Center, known as the NCIC. That is the national crime database that is made instantly available to police and law enforcement right in their patrol cars.
The consequences of this lack of reporting can prove tragic. Last year, there was an awful, awful accident, a crash in northern Mississippi just outside of my district. Two teenage girls, Maddie Kruse and Rachel Lynch, were headed out of Memphis on the way to a vacation. Their grandmother was driving the car. At about 6:30 in the morning, a man who had registered .17 at 6:30 in the morning hit their vehicle and killed Maddie and Rachel. This man had accrued seven DUI charges since 2008 but had been allowed to plead guilty five times to DUI first. He represented himself and had five first-offense DUI convictions. Mississippi didn't have a system and still doesn't have a system to require those reportages.
This story broke my heart and, I believe, the hearts of everybody in the Midsouth who read about it.
This was a drunk driver who should have been in jail serving time off the road or have received treatment. The reason he wasn't, according to local investigations, is because none of his DUI history had been reported to the NCIC and was not available to the highway patrolman. When that patrolman ran his driving record in the national database, his past DUI convictions never showed up because they weren't reported.
This is shameful in this day and age. This information should be reported so that law enforcement can get access to it and get drunk drivers off the road and save lives like Maddie's and Rachel's. Our bill would make that happen by creating a financial incentive for States to require DUI arrests and convictions to be reported to the NCIC and, therefore, available to law enforcement.
The bill is bipartisan. It has the support of people throughout the country; but in Memphis, Billy Bond, at the Prosecutor's Office, worked on this for a while and tried to get laws like this passed. We have had a good response from MADD.
This bill will save lives. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to pass it quickly.
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