Cracking Down on Illegal Drivers

Every day untold thousands of illegal drivers take to the roads. Why do we let them?

By Michael Crowley
From Reader's Digest

When emergency workers arrived at the scene of the crash last February 19, they found the bright yellow school bus lying shattered on its side. A few minutes earlier, the bus had been carrying 28 children home from the Lakeview School in Cottonwood, Minnesota. That's when a van barreled through a stop sign and smashed into the bus, killing four students between the ages of 9 and 13. Marty and Rita Javens lost two sons, Hunter and Jesse. Six other children were seriously injured.

The woman who police say was driving the van -- a 24-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala named Olga Marina Franco del Cid -- did not have a valid driver's license. Even worse, she'd been caught driving illegally before. In 2006 a resident of Montevideo, Minnesota, called police about a driver who had plowed into her yard. The driver was Franco, who managed to hide her illegal status and pleaded guilty to driving without a license. Her punishment? A $182 fine.

(Illustration) by Tim Bower
One in five fatal crashes per year involves a driver without a proper license.

How many unlicensed drivers are on our roads? No one knows for sure, but the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles recently estimated that there were "tens of thousands" of unlicensed drivers in that state alone. And just last year the California Highway Patrol issued more than 132,000 citations to unlicensed drivers. All this helps explain why America suffers a stomach-turning 117 driving-related deaths per day. "People act like it's their right to drive whether they're licensed or not," says Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel, who oversees traffic safety for the National Sheriffs' Asso_ciation. "They don't care, and they put other people at risk as a result."

Some motorists are completely shameless. A Washington, D.C., TV crew visited a local courthouse this year and secretly followed people whose licenses had just been suspended by a judge out to the parking lot, where -- yup, you guessed it -- they got right back into their cars and drove away.

When these people are behind the wheel, they put us all at serious risk. Illegal drivers are almost four times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than everyone else. In fact, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, one in five fatal crashes per year involves a driver without a proper license.

Drivers like Alfonso Martinez. In January the 29-year-old Ohio man blew through a red light near Columbus and slammed into a salt truck. The crash killed his wife, who was eight and a half months pregnant, and left their two-year-old son in critical condition. Turns out, Martinez was driving without a license -- in part thanks to his 2006 conviction for … driving without a license.

Like Franco, Martinez was in this country illegally. Highway-safety activists say the failure of immigrants to become properly licensed contributes to the overall problem. That's why some politicians want to allow illegal immigrants to obtain licenses; others believe the answer is a new crackdown on illegal immigration.

But dangerous unlicensed driving is by no means limited to illegal immigrants. Look at Bobbie Hills, whose license was revoked in 2003 after she suffered an epileptic seizure while driving. On January 5, 2005, the 46-year-old Orlando, Florida, woman was driving home from work when she had another seizure. She lost control of her SUV and hit 14-year-old Gaston Roy Johnson, Jr. The high school student was killed instantly.

Our system clearly isn't doing enough to keep killers like Angela Ball off the road. Ball, 28, of Saybrook Township, Ohio, was fleeing police who were trying to pull her over when she broadsided another car, killing the driver, Richard Turner, 71. Ball's license had been suspended ten times in eight years; little more than a week before the accident that took Turner's life, Ball had been released on a $600 bond after answering an arrest warrant related to her latest license suspension.

We can change this reckless behavior by cracking down. Two years after California started impounding cars of people driving without valid licenses, a study found that those drivers were about 20 percent less likely to repeat the offense than other drivers. A similar approach in Portland, Oregon, reduced those offenses by about 50 percent. Eleven states, including Alabama, Illinois, and Washington, now have impoundment laws on the books.

But there's still far too much indifference. The Florida legislature recently advanced a bill that would actually soften punishments for rogue drivers, reducing the penalty against drivers convicted of two unlicensed driving offenses from a felony to a misdemeanor and dropping the maximum jail sentence from five years to 60 days. Meanwhile, a rival bill to toughen penalties and impound cars has been stalled for years.

State legislators say they need to free up prison beds for more serious criminals and to cut costs. Try explaining that to the family of Veronica Ford, a four-year-old girl from Sunrise, Florida, who was struck and killed by a driver while stepping off a bus with her mother one afternoon in April. The driver charged in that case, 18-year-old Charles Sanford, turned out to have one prior conviction and one plea of no contest to charges of driving without a license.

"It seems as if we as a society have raised a white flag of surrender and are willing to accept that these losses are the price we have to pay for the mobility we enjoy in this country," says Peter Kissinger, president of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. "And that couldn't be further from the truth."

How many more men, women, and especially children have to die violently before we realize that?

Do More
Support tougher laws. Tactics such as impounding vehicles when a license is suspended or linking vehicle registration to a valid license can help keep suspended drivers off the road.

Be vigilant
That hit-and-run driver is your business, even if the accident didn't involve your car and was only a fender bender: Such drivers are more likely to have suspended licenses. Write down that license plate number!

Educate yourself
Stay abreast of the latest auto-safety research at the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety website.

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