So one of my jobs lately has been writing blogs for lawyers. Basically if you crash your car in an interesting way or get a DWI of some sort of passing notoriety you can count on me summarizing it in 300 words or less on some lawyer’s blog.

This article bothers me more than most.

http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/courier/news/new-waverly-woman-gets-years-for-dwi-evading/article_1b857605-fa8f-538a-b90d-07d5a8a90862.html

I just don’t get it. I don’t see the point. It would be kinder to execute her.

The earliest she will be out of jail is when she’s 71.

She probably doesn’t even remember the incident. Soma is a weird drug with psychoactive effects, and it can produce something like sleepwalking.

Look at that woman. I’ll bet a dollar against a donut that she has grandchildren. What is the point of taking her from her family? Maybe all she needed was a prescription for a weaker sleeping pill and to not have a car around. Maybe what she needed was supervision, not incarceration.

This isn’t even punishment. It’s an institutional response by an institution that has lost all sense of proportion. The self-justification by the prosecution makes me queasy.

Our society needs a response between “crush” and “ignore.”

The really sad part is that in ten years self-driving cars will be everywhere, in fifteen drinking while being driven around will be as accepted again as it was in the 1950s.

But she’ll still be in jail.