As far as driving goes, being drunk will only stiffen your sentence, if you caused an accident resulting in somebody’s death… well, normally!
However a magistrate in a provincial law court in Granada considered the driver’s state as an attenuating circumstance and gave the driver a 3-month sentence instead of the 3-year one that the Public Prosecutor and private prosecution had recommended.
Santiago H.C. collided with a van carrying four people resulting in the death of one of them. It was at 06.30h in the morning of the 23rd of January, 2010. He was driving along the A-44 level with Otura.
The collision occurred as Santiago attempted to overtake the van, causing it to swerve off the road and turn over after hitting a crash barrier. Besides the dead man (who had not been wearing a seat belt), the other three were injured to varying degrees.
The Guardia Civil soon arrived and noticed that Santiago was showing signs of being very much under the influence of alcohol, so he was breathalyzed – he was found to be well over the limit.
Santiago admitted that he had been drinking until at least two hours before the accident and hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before.
It was the fact that the victim had not been wearing a seat belt that inclined the judge to drop the accusation down from manslaughter through careless driving to simply careless driving.
The private-prosecution lawyer considered this as a ‘judicial barbarity.’ One thing, he said, in Civil Law was to consider that the victim contributed to his own demise and quite another that this in any way lessens the degree of responsibility in Criminal Law of the drunk driver; i.e., that he should benefit from culpability of the victim to lessen his own.”
He also had strong words against the magistrate’s considering that the man’s state of being inebriated as an attenuating factor. “It is impossible within the judicial logic to consider inebriation as an attenuation, precisely because driving under the influence is a criminal offence.”
The family of the deceased and those injured in the crash will be appealing against this sentence.
(News: Province of Granada, Andalucia)