Traffic Justice

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, three people were killed in New York City by drivers with suspended licenses. These deaths are entirely preventable. If not for a legal system that cavalierly lets reckless drivers get back behind the wheel, Sonya Powell and Lillian and Peter Sabados might still be alive.

Yesterday the City Council held a hearing on street safety for older New Yorkers. The hearing came while the deaths of Lillian and Peter Sabados, an elderly Staten Island couple run down by Allmir Lekperic on Thanksgiving eve, are still fresh in people's minds. But when it comes to keeping drivers like Lekperic from harming others, The Staten Island Advance reports, some of the borough's council reps seem to think they've exhausted their options:

We heard the question more than once. When it was reported that Allmir Lekperic, the unlicensed driver who killed Peter and Lillian Sabados as they walked to Thanksgiving Mass on Staten Island last Wednesday evening, had racked up some 29 license suspensions since 2006, Streetsblog readers wondered: How is this guy not behind bars, much less behind the wheel?

In handing down a prison term of 20-to-life for Auvryn Scarlett, the garbage hauler who had stopped taking his epilepsy medication before suffering a seizure behind the wheel and killing two pedestrians last year, Justice Richard Carruthers described the convicted as "a time bomb ready to explode at any moment on the streets of New York." The same could be said of the countless number of motorists roaming the city at any given moment though their licenses have been suspended or revoked due to a history of recklessness. Two such drivers killed three people in separate crashes over the Thanksgiving holiday.

We've got a quick update on the legal aftermath of the Ninth Avenue road rage case, in which the Manhattan DA's office charged both cyclist Ray Bengen and SUV driver Gus Gonzalez.

While it took a lot of very public arm-twisting, last week brought a rare bit of good news from Albany: Lawmakers actually passed and adopted legislation to increase penalties for drunk drivers. And they did so, by their standards, with lightning speed. Reacting to the death of 11-year-old Leandra Rosado, who was thrown from a car driven by an intoxicated Carmen Huertas on the Henry Hudson Parkway on October 11, Governor David Paterson last Wednesday signed a bill making it a felony to drive drunk with children as passengers.

Charles Alexander Diez, the former North Carolina firefighter who shot cyclist Alan Simons in the head, has been sentenced to four months in jail.

City district attorneys and NYPD have reached an agreement that could speed the process of collecting blood evidence from drunk driving suspects who refuse to take breath tests.

After two incidents in two months of off-duty NYPD officers running down and killing pedestrians, then refusing to submit to Breathalyzer tests, police Commissioner Ray Kelly this week convened a panel aimed at expediting the collection of blood evidence from motorists arrested on suspicion of driving drunk.