Drunken driving madness in the courts

It’s so hard to decide which is the craziest part of today’s eye-popping Globe Spotlight story on judicial leniency in drunken driving cases.

Is it the episode where the judge believed a defendant who said, yes, he was driving while hammered, but also believed his lawyer, who claimed his client hadn’t driven on a public road before ramming into a house three times?

Or maybe it’s the one where the judge took the word of a teenager who blew 0.11 in a breath test, failed field sobriety tests, and then changed his story in court, claiming a friend had actually been driving.

Not guilty, despite the fact that he had admitted to lying under oath just minutes before.

So many barmy choices! We’ve got judges all over the state who are abandoning common sense, and in some cases, it appears, sanity, to free drivers who slide behind the wheel while wasted.

And we’ve got a savvy club of defense attorneys shamelessly working the system to make sure the jurists most hell-bent on acquitting drunken driving defendants are the ones who hear their cases.

Yet District Court Chief Justice Lynda M. Connolly told the Globe, “I’m not sure that there’s something wrong there.’’

There’s something wrong there.

And it’s all happening out of view, in near-empty courtrooms, beyond the reach of even the court’s spanking-new, $75 million computer-tracking system.

Judges would never get away with so little scrutiny for so long if they were taking this lax an approach to, say, weapons charges.

To illustrate, I offer a reimagining of the loopiest anecdote from today’s Spotlight story - you’ll recognize it as the one where Taunton District Court Judge James McGovern encountered Jorge Pinto, who had showed up apparently inebriated for a hearing on his second OUI offense. The judge let Pinto leave the courthouse - behind the wheel of his car.

That made the judge annoyed - not at Pinto, but at those who had dragged him back to court.

Imagine, if you will, the same scenario with loaded guns substituted for loaded drivers: Police see a man brandishing a gun on a public street, and arrest him. Then when he arrives for a pretrial hearing, prosecutors suspect he’s been waving a weapon around again, and tell the judge.

“You waving a loaded gun around?’’ the judge asks the defendant.

“I waved a loaded gun around this morning, yes,’’ the man replies.

Then the judge does nothing. Free to go, the defendant heads right back out to the street, where he proceeds to pull out his piece again. And instead of throwing the book at him, the judge threatens to dismiss the whole case.

Gun charge or OUI, this is absolute madness. Driving a car drunk is just as dangerous as running around with a loaded weapon.

An astonishing 108 people died in drunken driving crashes in Massachusetts in 2009, the latest year for which figures are available. And this staggering figure was one of the lowest in the country. Nationally, 34,000 people died in crashes caused by impaired drivers.

But the fatalities tell only a tiny part of the story. There are a whopping 17,000 OUI arrests in Massachusetts each year. And those are just the ones overstretched police manage to stop.

Imagine how many others are out there, in the bag, racing around in tons of metal, sure they won’t get caught, or worse.

“People just look at it and think . . . this is not going to happen to me,’’ says David DeIuliis, a spokesman for Mothers Against Drunk Driving in Massachusetts.

What is it about the mortal danger of drunken driving that is so hard for so many motorists - and judges - to take seriously?

In courtrooms, and on the roads, it has to end.

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