By MATT CHANDLER
Buffalo Law Journal

Dante Stallworth has made millions of dollars playing football professionally. He is young, talented and rich, and recently, he killed a man.

Stallworth, a wide receiver with the NFL's Cleveland Browns, was sentenced last week for DUI manslaughter in the death of a pedestrian he struck while speeding in his luxury car in Miami. His blood-alcohol content was .13. His sentence: 30 days in jail.

If that's too far removed for you to relate to, there are plenty of local cases that show that despite endless public-service announcements warning of the risks, people of all ages get behind the wheel after having too much to drink.

Former Erie county prosecutor Anne Adams was pulled over last fall in the Town of Hamburg in a much-publicized case of apparent drinking and driving. Though she lost her law license and served a few hours in jail, Adams was fortunate that she didn't injure or kill anyone.

That wasn't the case for the North Tonawanda teenager who was behind the wheel of during a fatal accident three weeks ago. Ashley Sullivan, 17, has been charged with driving while intoxicated after the car she was driving struck a brick wall, killing her 20-year-old passenger.

These two cases - along with those involving Hamburg lawyer John Duffy, who admitted to drinking prior to fatally striking 19-year-old Meghan Sorbera as she walked home from her job in October, and has since been disbarred, and Christopher Tulumello, an unlicensed driver who, with a reported blood-alcohol content of .15, struck and killed a Buffalo woman as she crossed a downtown street with her young son in December - have renewed the debate over how to curb the high number of driving-while-impaired and driving-while-intoxicated cases in Western New York.

While advocacy groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) have long fought for harsher penalties and increasing police vigilance, others say such approaches haven't been effective, and they say the numbers support that.

Data provided by the Erie County Sheriff's Office show that DWI arrests have risen slightly, from 3,237 in 2001 to 3,467 in 2008. In Niagara County, arrests rose from 890 in 2001 to 1,294 in 2007, the latest year for which data was available.

So what can lawmakers and police do to stem the flow of alcohol-related crashes as we head into the summer season? Advocates of tougher penalties say stepping up the use of alcohol-monitoring devices and increasing jail time will send a message and ultimately make the roads safer.

Elizabeth Obad, president of the Erie County chapter of MADD, lost her son - Marine Sgt. George Obad, a veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq - to a 1994 car crash caused by an impaired driver. She believes something has to be done to reign in repeat offenders.

"I was a paramedic most of my life, and I lost eight people in five separate crashes because people chose to drink and drive," she said. "A lot of people have really become complacent with the issue of drunk driving."

Sgt. Greg Schuey, who oversees the Niagara County Sheriff's Office's DWI-prevention programs, says Niagara County officials are anything but complacent.

"We put all of the high-school seniors through the Traffic Safety Fair, which is a full day of them seeing the effect of drinking and driving from the victim's family's standpoint all the way through the legal aspect," Schuey said. "In fact, we have kids come through from other counties."

While education has long been a major component of MADD, Obad said more has to be done to reach the adults who are over the limit and behind the wheel.

"What we know is that the strongest deterrent to stop drunk driving is to have highly publicized, highly visible sobriety checkpoints," she said. "That is a strong deterrent to most people, if they have had a few drinks, to say, ‘I don't want to get stopped tonight.' "

Thomas Trbovich, a former prosecutor who now works as a DWI defense lawyer, has high praise for the work MADD has done to raise awareness and educate people, but he disagrees with the premise that harsher penalties and increased sobriety checkpoints are going to impact the statistics.

Aside from those who are actually innocent, Trbovich says people arrested for drunk driving fall into two categories: "the first-time foolish" and substance abusers dependent on alcohol.

"They made a mistake, didn't think about committing a crime," he says of the first-timers. "This is probably the largest group of DWI individuals... (They are) mortified and will never be seen drinking and driving again."

The alcoholics, he argues, need counseling, not jail. Neither group, he says, will be impacted by sobriety checkpoints.

Trbovich attributes the increase in drunk-driving arrests to tougher enforcement, which he believes is well-intentioned, but ultimately ineffective.

"If you take a look at DWIs 10-12 years ago, you saw an attitude difference," he said. "Sometimes the police would pick up someone, and instead of running them through the test, they would take them home, especially in the small towns. You don't see that happen anymore. If someone is driving and they could be intoxicated, they will be arrested."

Trbovich said he also has a more difficult time negotiating a plea for his clients than, say, if they were charged with burglary. It is a point Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita III doesn't dispute.

"I think practically speaking, it is more difficult to get a reduced plea on a driving-while-intoxicated offense than it is on another violent felony," Sedita said. "By the same token, it is much less likely that you are going to jail on a DWI than you are on a reduced plea to a non-DWI felony." Sedita said it is the assurance that the non-DWI plea will result in jail time that makes a lesser plea an option.

Across the aisle, Chris O'Brien is fine with that. A partner in O'Brien Boyd PC, a firm that advertises under the tag line "We sue drunk drivers," he says more needs to be done to prevent the drunken-driving tragedies.

"We have been much more aggressive about suing for punitive damage in the classic DWI cases," he said. "The message we are trying to send with that is that if you're drinking and driving, your insurance is only going to cover part of it, and we're going to look to you personally."

O'Brien advises DUI victims to seek damages too from businesses that have served drinks to clearly intoxicated patrons, though he says that can prove more difficult.

"With the (Seneca Niagara) Casino, we are seeing an outflux of people who have been drinking for hours, and for free, and we can't sue the casino because (the Senecas) are a sovereign nation," he explained.

Instead, his firm focuses on seeking heavy punitive damages, which cannot be dischargeable in bankruptcy. In conjunction with the criminal process, and continued education, he hopes it will be enough to decrease the number of serious DWI-related accidents.

For his part, Sedita said his office has policies in place that limit the numbers of cases where plea agreements will be offered to defendants charged with driving while intoxicated.

"If someone comes in for the first time, if there is no injury or accident and if their (blood-alcohol) test is .13 or below, it can be considered (driving while) impaired for a plea," he said. But when the case involves an accident with injuries, a defendant who left the scene or a repeat offender, the district attorney said, his office generally has a no-plea policy.

"We want those people off the road, we don't want them to have licenses and, in many cases, we want them in jail," he said.