Revistazo May 2004

Transit Police:
Current law is outdated and irrelevant

Honduras may be the only country in Central America that still does not have a law governing overland transit. The only document regulating traffic throughout the country is a regulation adopted in 1955 during the presidency of Julio Lozano Díaz.

More than 40 years have passed since then and still no one has found it important enough to address the effectiveness of this outdated regulation. Even transit authorities dismiss the regulation as obsolete, and as proof they point to fines set by the law for up to three lempiras (about $0.16).

René Maradiaga Panchamé

Sub-commissioner René Maradiaga Panchamé, Director of the National Transit Authority, is urging that a new law be approved. Without a Transit Law, the only option is to continue using the old regulation, which, though outdated, is still in effect.

According to statitistics from the National Transit Authority, drunk drivers are the third leading cause of traffic accidents in the country, after failure to obey traffic signals and speeding.

Transit Police: Current law is outdated and irrelevant Honduras may be the only country in Central America that still does not have a law governing overland transit. The only document regulating traffic throughout the country is a regulation adopted in 1955 during the presidency of Julio Lozano Díaz. More than 40 years have passed since then and still no one has found it important enough to address the effectiveness of this outdated regulation. Even transit authorities dismiss the regulation as obsolete, and as proof they point to fines set by the law for up to three lempiras (about $0.16).
René Maradiaga Panchamé	Sub-commissioner René Maradiaga Panchamé, Director of the National Transit Authority, is urging that a new law be approved. Without a Transit Law, the only option is to continue using the old regulation, which, though outdated, is still in effect. According to statitistics from the National Transit Authority, drunk drivers are the third leading cause of traffic accidents in the country, after failure to obey traffic signals and speeding.
	Reported accidents caused by drunk drivers in Honduras 2002 2003 Accidents 299 512 Persons wounded 246 357 Persons killed 75 68
Driving under the influence of alcohol is not defined as a crime by the existing transit regulation. Because of the lack of regulatory measures to hold drunk drivers accountable for their actions, the Honduran Congress passed the Law for the Penalization of Habitual Drunkenness in October of 2000. The Law consists of 11 articles, including measures to prohibit and sanction drunk driving. Article 1 authorizes the National Police to administer tests to determine the blood alcohol concentration of any driver who appears to be intoxicated. However, if a drunk driver causes an accident that kills someone, the court will only except evidence of intoxication in the form of a blood test performed by someone from Forensic Medicine. This makes the process of prosecution very difficult because there are very few people from Forensic Medicine available in the country. There are almost 7 million people in Honduras, living in 18 districts. The Transit Authority reports that 500,000 vehicles are registered in the country. The National Transit Authority has only 15 breath alcohol testing instruments and 15 speed guns to use in facing the problem of drunk driving. That means that in Tegucigalpa, the capital and one of cities with the highest concentration of vehicles, the police have 3 breath alcohol instruments.
Rafael Girad	The ideal, says Rafael Girad, spokesperson for the Transit Police, "would be to distribute a breath alcohol testing device to each patrol in the street to perform daily tests with drivers." He adds that the lack of these instruments makes the Transit Police's job often impossible because of the difficulty in many cases of transporting the suspect to a Forensic Medicine office. Often, by the time the police arrive with the suspect and the blood test is performed, so much time has passed that the driver's blood alcohol concentration has fallen below the legal limit.
In cases against drunk drivers, The new law should adopt breath alcohol tests as legal evidence The Law for the Penalization of Habitual Drunkenness sets 0.07 as the legal blood alcohol limit. That is approximately equal to the effect of ingesting three beers. Someone who has had more than that will show noticeable changes in behavior, but it can only be quickly measured with a breath alcohol test, says Girad.
To use the results of a breath alcohol test as evidence in a court case, it would be necessary to use digital instruments that print out the results on an attached printer. As of now, the Transit Police at the site of an accident can only describe what they see happen, and their descriptions of a person appearing to be drunk are often discounted as evidence in trials for drunk drivers. People's lives, especially the lives of innocent people killed by drunk drivers, are priceless. That is why the Transit Police feel that the Congress should approve new laws to allow breath alcohol tests to be used as evidence in court. Better control of drunk driving will save lives.
What do Transit Police do when an accident happens? Anyone can call and report an accident by dialing the emergency number 199 from a land line or 222 from a cellular phone. If the traffic accident killed or injured someone, the police are obligated to present the person responsible for the accident to the Public Prosecutor within 6 hours. In such cases, the Public Prosecutor from the Public Ministry and the Forensic Medical Department should be called. The Department for Criminal Investigations should also be contacted to take charge of removing the bodies. Representatives from the Technical Department of the Transit Authority should also be called to the scene. Once the Public Prosecutor is notified, s/he should order an alcohol test for all the parties involved to check for intoxication. If doubt persists, the Public Prosecutor should send the suspected drunk driver to the Forensic Medicine Office for a blood alcohol test and the results should be sent to the appropriate court. Based on the blood test, drivers with blood alcohol above the legal limit should be convicted and sentenced according to the law. When a person is detained by police for suspected drunk driving, the police administer an alcohol test. If the test is positive, the person should be detained for three hours under police supervision. In such situations, police contact a family member to take control of the vehicle and return it to the owner's home. If this is a first offense for the driver, his/her license would be suspended for six months and fine would be charged varying in amount from half to equal to the minimum monthly wage. Repeated offenses would carry with them a fine of one to three times the minimum monthly wage and, depending on the case, could result in the cancelation of the driver's license for one year or more. www.revistazo.com