The way Walter Derry sees it, somebody should have taken Linda
Bianchi's driver's license before the crash that killed his fiancee. Bianchi, 45, has a driving
record that includes two drunken-driving convictions, nine wrecks, and more than a dozen police stops that resulted in tickets
for moving violations. And she has a criminal record for heroin use.
"How does somebody
like this slip through the cracks?" Derry asked.
Bianchi, of Marlton, slipped though two
cracks. She might have lost her license for drunken driving, but her punishment is in limbo because of a New Jersey Supreme
Court-ordered study of the state's breath-test machine.
Or she might have been flagged for
other moving violations, but three times they were reduced in court to a catchall charge called "unsafe operation of
a motor vehicle," which top state officials say was designed to raise revenue but does nothing to weed out unsafe drivers.
On Oct. 1, Bianchi ran a red light at the Black Horse Pike and Berlin-Cross Keys Road in Washington
Township, police said. Without braking, her Toyota Avalon slammed into a Chevrolet Cavalier driven by Derry's fiancee,
Navy veteran Rebecca Haines, 24, of Williamstown. Haines, who had served three tours of duty in the Persian Gulf, died of
massive head injuries three hours later in a hospital, with Derry at her side.
"Somebody
should have flagged this woman," seethed Derry, 30. "She should not have been allowed to drive."
Bianchi is charged with vehicular homicide and is in jail, with bail set at $150,000. Police said she had smelled
of alcohol at the crash scene. They are awaiting blood tests before deciding whether to charge her with her third drunken-driving
offense.
Derry said he had hired a lawyer and intended to lobby state legislators to change the
law.
He'll find plenty of support.
Sharon A. Harrington, chief
administrator of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, said the state relied on a point system to track bad drivers. Most
moving violations ding a driver's record with points. A dozen points bring a license suspension.
Running
a stop sign, for example, is two points. Reckless driving is five.
Unsafe operation of a motor
vehicle carries no points.
Harrington said eliminating that charge was the one thing that would
most improve New Jersey highway safety.
"It gives bad drivers a pass," she said.
Pam Fischer, director of the state Highway Traffic Safety Division, which pays for highway-safety programs, said:
"The unsafe-operator statute has not done anything to make things safer. It's done the opposite."
She added: "If bad drivers are not getting points, they're not getting flagged."
Bianchi pleaded guilty to the unsafe-operator charge on Sept. 2, 2003; on Nov. 12, 2005; and on Jan. 2, 2006.
The state Transportation Department has begun a study of the law's effect on safety. A description of the study's
scope notes: "Courts and lawyers are aggressively promoting the 'unsafe operator' ticket plea alternative for
drivers who want to avoid points."
Bianchi isn't the only bad driver to have kept a
legal driver's license with help from the law.
"In one case, a driver who had a 90 m.p.h.
speeding ticket and later had two 'unsafe operator' pleas that were followed by a cell-phone plea ended up killing
three people while intoxicated," the study's description says.
The unsafe-operator charge
became law in 2000, designed to clear traffic charges from municipal courts. In 2004, Gov. Jim McGreevey added a $250 surcharge
to the plea to help balance the state budget.
"That law, in my opinion, was just a revenue-raiser,"
State Sen. Stephen M. Sweeney (D., Gloucester) said. "A speeding ticket, depending on how fast you're going, is a
lot of points. Your insurance is going to go through the roof. So instead of letting the insurance companies do it, the state
doubled the fine and took the money."
On Wednesday in a jammed Cherry Hill municipal courtroom,
a parade of drivers pleaded guilty, one by one, to the unsafe-operator charge rather than face points for offenses that ranged
from speeding to improper turns.
Judge Jeffrey Karl called each offender before a microphone
in front of his bench, then asked if the driver wanted to plead guilty to unsafe operation of a vehicle.
About a dozen offenders - every person who came to court for a moving violation - answered yes. The judge banged
his gavel, then directed the drivers into another room to pay their fines.
That can be staggering.
Drivers still must pay the fine for their original offense and court costs, which can be hundreds of dollars. Plus they have
to pay the $250 unsafe-driver surcharge.
Last year, New Jersey municipal courts logged 181,380
pleas to the unsafe-driver charge. The surcharges totaled about $44.7 million.
Cherry Hill alone
sends $15,000 to $20,000 to Trenton every month in unsafe-driver surcharges, court administrators said.
The law also can hide a bad driver's record from insurance companies.
"In most
states, companies can only rely on a driver's record to determine how much they're going to charge," said Bob
Passmore, a spokesman for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, an trade group.
"To
her credit, at least she had insurance," he said.
Derry said the insurance hadn't even
covered his fiancee's funeral.
"There has to be a mechanism, a system of checks, so
that the municipal courts are required to report the real offenses to the Motor Vehicle Commission and the insurance companies,"
Derry said. "All it would take is a simple piece of software. That way, maybe bad drivers could be kept off the roads."
Or not.
Bianchi was convicted of her second DWI offense on Aug.
8. That charge carries a mandatory three-month license suspension.
But she and 12,000 other drunken
drivers convicted since January 2006 have kept their licenses because the state Supreme Court is considering another driver's
legal challenge of the new breath-testing machine.
The court has appointed a special master to
hold hearings about the Alcotest machine. A spokeswoman said there was no timetable for a decision.
