The victims include a Bible college student in Iowa who was bicycling home from work, a 13-year-old Michigan boy riding in his older sister’s car and a Minnesota school bus driver picking up the morning newspaper in front of his home.
All were killed in recent years by distracted drivers who had been texting or looking at their GPS. Yet none of the drivers responsible for those deaths spent more than a few days behind bars.
Although there are no national statistics on the results of prosecutions brought against distracted drivers who kill or severely injure someone, light punishment appears to be the norm. An informal review by FairWarning of prosecutions of distracted drivers — cases gleaned from news reports over the last five years that involved more than 100 deaths overall –- found that few were sentenced to serve for more than a month or two, or given fines of more than $1,000.

Megan Goeltz was killed in February 2016 at the age of 22 when another driver slammed into her car at a highway intersection in eastern Minnesota. Authorities said the other driver, Drew Fleming, had been texting when the crash occurred. Fleming was charged with a misdemeanor reckless driving charge and still is awaiting trial.
To combat distracted driving deaths, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last May published a 24-page guide outlining the best methods to win convictions. It was prepared by a team of eight prosecutors, police officers and traffic safety specialists from across the nation.
“Sending or reading a text message can take the driver’s eyes off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds,” the publication said. “At 55 miles per hour …. the vehicle will travel the length of a football field without any visual guidance.”
Safety advocates and researchers say tougher penalties alone aren’t likely to get drivers to put down their phones. But as with drunk driving a generation ago, they say, stiffer penalties could reduce the reckless behavior, if the tougher punishment is combined with education programs, peer pressure and technology that can disable motorists’ wireless devices while they are driving.
For example, Christopher Kutz, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor, thinks that ”very well-publicized homicide prosecutions” could have a strong deterrent effect. Yet he also believes that technology to prevent drivers from using their smartphones or other devices is essential. “There’s a particular problem with distracted driving — the design of the device is to encourage distraction,” he said. “They’re built with addiction as a feature, not a bug.”
“Part of the challenge,” said Jay Winsten, associate dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, “is that there is no stigma connected or associated with a distracted driving offense. There’s no shame.”
He added: “I’m at a reception or cocktail party and someone asks, what are you working on and I say distracted driving and they’re more likely than not to say, ‘Yeah, I’m probably one of the worst offenders.'”
Public attitudes tended to be similarly blasé toward drunk driving until the 1980s. “People would joke about how drunk they were when driving,” Winsten recalled. But then the newly formed Mothers Against Drunk Driving stepped in and drew widespread attention to the deadly problem. By swaying public opinion, MADD helped win tougher legal sanctions, higher drinking ages in some states and highlighted such alternatives as designated drivers.
[comment text=”We’d like your thoughts on how to address the problem of distracted driving.”]Nearly one-third of drivers between the ages of 18 and 64 read or send text or email messages while at the wheel, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Distracted driving causes almost 3,500 deaths and 400,000 injuries a year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says. In 2015, the agency estimated that nearly 500 deaths involved the use of cellphones, but experts consider that figure very low since the federal database relies on often incomplete information in police reports. Along with using wireless devices, other distractions – such as eating while driving — also figure in some of these crashes.
“This is so prevalent and so very dangerous,” said Amy J. Freedheim, a prosecutor in Seattle for King County, Wash., who co-authored the NHTSA prosecution guide. “We’ve got to address it — we can’t afford not to.”
“All it takes is just a moment of drift and you’ve altered your life and you’ve ended somebody else’s life.”

Jay Winsten, associate dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, said part of the challenge in dealing with distracted driving is that “there’s no shame” associated with the offense.
The NHTSA guide encourages police to consider using specialized evidence bags for cellphones to preserve their data and reduce the chance that the information would be lost due to outside interference or static electricity.
It also advises police to demand electronic records from wireless providers, who typically won’t release them without a subpoena, and get statements from witnesses and the suspect driver. “The early interview may reduce the opportunity to fabricate or conspire with others,” the manual noted.
Yet no matter how thorough the criminal investigation, experts say that distracted driving is a far tougher nut to crack than drunk driving — and not just because it is more difficult to prove a motorist was texting at the moment of a crash than to demonstrate, with the black-and-white results of a field sobriety test and breathalyzer or blood test, that a driver was intoxicated. Only in the rare case of an eyewitness report or admission by a motorist will police know that a cellphone was involved.
For one thing, more people use wireless devices day-in and day-out, often minute-by-minute. Tweeting, texting and posting are hard habits to break — even for someone in the driver seat.
Winning tougher sanctions also requires some legislators, litigators, judges and juries to ignore their own behavior. As Harvard’s Winsten put it: “There but for the grace of God go I – am I really prepared to send someone to jail?”
Freedheim conceded that tough sanctions will remain difficult to win unless public perception changes.
Most people “are getting the message that texting and driving is injurious,” she said. “But everybody thinks they are the safe person.”

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Most prosecutions that lead to prison sentences, the FairWarning review showed, involved at least one additional illegal act. Those included drinking, drug-taking or the use of a hand-held phone while driving a commercial truck, a practice outlawed by federal transportation authorities.
Perhaps the stiffest sentence in recent years was meted out to Frank Rychtik. The Wisconsin dump truck driver pleaded no contest to killing Minnesota motorist Jason Songer, 29, and seriously injuring two others in 2014. He is serving 16 years in prison.
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Rychtik had been drinking the previous evening and his blood alcohol level remained above .04 when he slammed into several vehicles that had come to a halt ahead of him on Interstate 90 near La Crosse, Wis. At the time, he acknowledged, he was looking down at a Facebook post and failed to notice the stoppage.
“Life can change in that second it takes you to look at your phone,” he reflected in a prison interview with Fox 9 News in Minneapolis early last year.
“I just wish I could go back and re-wake up that morning and not get into that truck,” he said. “That text message, that Facebook post, all of that can wait.”
In New Jersey in 2013, a high school sports star, Sam Oltmans, received a five-year prison sentence in connection with a crash that killed a 61-year-old political activist named Lauren O’Neil.
Don’t Drive Distracted, Wireless Industry Says, But Safety Advocates Want More Than TalkWhile Assailing Driving Distractions, Automakers Pack in Tempting Gadgets
Authorities said Sam Oltmans, who was 17 at the time of the crash, was at a party before driving off. They said Oltmans later crossed a double yellow line and struck O’Neil’s vehicle head-on while he was talking on his cellphone and sending text messages.
In sentencing the teen, according to local news reports, Superior Court Judge Robert Reed called the case a tragedy and indicated that he hoped the tough sentence would serve as a warning to others.
“For God’s sake, stop it, lest you stand where Sam Oltmans stands today,” the judge said in remarks directed toward young people.
Today, Oltmans is out of prison and is attending Rutgers University, where he plays on the lacrosse team. He also speaks to school groups about drinking, texting and driving.
“My message to you: Be responsible,” he was quoted as telling students at Quinnipiac College. “Don’t make the same mistakes that I did. They’ll stay with you for the rest of your life.”
A case more typical of those reviewed by FairWarning is the one against Drew Fleming of Hudson, Wis. Authorities said Fleming was texting while driving through an eastern Minnesota highway intersection in February 2016 when he lost control of his Saab, careened off an embankment and slammed into Megan Goeltz’s Ford Fusion. Goeltz, who was 22, pregnant and the mother of a toddler, was killed.
But Fleming, then 20, was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving. Still awaiting trial, he faces a maximum sentence of a year in jail.
Forty-three states and Washington, D.C., have text messaging bans for all drivers, and 15 states and the District of Columbia bar all handheld use of phones. But, by and large, the penalties are light.
In Minnesota, for example, drivers caught texting face a $50 fine and $225 for subsequent offenses. When deaths or seriously injuries occur, a distracted driver faces at most a gross misdemeanor reckless driving charge unless engaged in an additional offense such as drunk driving.
That outrages the victim’s father, Tom Goeltz, who has worked for three decades as a safety consultant in Minneapolis.

Amy J. Freedheim, a prosecutor in Seattle for King County, Wash., in front of photos of victims in vehicular homicide cases that she has prosecuted. Freedheim said distracted driving “is so prevalent and so very dangerous” and must be addressed.
“When they say, ‘Well, he has to be doing something else like speeding, or being drunk or high on illegal drugs,’ I mean those things by themselves they can get a felony charge for,” Goeltz said in an interview. “You can get a felony charge for cutting down a darn tree on public land. We’re not protecting the public.”
In his job with a risk management firm, Goeltz discusses safety with business owners and employees, and he has added the topic of distracted driving to his lectures.
“I work with nuclear power plants and linemen that put up high tension wires with big utilities, and gas line employees,” Goeltz said. “And the first thing I tell them if I’m in a safety meeting is the most hazardous thing you’re going to do today is not at work, it’s driving back and forth to work.”
“Last year, 5,000 people died in construction sites and general industry and plants, but 40,000 died driving on our roads back and forth to work, school or wherever,” he said. “But we focus so much less on it.”
Some analysts say that fostering peer pressure — particularly among young drivers, who are most at peril – is crucial for putting the brakes on distracted driving.
For drivers who “are very hooked” on their smartphones, “there is no punishment stiff enough to change that behavior,” said Ramsay Brown, co-founder and chief operations officer of Dopamine Labs in Venice, Calif., an artificial intelligence software firm. “You need to find some way to make it cool to get angry at your friend when he’s texting and driving. You need to make distracted driving wickedly unsexy.”
Paul Feldman can be reached at email hidden; JavaScript is required.
Post script…That last paragraph of Dopamine Lab’s comments was a terrible way to end. It pretty much pulled up short the seriousness of your article.
There is a really insidious helplessness that people express when it comes to their smartphones. This is very disturbing. Why does the judge think “there but for the grace of God go I” when looking at the driver, instead of when looking at the victim? It’s a sickness. And it’s been nurtured by the cell phone industry and the makers of online distractions. This is their game plan. Success!
The public, and everyone serving the public, has been intoxicated by this technology, despite copious indications that it is full of dangerous side effects. But everyone’s helpless—helpless to drop it while driving, helpless to stop it while being with or caring for others, helpless to set limits for their children’s screen time, helpless to take any precautions to lessen radiation exposure.
The tech industry wanted this, and they have taken every available opportunity to shove away any information or indications of problems ahead to keep the public naive, dazzled, and in the dark. It was found years ago that such subtle signalling could stimulate the opioid receptors in mammalian brain tissue, and that these frequencies can make alterations in brain waves and all manner of cellular and bodily functioning. The psychological addiction is icing on the cake.
I would like to see followup reporting about the cause of accidents, especially local ones. I don’t doubt most are caused by drivers using cellphones and other electronic distractions. The public in general does not seem to be aware of the magnitude of this problem partly because only the most dramatic ones are publicized. It’s not a solution and It probably won’t make a difference to most people but at least people will be aware of how unsafe their local roads really are.
Felony. I live and drive in L.A. & Orange Counties where there is already a huge traffic problem on many roads. The people who are glued to their phones while driving, or at a traffic light, cause major disturbances in already dangerous areas. I think it should be a felony and a minimum $10,000 fine when caught texting or browsing on your smart phone while driving, including sitting at a traffic light.
Thanks so much for your insightful article. I’ve stood on the side of the road amazed at how many drivers have their gaze fixed on their cell phones as they hurtle down our roads.
Please be careful! Your car is a lethal weapon when unattended to. Dr. Steven Visentin,D.C. Denver CO
Offenders should lose their driver’s license for life.
Hi Keith, all interesting points. But if you’ll allow me to toot our horn, at FairWarning we don’t focus only on driver behavior:
https://www.fairwarning.org/2017/08/wireless-companies-duck-responsibilities-distracted-driving/
https://www.fairwarning.org/2011/09/mixed-message/
We continue to focus purely on driver behaviour, which is only part of the problem. If more highways had dividing steel wire rope barriers that can stop head on crashes; if more vehicles were fitted with crash notification, or better, autonomous emergency braking; if more vehicles had lane departure warning, or better, lane keeping assist systems; if roads had sealed shoulders and tactile rumble strips along the lane markings; many of these crashes would never have occurred. I do not lift responsibility from distracted drivers, but we must share the responsibility for road safety. The Safe System Approach is proven to work in reducing road trauma and tragedy.
Better car design limiting apps on dashboard and disabling most when car is in motion.
Distracted driving is a big issue, but it is one that needs to be approached very rationally if we are to succeed in making progress as quickly as possible. So far, many efforts around the country have taken an “eliminate all distractions because any distraction is unacceptable” approach. The narrative for these efforts equates adjusting the volume on the radio with reading a text message and responding manually.
The problem with such an approach is that human beings have a really hard time sustaining true single-minded focus for very long. Some people, in some occupations (NASCAR drivers, Secret Service protection officers) get better at it, but in general humans struggle with it. Think back to when you first learned to drive. The average person finds it exhausting because the process requires so much attention and conscious thought for a sustained period of time. As we learn to handle more and more of the driving tasks subconsciously and through muscle memory, it becomes less exhausting. We also become better drivers. In part, that is because it frees up our mind to be “distracted.” That is to say, to switch focus and cycle through a variety of thoughts. It also allows us to be more open to perceiving novelties; some of which are the hazards that a good driver can avoid because they have been perceived. It is analogous to how we can avoid repetitive stress injuries to body parts by not just doing the same motion continually.
For many people, having the radio on will generally enhance sustained attentiveness to driving precisely because it is a distraction of sorts. We need to come up with better ways to train people to be better drivers, and more attentive drivers. There are some activities that are unsafe distractions because of the time they take, and the cognitive demands they place on us. But adjusting the volume of the radio isn’t one of those. We probably need more, and better, information to know about some other activities. For example, is lifting a cup from the cup holder and sipping on the straw a dangerous distraction? Some have argued it is. I would argue that it is not; at least for most people that I’ve observed.
My point is that achieving better, more attentive drivers will require a very different strategy than it appears is being adopted around the country. “Buckle Up” was a good and effective slogan. “Don’t Drink and Drive” was good. “Don’t text while driving” is certainly good advice, even if it isn’t much of a slogan. “Don’t be distracted” isn’t going to accomplish anything.