YOUR DRIVER'S RECORD WILL NOW HAUNT YOU!

State legislators here in Pennsylvania are changing PennDOT (PA Dept. of Transportation) regulations because of a Feb. 17th fatal crash involving a Perkiomen Valley school bus driver who had received a commercial driver’s license despite the fact that he had been involved in a previous fatal accident back in 1999. Heretofore, PennDOT regulations did not require a full driver history review and so the company that hired the driver was unaware of the exact nature of the driver’s 1999 accident, in which a 2 year-old girl was killed. Rep. Josh Shapiro, D-153, sent a letter to PennDOT officials calling on them to make all accident information available to school districts prior to hiring school bus drivers. State Rep. Bryan R. Lentz, D-161, pretty much agrees. So now (as of October 2010), crash information contained on a driver record will be expanded to include the “crash severity” on all driver records, regardless of the type of license the person has, to specify whether a crash resulted in fatalities, injuries or property damage.

I’m sorry, but I’ve got a problem with this. We are fast becoming a self-righteous intolerant and condemning society. What thirty-five, forty, fifty, or sixty-something year-old does not regret actions they’d committed in their twenties, let alone the shenanigans they pulled off in their teen years? There is a reason why we have a thing called “statute of limitations” in our legal system and there is good reason for having a Juvenile court system in lieu of the adult one. There is also good reason why your auto insurance company actuaries can only consider the most recent three years of your driving record respecting tickets and accidents to determine your premium. How many of us always make complete, 100% stops at every single stop sign we come to? Come on, all of us are guilty of doing “California Stops” at many stop signs where we expect and regularly see little traffic, no car coming. As a way of determining the cost of your next premium, would you like your insurance company to be able to go all the way back to your first year of driving and include every ticket, every fender-bender, and every error you’ve ever made while driving? Of course you wouldn’t! Time changes things. People change. We generally learn from our past mistakes. Yet here we are ranting and raving and giving full support to significant changes in the releasing of information about our driving records because of this one bus driver’s second fatal auto accident.

No! The past should not turn around and bite us. We should not be haunted by past accidents, if, that is, sufficient time has passed, showing that it is not a recurring, unaddressed problem (such as mounting DUI citations, e.g.). PennDOT will now offer drivers’ records that contain an individual’s entire driving history. This new policy is going to turn around and bite us. We will be sorry for it. The majority of drivers will not immediately and dramatically feel its effect but a steady flow of individuals will. A thirty five year old will not get a job he may very well have been highly qualified for, but for his driving record going back to when he was a seventeen year old driver; or a grandmother may end up receiving an underserved and quite severe sentencing with costly life-changing repercussions for a current accident because they unfairly and unjustifiably included the details of a previous accident she was involved in, twenty-five years before.

It begs the question: what is real justice? What does it mean to be held accountable, to pay one’s debt to society and be able to move on and put past mistakes behind one? No one is perfect. Yet we are moving more and more toward zero toleration for just about everything that we deem inappropriate, as if to say, be perfect or be condemned for life. Everyone requires time to grow and mature, to change for the better. Yet we are moving in the direction of not only keeping but actually using a lifetime of records to judge and condemn a person as if every past mistake must define that person for life. In the end, no one will escape the sticky incriminating web of past misdeeds, no one, not even the most law abiding and conscientious citizen. For we are all guilty of some misbehavior, some mistake in judgment, some error or miscalculation, or just plain ole foolishness of youth; and because of it, our character will be forever branded as unworthy of any respect or consideration, for the un-erased record will show how awful we really are! In this kind of environment we are safer to stand before God in judgment than our fellow citizens.