Bill to strengthen DUI laws in SC could reach governor soon

COLUMBIA, S.C. (WCSC) – Almost two dozen different states have extra folks than South Carolina, however lately, simply seven states had extra felony DUI deaths.

A push to strengthen state DUI legislation is a private combat for therefore many South Carolina households, together with one girl who almost misplaced her life 5 years in the past Friday.

On the morning Might 5, 2018, Megan Diffee was driving alongside a Lexington County freeway, headed to a soccer sport, when a driver excessive on cocaine and different medicine hit her head-on at 60 miles per hour.

Two seconds later, one other automobile slammed into Diffee’s, going 45.

“My husband was two automobiles behind me, and he might see the entire thing,” Diffee mentioned.

“It gave the impression of a billion soda cans being squashed on the similar time,” her husband, Brandon, recalled.

Diffee was unconscious inside her crushed automobile, having suffered a traumatic mind harm and round two dozen damaged bones.

She doesn’t bear in mind something till almost a month after the crash.

“And I’m actually grateful for that as a result of I’ve heard tales of what occurred and what was occurring, and it’s nothing that I care to recollect,” she mentioned.

As she recovered, Diffee discovered about efforts to make it tougher for impaired drivers to get behind the wheel in South Carolina.

Since then, she has advocated alongside organizations like Moms Towards Drunk Driving in help of that laws, which has fallen in need of turning into legislation lately.

“It’s actually irritating,” Diffee mentioned. “The extra you study, the extra infuriating it’s to know, you realize, what’s the holdup? It looks as if a commonsense invoice.”

However that would quickly change.

Beneath present state legislation, drivers could be required to briefly use an ignition interlock machine if they’ve a number of DUI convictions or one conviction with a blood alcohol focus of 0.15, almost twice the authorized restrict.

Drivers must blow into the machine, and their automobile received’t begin if they’re intoxicated.

“We all know that final yr in South Carolina, 22,000 instances, folks tried to begin their automobile with alcohol of their system, and the machine labored and stopped the automobile from beginning,” Senate Minority Chief Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, mentioned.

Hutto is the lead sponsor of S.36, which might briefly impose an ignition interlock requirement on all first convictions for DUI and pre-convictions.

“That’s the most important motive why that is wanted is as a result of when you’re getting caught, you’ve finished it earlier than, and also you’re not afraid of doing it,” Brandon Diffee mentioned.

This invoice has handed each the state Senate, and earlier this week, the Home of Representatives, the place it had died in earlier years.

There are some slight variations between the 2 payments, nonetheless, so lawmakers might want to work out a compromise despatched to the governor.

“It should actually save lives,” Moms Towards Drunk Driving Victims Providers Supervisor Kimberly Cockrell mentioned. “We perceive they should go to work, decide up their kids, so because of this the interlock is so necessary. It not solely retains them protected and people of their automobile protected, however it could additionally defend the remainder of the residents of the state.”

Diffee testified in help of the invoice at a listening to this yr, getting up to now 5 years later after too many surgical procedures to depend — “All the pieces’s been operated on,” she mentioned.

Her life is endlessly modified, although it took years to confess.

“I’m not going to have the ability to return to my job. I’m not going to find a way run once more, and accepting that takes a extremely very long time,” she mentioned.

Now she and Brandon are excited to welcome their first youngster quickly, a boy, a child they have been not sure they may ever have after the crash.

However the wreck nonetheless casts worry and worries over that pleasure.

“I fear about not having the ability to chase after a child who’s simply taking part in round and never having the ability to catch them, not having the ability to decide him up off the bottom,” Diffee mentioned.

The Diffees say the driving force who did this to them — who’s at the moment in jail, serving a 15-year sentence for felony DUI with nice bodily harm — and anybody else who will get behind the wheel intoxicated or impaired are egocentric.

“Take into consideration placing your life in danger, and also you don’t know who you’re going to hit,” Diffee mentioned.

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