The case of Charles A. Cotton was handled with assembly-line speed; just one of 279 traffic cases jamming the July 1 docket.
Cotton pleaded guilty to driving after his license had been suspended – for the 10th time.
He was fined $100. Five minutes later, Cotton sauntered up to a Honda Civic parked outside the Roanoke courthouse. He plucked a parking ticket from the windshield and paid it after haggling briefly with the attendant.
And then he drove away.
People like Cotton are on the road every day. Last year, 2,487 people were charged in Roanoke with driving on suspended licenses. Statewide, the Department of Motor Vehicles estimates there are 664,517 suspended drivers — 13 percent of Virginia’s driving population.
If suspended drivers had stayed off the roads of the Roanoke region for the past nine months, at least five people still would be alive today:
Dustin Washburn, 9, of Roanoke County. He was killed when John Stover, his license restricted for a drunken-driving charge, allegedly smashed into the car driven by Dustin’s mother while racing on Peters Creek Road in Roanoke County.
Geoffrey Pelton, 20, of Roanoke County. Gregory Kinzie, 20, of Roanoke. Both died because Stanley Brooks was flying down Roanoke’s Roy Webber Expressway, drunk, when his Mustang went airborne and plowed into oncoming traffic. Brooks, banned from the roads for 10 years because of his driving record, also was killed.
Shannon Doss, 5, of Bassett. She was killed when her father, drunk and driving in violation of a court order, took a curve too fast and ran off U.S. 220 in Henry County. Jimmy Doss pleaded guilty to manslaughter earlier this month.
Taking away someone’s privilege to drive is a popular punishment in Virginia; a sanction imposed on drunken drivers and drug dealers as quickly as it is on people who don’t pay fines for expired inspection stickers or burned-out taillights.
Sheer numbers have made the law almost impossible to enforce. And when someone is charged with driving on a suspended license, it’s equally difficult for the system to decide what to do next.
Hundreds of drivers like Cotton, whose license was suspended because he didn’t pay court fines, don’t appear to be a threat to society. “I drive the speed limit, and I’ve never been charged with drinking and driving, ” he said.
But how can the system keep the other suspended drivers, the ones like John Stover, Stanley Brooks and Jimmy Doss, off the roads before the next victim dies?
There is no way – “short of incarcerating them all forever, ” said Henry County Commonwealth’s Attorney Bob Bushnell.
With Virginia’s jails and prisons overflowing, authorities are being forced to rethink how to deal with illegal drivers. Driving on a suspended license once carried a mandatory jail sentence, a punishment now reserved for the most serious offenders as caseloads soar.
“There’s no way we can put all these people in jail, ” said Roanoke General District Judge Julian Raney, whose courtroom was packed with 62 other suspended drivers the morning Cotton drove away from court.
Such brash defiance of the law is routine to courthouse regulars.
“It’s not that we’ve given up on it,” Raney said, “but we have to do something else to stop the vicious cycle.”
Perhaps the most daunting challenge is to distinguish between the potential killers and the scofflaws – the drivers who are suspended not for drunken or reckless driving, but for failing to pay fines on less serious charges.
“The vast majority of suspended drivers do not constitute a danger on the road, ” said Roanoke Commonwealth’s Attorney Donald Caldwell. “The exception is usually your tragedy.”
But it is the tragedies that have citizens demanding solutions from an overburdened criminal justice system.
“The system is just overwhelmed, ” said Jim Phipps, director of the Roanoke Valley’s Court-Community Corrections Program. “The rivets are popping out, and people are still expecting wonders.”
`It’s a joke’
In the traffic division of the Roanoke Police Department, Lt. Ramey Bower has taken to sticking pins in a city map at each spot where a motorist was arrested for driving on a suspended license.
With one of every three traffic tickets citing such a violation, the map is fast becoming a giant pincushion.
In the past month, city police have charged 216 people with driving on suspended licenses – about eight a day.
To many police officers and victims, the solution is simple: tougher punishment. “Something is not getting their attention when they get to court, ” Bower said.
“To me it’s a joke, ” said John Markey of People Against Impaired Drivers in Roanoke. “We don’t really need any more laws. What we need are some judges who will apply the laws already on the books.”
To which Phipps responds:
“It’s one thing for the public to scream at the judges and prosecutors and demand their proverbial pound of flesh. But on the other hand, the taxpayers are railing against any tax increase or bond issues to give the system the resources it needs.”
There are less costly alternatives to building more jails: seizing the cars of illegal drivers, using ignition interlocks, labeling the license plates of suspended motorists.
But for every possible solution, there seems to be a loophole that illegal drivers can maneuver. “You have some people who will just never learn, ” Caldwell said.
How to predict?
Shawn Martin has been locked up now for two months, rubbing shoulders with inmates accused of drug dealing, rape and theft.
What did Martin do to put him in the company of his fourth-floor pod in the Roanoke City Jail? He drove his car – once to buy diapers for his 1-year-old, another time to hunt for a job.
“I wasn’t out there drinking and partying, I was just taking care of my family’s needs, ” Martin said. “I don’t feel like I’m a threat to anybody.”
But the law considers him one. Martin is a habitual offender, someone with a driving record so bad – in his case, a DUI and two convictions of driving on suspended license – that he has been banned from the roads for 10 years.
He faces a mandatory sentence of one to five years under one of Virginia’s toughest sentencing laws. But with 32,000 habitual offenders statewide, and 1,200 of them in prison, that is now changing.
By reducing the punishment for “nondangerous” habitual offenders in an effort to reduce prison overcrowding, the General Assembly at its last sessionessentially acknowledged that the “lock ’em up” philosophy doesn’t always work.
Now, the emphasis has shifted to identifying the potentially dangerous drivers, a task that is nearly impossible – until it’s too late.
Martin has killed no one.
On paper, though, his driving record is worse than that of Stanley Brooks. One month before he killed two people, Brooks was declared a habitual offender solely for driving on a license that was suspended for financial reasons. He had no convictions of drunken or reckless driving – nothing to raise a red flag.
“Unless people walk into court with a sign on their forehead that says: `The next accident I’m in will kill somebody, ‘ there’s no way the system can predict, ” Bushnell said.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about one in nine drivers nationwide involved in fatal crashes in 1991 did not have a valid license.
Yet some say hundreds of other suspended drivers are the most cautious motorists on the roads – albeit for selfish reasons.
“When you have to worry about being pulled over and going to jail, you’re going to be a lot more careful, ” Martin said.
While public outcry over recent deaths has prompted the House Courts of Justice Committee to schedule a public hearing in Roanoke Tuesday, the number of alcohol-related accidents in the Roanoke Valley actually has dropped 12 percent in the past five years.
And of 16 people charged with manslaughter in traffic deaths in the Roanoke and New River Valley region since 1990, all but three held valid driver’s licenses.
“Statistically, they are exceptions, ” Phipps said of the suspended drivers who kill. “But personally, we can’t accept that kind of loss on our highways.”
Personal loss is something John A. Feldenzer knows all too well. He is the doctor who had to tell Dustin Washburn’s parents their 9-year-old son was brain dead.
“How do you explain that to Mrs. Washburn, who took her kid out for a candy bar and loses him?” he said.
“How do you explain jail overcrowding to her? If that guy had been in jail, she might still have a son.”
One of the greatest frustrations with suspended drivers who keep driving – with fatal consequences or not – is that they have had some contact with the system.
And it didn’t work.
“Any time that something like this happens, ” Judge Raney said of the two most recent fatal accidents, “we think about what we could have done differently.”
Staff writer Ron Brown contributed to this report.