Published: November 03, 2009 12:19 am      

GUEST EDITORIAL: Get serious about drunken driving

Among the millions of drivers on New York’s roads today, there will be drunks. They will endanger countless numbers of people. Some they will maim. Some they will kill.

And, among these drunks, there will be those who, in gross and unconscionable irresponsibility, take to the wheel with young children as their passengers.

They must be stopped.

They must be deterred from subjecting youngsters who are too young to understand and too powerless to protect themselves from the high risk of death.

They must be punished — and punished severely — for the very act of pulling into traffic bombed, with babies on board.

Before one more child is injured, before one more child is killed, the New York State Legislature must pass Leandra’s Law.

Leandra Rosado was the 11-year-old girl who died in a fiery crash on the Henry Hudson Parkway two weeks ago. Six more children were seriously injured. At the wheel was a woman who had spent the night drinking cognac at a birthday party and who was so drunk she asked her school-age charges to play a guessing game of whether they would make it home without crashing.

They didn’t. At almost 70 mph, the station wagon swerved, went airborne, rolled and crashed into a tree, ejecting three kids.

Leandra was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Hospital, her death attributed to blunt-force injuries to the head and torso.

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has indicted driver Carmen Huertas on manslaughter charges. She faces 15 years. Had police pulled Huertas over before the accident, the max — rarely given to a first offender — would have been a year.

Driving while intoxicated is but a misdemeanor in New York because this state refuses to get serious about drunken driving. Now it must, starting with cases where reckless adults endanger helpless children. In and of itself, that must become a felony.

Legislation has been pending to do so since shortly after the last horrific incident in which a drunk killed children who were passengers. That was the case in which wrong-way driver Diane Schuler took the lives of her young daughter, three nieces and three men in another car, as well her own, on the Taconic State Parkway. It happened in July and drew worldwide attention.

Gov. Paterson and Long Island Sen. Charles Fuschillo responded with nearly identical proposals to make it a felony to get behind the wheel drunk if there is a child under 16 in the car. The punishment would be imprisonment for up to four years, with ascending sentences if the young passenger were injured or killed.

This common-sense, lifesaving legislation has gotten lost in the confusion of Albany. But now, others such as Mayor Bloomberg, city Controller William Thompson, Sen. Martin Dilan and Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg are getting on board.

A true citizen champion, Leandra’s father, Lenny Rosado, has stepped forward to fight for passage. Let us all join his noble battle. The Legislature must act.

— The New York Daily News