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License plate markings have proven effective in alerting police officers
to cars owned by DWI offenders. In some jurisdictions, special plates, stickers
or numbers are issued for a vehicle owned by a convicted drunk driver and
constitute probable cause for stopping the vehicle. The special plates or
stickers permit family members to continue to operate the vehicle that otherwise
might have been impounded or had its registration suspended or revoked.
Three states — Iowa, Minnesota and Ohio — issue special license plates to
permit the use of the vehicle by family members of convicted DWI offenders
(NHTSA January 2001). In Minnesota, upon arrest for DWI/DUI, license plates
are impounded and disposed of. Special license plates may be issued so the
vehicle can be operated by a family member with a valid driver’s license
or by offenders who have a limited (restricted) license. These plates contain
a special sequence of letters for drunk driving offenders. In 2000, Minnesota
passed a law making it a separate crime for an offender to drive a vehicle
without a special plate or for a person to knowingly allow a drunk driving
offender to drive a vehicle without a special plate. The penalty for violation
of this law is vehicle impoundment for one year.
A national survey of American adults conducted in 2001 found 50 percent
of respondents favored special identifying license plates for convicted
drunk drivers (Snow 2002). However, that wasn’t the case in Washington and
Oregon. Those states operated programs in which police officers, if they
stopped an unlicensed driver, could take possession of the driver’s vehicle
registration, provide a temporary registration certificate, and place a
striped tag, or zebra sticker, over the annual renewal sticker on the license
plate. The programs had little public support, and the zebra tag law was
allowed to expire in both states, but in Oregon, suspended license offenders
with zebra tags had fewer subsequent drunk driving violations than suspended
offenders who did not receive the special tags. The similar law in Washington
state was not applied to nearly as many drivers and did not appear to reduce
subsequent violations or crashes. |
