Komoroski receives a rare sentence for the drunken murder of his bride

People were understandably surprised when Jamie Lee Komoroski was sentenced to 25 years in prison for crashing her car into a golf cart and killing a bride while leaving her Folly Beach wedding reception last year.

As the Post and Courier’s Kailey Cota reports, only about 2 percent of SC defendants have received the maximum sentence for misdemeanor drunk driving with death since 2015; Most often, judges sentenced people to six to ten years in prison.

Perhaps we would be less surprised if, instead of using the sterile “crime of drunk driving with death,” we described the crime as what it is: drunken murder. It would have been the same if a drunk had taken a gun and shot the bride and injured her husband and two other new parents as they chased the couple from the reception.

Perhaps we would be even less surprised if, instead of listening to criminal defense lawyers talk about the difficulty of getting judges to be “fair” to drunken killers – because Mothers Against Alcohol at flying are such a powerful force and judges are worried about the legislature. won’t re-elect them if they don’t throw the book at notorious DUI killers – we paid more attention to friends and family whose loved ones were ripped away from them in an instant because someone did the deliberate choice. I decided to go out drinking without making arrangements to get home safely, jumped from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker, then tried to drive home with a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit.

Perhaps we would also be less surprised if our judges were willing to impose the maximum sentence more than 2% of the time. That is, if judges also viewed defendants as “drunken killers” rather than near-victims themselves – people who had an “accident” whose consequences they will have to live with for the rest of their lives. We are convinced that many killers regret their actions, but there is nothing accidental about getting drunk and then driving a car, and these killers are no more victims than people who deliberately kill innocent people.

And in fact, while 25 years was the maximum sentence allowed by SC law for the death of Samantha Miller, Ms. Komoroski did not receive the maximum sentence for her crimes: Judge Deadra Jefferson allowed her to serve two sentences of 15 years for felony DUI with great rigor. for bodily injury and 10 years in prison for reckless homicide, rather than serving all four sentences consecutively, as she could have done.

It’s not surprising that harsh sentences for drunken killers are so rare — or that we so often need to convict drunken killers — given how little seriously lawmakers take drunk driving.

If our drunk driving law made it easier for police officers to arrest and prosecutors to prosecute ordinary drivers under the influence, drunk drivers would likely be arrested and convicted much earlier in their drunk driving careers. drunkenness. If we had tougher penalties and clearer preventative measures against drinking and driving, it would be more likely that they would get the message and regularly arrange for someone else to drive them home or, better again, let them get drunk at home rather than getting drunk. in public.

It’s no coincidence that South Carolina has the highest per capita death rate from drunk driving in the country. This is a direct result of the weakness of our drunk driving law and the legislative attitude towards drunk driving that permeates the criminal justice system and almost all entire culture of our state.

Criminal defense attorneys, inside and outside the Legislature, are working overtime to twist our laws so that they protect drunk drivers rather than the public.

Parliament passed a law, which took effect this summer, that requires more people convicted of driving under the influence to place a device on their vehicle that prevents the ignition from being turned on if it detects alcohol in their body.

But lawyer-lawmakers continue to block efforts to end a workaround that invites people to refuse to take a breathalyzer test or even submit to a field sobriety test, increasing the already long odds that they are condemned and must install contact. -locking device.

They have also blocked efforts to reform parts of the DUI law that discourage police from even trying to enforce it, leading to the culture of lawlessness we see reflected in all of our related state rankings to the DUI.

We don’t like filling our prisons, but Parliament clearly needs to do something to make it clear that drink-driving is a serious crime – whether that means ticketing a police officer who stops a driver in train to weave even if a conviction is unlikely or a bride taken to the morgue in her wedding dress. In the meantime, we hope Jamie Lee Komoroski’s surprisingly apt line scares at least a few people into handing over the keys when they go out for drinks.

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