(Helena, MT – Jackie Yamanaka, YPR) – Montana lawmakers are considering several bills this week to crack down on drunk driving. Recently there have been high profile deaths, including two cases of drunk drivers killing Montana Highway Patrol officers.

MT Attorney General Steve Bullock showing the House Judiciary Committee a picture of MHP Trooper Michael Haynes car after being hit by a drunk driver

Yellowstone County Attorney Scott Twito says one of the hardest cases he had to prosecute involved DUI. Chad Shipman was convicted of hitting road engineer Richard Dean Roebling who was working on Main Street in Billings. Shipman drove away from the scene.

At the time of Shipman’s arrest, his blood alcohol level was .29 percent or nearly four times the legal limit. “And I get emotional when I have to talk about this because it was one of the hardest cases I ever had to prosecute, “ Twito says. “Because I had to tell Roebling’s kids about Mr. Shipman. And his 14-year old son asked me, ‘Mr. Twito you knew this was going to happen, why didn’t you prevent it.’ I don’t want to have that conversation anymore.”

Twito says Shipman had a lengthy history of drunk driving and minor in-possession citations.

He says the signs pointed to what would eventually happen that early morning in 2004. Twito says intervention, as is spelled out in Senate Bill15 might have prevented that and other deaths. No one spoke against the bill.

According to a report by the Interim Law and Justice Committee, Montana had the highest alcohol-impaired fatality rate in the nation in 2008. It also found nearly 40 percent of all traffic fatalities involve an alcohol-impaired driver, the third highest percentage in the country.

The House Judiciary Committee also heard a slate of DUI-related bills. One, House Bill 106 seeks to create what’s known as the 24/7 sobriety project. Essentially what the program does is require participants to submit to twice-a-day breath tests or agree to related tests. A failure would result in immediate jail time.

Lewis and Clark County started a 24/7 pilot program about 7 months ago. County Attorney Leo Gallagher says at first he was skeptical it would work.

"I thought this was a gimmick when I first got involved in it,"  he says. “I didn’t think it would work. I’m a believer.”

House Bill 106 is sponsored by Representative Steve Lavin of Kalispell, a Montana Highway Patrol Sergeant. Lavin lost two colleagues to drunk drivers.

State Attorney General Steve Bullock spoke in support of both bills. He says under House Bill 106, participants pick up the tab for their breath tests, and so long as they comply, they’re out of jail and working, saving the taxpayers the cost of incarceration.

“It’s not going to be a be all, end all,” Bullock says. “We’re not going to walk out of this legislative session and all of the problems with drinking and driving are going to be solved. But it does provide a real opportunity to do something that we haven’t done.”

The 24/7 sobriety program was created in South Dakota in 2005 to deal with an exploding DUI problem.

Bill Mickelson is a former South Dakota Highway Patrolman and coordinator for the program. He says since the program’s inception over 17,000 people have been placed on twice a day testing.

“And we have a pass rate of showing up on time and blowing clean tests 99.3 percent of the time,” he says. Mickelson says numbers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indicate South Dakota is one of the national leaders in the reduction of alcohol related fatality and injury crashes since the program started, and recidivism for DUI offenses has gone down 50-percent.

Sixty of South Dakota’s 67 counties participate. Mickelson says those that don’t declined because there’s no agreement with the Indian Reservations in those counties, but he says talks are on-going.

The House and Senate Judiciary Committees did not immediately vote on the DUI bills presented.

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