Driving a vehicle while impaired with drugs or alcohol can lead to serious hazards on the road. As one of the most traffic-congested states in America, New Jersey experiences accidents from impaired driving every day. These accidents can be as deadly to the people around the driver as to the driver themselves.
Statistics indicate that 20 percent of all highway fatalities for children between the ages of 14 and 0 involved an alcohol-impaired driver in some way. In more than half of these deaths, the intoxicated person was driving the car that the child rode in.
The category of alcohol-related car accident constitutes approximately one-third of all highway mortality among adults. Although drugs besides alcohol are implicated in a substantial proportion of these crashes, alcohol remains the most common factor in intoxicated road deaths.
New Jersey law does not allow the refusal of breath tests for alcohol intoxication, and assiduous prosecutions of drunk driving are common. If someone is driving drunk on the roads of New Jersey and causes a traffic accident that leads to the injury or death of any other person, even someone who had been a passenger in their car, then it is likely that the state of New Jersey will indict and prosecute them for DUI. However, this is no bar to a lawsuit being filed against them by the people who were hurt in the accident. A personal injury lawsuit is a civil case and will be carried out in an entirely different court system than the criminal case, though evidence that is presented in one case may be used in the other. An attorney may be beneficial to those who wish to seek compensation for their injuries and put together a well-developed case.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Impaired Driving: Get the Facts“, January 04, 2015
