If anything good is to come from the DUI and wrong-way driving allegations against Kansas Senate Majority Leader Gene Suellentrop last week, perhaps it’s this: Senators may now be more focused on a bill boosting the penalties for fleeing and eluding police and for wrong-way driving.
And after the House passed HB 2093 by a loud and clear 124-0 vote, it would be blatant negligence for the Senate not to follow suit.
You don’t get too many no-brainers in the course of a legislative session. Senators need to act on this one.
While Suellentrop’s alleged 10-minute wrong-way drive on Interstate 70 — ending near the Capitol in Topeka in the wee hours March 16 — may have been more a result of fog than flight, he did lead Capitol Police on a five-minute chase, according to the Kansas Highway Patrol.
In any case, Suellentrop’s perilous misadventure — he easily could’ve killed someone, and reportedly did nearly hit one motorist — should awaken senators to the ominous offenses this bill seeks to punish and perhaps prevent.
The bill creates a new penalty for someone who, while eluding police, “willfully drives the wrong way into an opposing lane of travel on a divided highway” or “willfully departs the appropriate lane of travel into an opposing lane of travel on any roadway causing an evasive maneuver by another driver.” It also cites similarly driving through an intersection and causing evasive maneuvers or collisions during a police pursuit.
The added offense would be a Level 7 felony — which is notable, since other fleeing and eluding penalties are lesser felonies or even misdemeanors.
Importantly, the bill also would make fleeing police an automatic felony if done in a stolen vehicle. And it would create a minimum $500 penalty for it — whereas such charges are now often rolled into others, meaning there’s no added punishment.
The new law would come too little, too late for a number of victims of fleeing suspects just in the Kansas City area. Tragically, examples of the torment are too easily at hand:
Last Christmas Day, a stolen pickup fleeing police flew into a Kansas City, Kansas, intersection and crashed into a car, killing 89-year-old Mario and 85-year-old Delia Madruga. The beloved couple had survived separate escapes from Castro’s Cuba in the 1960s before raising children here — one of whom is a doctor in Florida and another a judge in Wyandotte County.
In 2013, a motorist fleeing an officer’s attempted traffic stop slammed into a vehicle in Prairie Village, killing 30-year-old dance instructor Tiffany Mogenson.
Much more needs to be done to enhance the prescribed penalties, and the actual punishments, for scofflaws who endanger all of us with their reckless attempts to elude police and escape accountability.
Speaking of which, Senator, you’re still trying to do the latter.
This bill is a good start. And it’s one the Kansas Senate can’t afford to pass up. Lives really are at stake.
— The Kansas City Star
