When Tina Turcotte died in July 2005, her death caused an outrage that echoed across the state. The 40-year-old Scarborough woman was killed when a truck driver didn’t heed slowing traffic on Interstate 95 in Hallowell and slammed into the rear of her car, essentially crushing her vehicle between his cab and another truck in front of her.

She held on for two days before succumbing to her injuries, yet her death has resonated in the years since.

It wasn’t the accident or even her death itself that drew the outrage – hundreds of fatalities from motor vehicle accidents sadly occur every year on Maine’s roads. It was the fact that the truck driver, Scott Hewitt of Caribou, had a driving record that included 63 convictions, 22 license suspensions and a previous fatality.

He shouldn’t have been driving. Period.

In response, Maine’s Legislature unanimously passed L.D. 1906, An Act to Safeguard Maine’s Highways, in 2006. Called “Tina’s Law” in her honor, the bill strengthened Maine’s operating after suspension-revocation violations and habitual offender laws. It also created two new motor vehicle crimes related to causing serious bodily injury or death while driving with a suspended or revoked license, and aggravated operating after habitual offender revocation.

The theory back then – as it should still be today – is if you deter someone from driving after they lose their license and codify more severe penalties if they do, it would keep habitual offenders off the roads and cut down the associated risk they pose to others.

One of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, who is actually serving again in Maine’s Senate, said in 2006 that the law was needed because Hewitt would have been classified as a habitual offender and likely wouldn’t have been on the road that summer had Tina’s Law been on the books.

“I believe there are accidents out there waiting to happen if we don’t change the law and change people’s attitudes,” Diamond told the media back then. “What we’ve done is we’ve taught people that in Maine it’s OK to drive with a suspended license … that driving while suspended is not a big deal.”

As a former law enforcement officer myself, I couldn’t agree more. And the potency of such laws resurfaced in 2013 when a Saco father was killed and his 17-month-old son critically injured in Biddeford while bicycling. The driver, David Labonte of Biddeford, had four operating under the influence convictions on his record when he crashed into the family, also injuring the boy’s mother. He was serving a 10-year sentence when he died in 2020.

And just last month a Woodstock man whose license should have been suspended following a guilty plea last year for vehicular manslaughter critically injured a Portland woman after leading police on a chase in Oxford County. Ethan Rioux-Poulios’ plea was the result of yet another police chase in 2019 that killed John Pikiell, 71, of Norway. Two police chases, both ending in injury or death – that’s what laws like Tina’s Law are meant to prevent.

Yet if a bill proposed by Democrats is passed, it would undo what the previous Legislature intended to be both a stiff deterrence and an even stiffer penalty if you’re caught driving without a license, and do nothing to drivers like Rioux-Poulios even if his license had been suspended properly.

Through L.D. 1604, Democrats want to move certain Class E wildlife and traffic criminal offenses to civil infractions. While some of the bill helps a seriously backlogged judicial system, it waters down the classification of habitual offenders while ignoring those like Rioux-Poulios who pose just as much risk because of their poor, reckless and, in his case, criminal driving behavior.

In essence, Democrats will be reversing something they actually got right 16 years ago. The sad part for me is that if her life hadn’t been taken so unnecessarily, I wonder what Tina Turcotte would have thought.

 

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