On a Monday afternoon in September 2007, Alexandra Tenneriello, 19, was sitting with her best friend in the rear of a white Mitsubishi Lancer when it drifted across the center line and slammed into an oncoming car near the Little League field in Jackson Township, Ocean County.
Of the Lancer's four occupants, only the 17-year-old driver survived. A blood test revealed that she had marijuana in her system, though a drug expert brought in after the crash was unable to determine whether she had been impaired. The passengers in the other car escaped serious injury.
The teenager pleaded guilty in juvenile court to vehicular homicide, but charges of driving under the influence were dropped.
Last month, New Jersey Assemblyman Ron Dancer (R., Ocean) introduced a measure he calls "Alexandra's Law" - named after the Jackson teenager - that he hopes will close the legal loophole involving "drugged driving."
"It is illegal to possess drugs, but there is nothing in the law defining how much drugs in someone's system would impair driving," Dancer said. "This bill would make it crystal clear that any amount is too much."
Under the proposed legislation, any "detectable amount" of an illegal drug found in a state police blood test would result in a fine of $300 to $500 and loss of the driver's license for two years.
Dancer said he expected the bill to be the subject of committee hearings in the lame-duck legislative session that begins today.
The bill was spearheaded by Ocean County Prosecutor Maureen Lynch Ford, whose experience with the Jackson case illustrated the difficulty in pressing drugged-driving charges in New Jersey. Without a statutory blood-content threshold, such as the 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level, prosecutors could not prove that a driver was likely to have been under the influence.
The differing consequences for driving under the influence of alcohol and driving while drugged are most apparent for drivers under 21, who can lose their license if found to have a blood-alcohol level of more than 0.01 percent, Ford said.
It's an "anomaly in the law," she said, "that somebody could be exposed to the presumption of driving under the influence by having even trace amounts of alcohol in their system but not if that person had trace amounts of an illegal substance."
Eighteen states have enacted measures related to drugged driving, according to the Governor's Highway Safety Association.
Dancer's bill would base charges on the result of blood tests, which reveal active amounts of a drug in a person's body, said Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws. Some states use urine tests, which he said can show metabolized marijuana that the person smoked months before.
"There's a much more narrow window of detection when you're looking in the blood," Armentano said.
He said he would like the New Jersey law to be similar to one that took effect in Pennsylvania in 2003. Lawmakers there deferred to state health officials to set the drug level they felt was capable of causing impairment.
The result was a law that charges drivers who have 5 nanograms per milliliter of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, rather than the minimum detectable level - normally around 2 nanograms - set by many states with zero-tolerance laws, he said.
"It's the only state I'm aware of that actually approached this subject from a scientific standpoint," Armentano said.
Cheryl Tenneriello, Alexandra's mother, said she didn't want New Jersey's law to convict unimpaired drivers with drugs in their system from a week earlier.
She wanted to ensure that no parent was left wondering if the motorist who killed his or her child should have faced drugged-driving charges.
"There's no number to go by," she said. "We wanted to do something to prevent this from happening anymore."
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