Same offence, different sentence: drink-drivers before Romania's 179 local courts

The driving ban: three in four get one. The court decides who

After a drink-driving conviction, on top of the prison term, the judge adds a complementary penalty: a ban on certain rights. Since June 2024 the law makes it mandatory, but the court chooses which rights to ban and for how long: up to five years for most, up to ten for the right to drive. It can ban driving (art. 66(1)(i) of the Penal Code) or only the right to stand for election and to hold public office (letters a and b).

The court's ban is not the same thing as the licence. After a final conviction the licence is annulled anyway (Road Code, art. 114) and the driving test must be taken again. The court's ban is a separate penalty: while it lasts, the right to drive is forbidden.

In 5,551 rulings for drivers with no repeat-offence finding and no other offence that state the complementary penalty, driving was banned in 75% of cases (76% without the courts that rarely include the complementary penalty in their summaries). The average hides two practices. In Oradea local court, four of 78 (5%): the court almost always bans public office only. In Baia Mare local court, 142 of 142 (100%). Of the 65 courts with at least 30 such rulings, 35 are above the national rate and 19 below it, with a 95% confidence interval that excludes the average.

The order of the courts holds from one year to the next: the correlation between 2025 and 2026 is 0.90, across 40 courts.

How long: one year in some towns, two or three in others

When they ban driving, courts almost always choose a round number of years: one year in 47% of cases, exactly two years in 35%, three years or more in 12%; the rest are in-between lengths. Here too the court matters. Bans of two years or more: in Ineu, one of 32; in Pitești, 41 of 45.

Length of the driving ban in 4,087 comparable rulings that impose one and state its length.

June 2024: the fine and the postponed penalty disappeared

Law 172/2024, in force from 3 June 2024, removed the criminal fine as a penalty for drink-driving and barred postponing the penalty. For earlier offences courts still apply the more lenient law, so the change shows by the date of the offence, not the date of the trial.

For offences committed in January–May 2024, 37% of the 1,115 rulings that state the offence date ended with a fine or a postponed penalty. For offences from July 2024 on: seven of 2,111. Of the rulings for offences after June 2024, 98% are suspended prison terms with probation.

Share of rulings ending in a fine or a postponed penalty, by month of the offence (rulings that state the offence date).

Before June 2024: a fine in some courts, a suspended prison term in others

For offences before 3 June 2024, the law allowed the full range: a fine, a postponed penalty, a waiver of the penalty (guilt is found but no penalty is imposed), a suspended or an immediate prison term. For the driver the difference is large. A postponed penalty means that if two years pass without trouble, no penalty is ever applied. A suspended sentence is a prison conviction, with two to four years of probation and community work.

Of 9,413 comparable rulings of this kind, 41% ended without a prison sentence (a fine, a postponement or a waiver). In Medgidia: three of 55. In Cornetu: 67 of 81.

Immediate prison: rare, and almost only when the ruling also involves other offences or convictions

Of 21,866 rulings with a penalty for drink- or drug-driving (2,206 of them for drugs), 866 (4.0%) were to immediate prison. In 85% of them the ruling finds a repeat offence, revokes an earlier suspended or postponed sentence, or also judges other offences. For drivers with no such mention in the ruling, immediate prison came up 112 times in 16,528 cases (0.7%).

The median prison term for those who admit the offence is 12 months for offences after June 2024 and 14 months for earlier ones.

Appeals do not erase the differences

Local-court rulings can be appealed to the courts of appeal. Of the 9,413 comparable old-law rulings, 20% were appealed; in 58% of the appeals found, the defendant is among the appellants. The appeal decisions were read by the program from their summaries, without a manual check. Recomputed with the appeal outcome, the gap between courts stays almost the same: the spread for the driving ban is 1.33 before appeal and 1.33 after, and for sentences without prison 0.69 and 0.69.

Not every case reaches a trial. A prosecutor can waive prosecution, and a judge confirms the waiver. The portal shows 818 such confirmations for drink-driving, 3.6% of the cases that reached a judge. If prosecutors mostly dropped the light cases, courts in their counties would receive the more serious ones and look harsher. The test set in advance did not flag this: in counties with more waivers, courts ban driving slightly less often (correlation -0.32) and more often avoid a prison sentence (correlation 0.43), both below the 0.5 threshold. Selection within a county cannot be ruled out with these data.

One case, from the roadside stop to the appeal decision

A real case, without names or court: a driver who admitted the offence, tried under the new law. The case reached the local court 116 days after the offence; the sentence came on day 264: a suspended prison term and a three-year driving ban. An appeal followed, and the court of appeal decided on day 348.

What these data do not show

• Blood alcohol. The public summaries of rulings almost never state how much alcohol the driver had: only 24 of 16,528 comparable rulings do. A court that sees more very drunk drivers may rightly be harsher. The comparison allows for repeat offences, other offences, the guilty plea and the offence date, but not for the alcohol level.
• Criminal record. "No repeat-offence finding" means the ruling does not find recidivism. A driver may have earlier convictions that do not amount to recidivism in law.
• What prosecutors send. Some cases end at the prosecutor's office with a waiver of prosecution. Only those confirmed by a judge appear on the portal.
• New-law rulings. Many summaries do not state the offence date. The driving-ban measures pool new-law and undated rulings, allowing for the difference. In Oradea, none of the 78 comparable rulings states the offence date; in Baia Mare, 54 of 142 do, all after June 2024.
• The summary, not the judgment. The data come from the summary of the operative part published on the portal. Some courts leave the complementary penalty out of the summary; there the driving ban cannot be read, and the court is shown separately.
• The licence is annulled anyway. Separately from the ruling, after a final drink-driving conviction the licence is annulled (Road Code, Emergency Ordinance 195/2002, art. 114), and the driving test can be retaken once one of the situations listed in law applies (art. 24(6)). The court's ban is a separate penalty: while it lasts, the right to drive is forbidden. These data do not measure how long someone is left without a licence in total.
• Not legal advice. The data show what courts decided, not what you will get. For your own case, talk to a lawyer.

Method

All cases with the object 'driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol or other substances (art. 336 Penal Code)' at Romania's 179 local courts were downloaded from the courts portal's public service, quarter by quarter, registered between December 2023 and October 2026: 33,522 cases. The portal does not return older cases. Names were removed at download; case numbers were not kept.

For each case a program read the operative part of the first ruling on the merits: type of sentence, guilty plea, repeat offence, revocation of an earlier sentence, other offences, the paragraph, the length of the prison term and of the driving ban, the offence date. Comparisons use only single-defendant rulings with a penalty under paragraph 1 (alcohol), with no repeat offence, revocation or other offence: 16,528 cases.

External benchmarks. The police reported 12,183 offences committed under the influence of alcohol and 4,183 under other substances in 2024; 11,665 and 3,858 in 2025. The local courts registered 12,581 cases for the same offence (art. 336, alcohol and other substances) in 2024 and 10,502 in 2025. The numbers count different things (offences recorded, cases reaching court, different years of offence and trial), so they are an order-of-magnitude benchmark, not a completeness check.

A court rate is published from 10 cases up; the number of cases is always published. Intervals are Wilson, 95%. The spread between courts is a Paule–Mandel estimate with a Q-profile interval (the pre-registered test also reports the DerSimonian–Laird estimate, in the results file); the court-effect model is a Bayesian logistic regression (statsmodels).

Part of the series "Romanian justice, court by court": protection orders at every local court.

The data, for anyone who wants to reuse them

The file holds, for each local court, every number on this page, plus confidence intervals. Licence CC BY 4.0: reuse it with credit. Each column is described in the data dictionary.

Download the court-level data (CSV) Data dictionary

https://mariuscomper.uk/alcool-la-volan-pedeapsa/date/alcool-la-volan-pe-judecatorii.csv

Sources

• Romania's courts portal, public query service (portalquery.just.ro), cases with the object 'driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol or other substances (art. 336 Penal Code)', accessed 24 October 2026
• Romanian Penal Code, art. 336, art. 66–68, art. 80–83, art. 91 (Law 286/2009, consolidated text)
• Law 172/2024, Official Gazette no. 510 of 31 May 2024, in force from 3 June 2024
• Road Code (Emergency Ordinance 195/2002), art. 24 and art. 114, consolidated text
• Romanian Police (IGPR), 2025 road-safety balance, 18 January 2026 (Agerpres)
• Romanian Police (IGPR), 2024 balance, 1 March 2025 (Agerpres)
• Public Ministry (prosecution service), 2024 activity report, table 7 (defendants sent to trial for road-traffic offences)
• Judicial Inspectorate, thematic inspection of offences under the influence of banned substances (June 2024), as reported by TVR Info