Drunk Boater Sentenced to 85 Years - Stanley Cameron - Brief Article

Boat/US Magazine, Jan, 2000

Florida has sent a message loud and clear that drunk boating will bring severe consequences. A Florida developer has been sentenced to 85 years in prison for a drunken boating accident that killed six people in a 1997 collision on the Intracoastal Waterway in Ft. Lauderdale.

Stanley Cameron's racing-type speed boat, estimated to be going 60 mph by witnesses along the ICW, rammed the victims' slow-moving cabin cruiser in the dark. His blood alcohol level was nearly three times the Florida legal limit of .08%.

Ironically, the group of conventioneers that were killed had hired a professional captain to take them out so they could socialize and have drinks. This was the deadliest boating accident on record in Florida, which had 98 boating fatalities in 1998, one-third of them alcohol-related.

Cameron, 58, was convicted of drunken-driving manslaughter and said he plans to appeal both the conviction and the sentence.

Every state except Iowa has a law written specifically on boating-while-intoxicated. The recent trend has been to lower the legal definition of intoxication from .10% to .08%. Some 20 states have already done so.