The Heidgen jury, which took five days to reach its verdict, seems to have had difficulty confronting these questions. In a way, the confrontation was forced on them — in part by a newly installed district attorney elected on an anti-drunken driving platform and in part by a grieving mother.

The facts of the case were never in dispute: Mr. Heidgen, an insurance salesman returning home from a party, was very drunk, his blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit. He was driving the wrong way on a highway when he plowed head-on into the limousine carrying the family of Neil and Jennifer Flynn home from a wedding. He killed the chauffeur, Stanley Rabinowitz, and Katie Flynn, 7.

The girl’s mother used no euphemisms in describing the accident. “As I crawled out of the car, the only thing that was left of Kate was her head,” Mrs. Flynn, 36, said two days after the crash. “And I took her, just like that, and sat on the side of the Meadowbrook and watched at the horrendousness going on around me. I want everybody to know that.”

There is no official count of how many times drunken drivers involved in fatal accidents have been charged or convicted of murder. But of the more than 13,000 alcohol-related driving deaths last year in the United States, prosecutors are aware of only a few murder cases each in Texas, California and New York. So there seems to be at least a bit of ambivalence about whether drunken drivers who kill people should be subject to the same legal penalties as gunmen who kill people.

“There is a certain psychological barrier there,” said Marcia Cunningham, director of the National Traffic Law Center, an agency of the National District Attorneys Association, in Alexandria, Va. Americans spend an enormous amount of time in their cars, she noted, and at one time or other just about everyone has had too much to drink. “The combination of these two familiar activities makes for a certain, what have you, difficulty with the word ‘murder.’ ”