Getting away with murder

[unixronin]

This BBC article discusses a ruling in which a US judge has ruled that a woman who killed a man in a car crash must carry a photograph of her victim lying in his coffin.

Now, I don't personally have a problem with that.  I think it's a good idea.  But the headline barely hints at the full story ... read the article for that.  This woman was driving drunk, she was gabbing on her cell phone while she was driving drunk instead of focusing what little remained of her powers of concentration on her driving, and she hit another car head-on and destroyed an entire family.  She killed the husband outright, the wife is in an irreversible coma, and their child (yes, she was pregnant at the time of the accident) was delivered by C-section and is being raised by relatives.

For this, she gets away with 30 days in jail, house arrest, probation, and having to carry a photograph.  They didn't even revoke her goddamn license -- hell, they didn't even SUSPEND it.  This woman has conclusively proved her utter unfitness to operate a motor vehicle -- driving drunk wasn't good enough for her, gabbing on the phone instead of concentrating on her driving wasn't good enough, no, she had to do BOTH AT ONCE.

IMHO, this woman should have been charged with second-degree murder, and her driving privileges should be revoked for life just for starters.  The reason people do things like this so casually is because we keep letting them off with slaps on the wrist.

Comments

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

Hmm. You could make a case for that being manslaughter, I think.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

No. There have been way TOO MANY cases of drunk driving/driving with cellphone that have led to fatal accidents for these cases to manslaughter anymore. It is common public knowledge.

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

It was my understanding that vehicular manslaughter could get you serious jail time - I wasn't trying to minimize the offence.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I could go with manslaughter if she'd hit them while talking on her cellphone alone. Driving, talking on her cellphone, and drunk, all at the same time, IMHO is worth a second-degree murder charge. She made a conscious decision to get in her car and drive while drunk, and she then further compounded it by not even paying attention to her driving, with lethal results.

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

Yes, I see your point. I thought that the sentence for vehicular manslaughter was something like 10 years, but I'm assuming that varies from country to country, and quite possibly state to state.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

NPR this morning was talking about a case in China where a wealthy woman delibrately drove her new BMW into a peasant woman and killed her. The driver was enraged because the peasant woman and her husband were in her way and when she went past them she scratched the mirror of her shiny new BMW on their cart. The wealthy woman driver got off with nothing til the case became widely known via the Internet and the case is now being reopened and the driver will likely lose the shiny new BMW.

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

Look, they couldn't enforce the "don't drive while intoxicated law" nor the "don't kill other people" law, I'm hard pressed to imagine that the cops are going to show up at her doorstop and demand to see a photograph of a coffin.

She won't carry the picture, and she'll feel defiant and correct to ignore the court order.

Bah!