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Like the article says, "Criminal law punishes bad intentions and bad acts, not traffic accidents.” Accidents happen. There is no reason to ruin two lives inste

Like the article says, "Criminal law punishes bad intentions and bad acts, not traffic accidents.” Accidents happen. There is no reason to ruin two lives instead of one, by harshly punishing another person. If driver A takes the .002% chance they'll cause an accident while driving on the phone and drive B takes the same .002% chance, it makes no sense to throw B in jail and let A off with a 50 dollar fine just because driver B actually hit someone. Drive B should be liable for all medical costs and lost income. But society gains nothing by punishing her. It's just a way to make us all feel more control. Accidents only happen to bad criminals! Good folks like us would never have an accident!

serf 9y ago
"Like the article says, "Criminal law punishes bad intentions and bad acts, not traffic accidents.” Well, the article is quoting the attorney of the person who ran over a cyclist, so it's fairly narrow in scope. The law finds accidents worthy of punishment everywhere, everyday -- regardless of provable ill will. But I absolutely agree with what you've said. There is little to gain by punishing the perpetrator of an accident. The problem arises when the truly guilty use the facade of accident to commit crimes that they want to commit.
- grey 9y ago
  A while ago it was suggested to me to mentally translate "accident" to "collision" in context of cars hitting cyclists. Most collisions with cyclists are easily avoidable, and caused by negligence, impatience or ignorance. Treating collisions as unavoidable, unintentional mistakes relieves drivers of a lot of the inherent responsibility of controlling a vehicle. Watch the road. Respect other users of the road. Be patient, safe, and focused.
notauser 9y ago
By harshly punishing drivers you provide a deterrent against the next accident. It makes sure that drivers have both an atruistic reason (preventing an accident) and selfish reason (preventing their license being revoked) to pay attention. Also - banning a driver isn't really a punishment as they'll get to discover how much fun it is to cycle to work and gain the life-long benefits of exercise and a friendly, social, activity :-)
yardie 9y ago
I believe the punishment should act as a deterrent. In the same vein that DUI laws will strip you of driving privileges, extract high fines, and possibly jail. And it's in the same frame of thought, exercising poor judgement. Being inattentive, with a 2.5-ton vehicle, at 10m/s should be treated as being over 0.08% BAC. Yet, only one of them is treated as a criminal violation.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>It makes no sense to throw B in jail and let A off with a 50 dollar fine just because driver B actually hit someone. Drive B should be liable for all medical costs and lost income. Users have the ability to think for themselves. Laws are not code. Nobody with a brain expects them all to be followed all the time (i.e. speed limit). If decide to talk on the phone at a dumb time and cause an accident you certainly deserve more punishment than the person who happens to drive by a bored cop while talking on the phone on a mostly empty highway.
astrodust 9y ago
If you've killed someone using a vehicle you should be held accountable. Would you use the same argument at a rape trial? People have, and it's utterly disgusting. "Why ruin this young man's life for a mistake," they say. Being called "accidents" is bullshit. These things often happen for reasons.
- choko 9y ago
  Let me give you a real-life example of an accident: My cousin, (completely sober, alert, and obeying all applicable traffic laws) ran over a slick substance on the road causing his car to slide into oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, his progress was halted by an oncoming vehicle. The person in the other vehicle was killed. Should my cousin be legally responsible for that death?
  - astrodust 9y ago
    Regardless of cause, that's a collision. If there was nothing they could have done to prevent that incident, if any reasonable driver would have had exactly the same problem, then perhaps they're not at fault. If somehow other people managed to navigate that hazard without issue then there may be an element of fault. Were they driving too fast? Were they slow to react? A good lawyer would be able to argue that the root cause of that collision was the spill on the road, which seems like a reasonable defence. If it went to trial a jury would be inclined to agree, so there's no real risk of over-prosecuting here. Keep in mind that these sorts of cases are the exception, not the norm.
- rhino369 9y ago
  Rape and accidental or negligent homicide aren't comparable because, by law, you can't accidentally rape someone. You have to recklessly, knowingly, or intentionally rape someone for it to be a crime. When people say that a rape was a mistake, they mean they made an error in judgment or something else. When we are talking about a car accident, we mean that they didn't intend to hurt anyone.
  - astrodust 9y ago
Zak 9y ago
> Like the article says, "Criminal law punishes bad intentions and bad acts, not traffic accidents.” To be clear, the defense attorney of someone who killed a person with her car said that, not the author of the article. I think driving a car with reckless disregard to the safety of others is a bad act. There may be no malice, but it's not behavior that should be accepted in present day society. At best, it's more selfish than is safe to allow in an area with even modest population density. That said, I'm not usually a big fan of punishment and don't care so much about whether people who do it are punished harshly enough. More important is to keep them from doing it again. Someone who injures or kills another person with a car should, if their negligence was a significant factor, lose their driver's license for some time and have to take active steps to improve their driving ability before getting their license back.
- rhino369 9y ago
  Of course reckless driving is a bad act. But most accidents aren't the result of reckless driving. And we don't treat cell phone driving as reckless driving, at least typically not. It's just a 50 dollar fine. Based on empirical data, maybe we should punish all cell phone drives as reckless like we do drunk drivers. But it makes no sense to single people out only if there was an accident.
  - Zak 9y ago
    > But it makes no sense to single people out only if there was an accident. A driver could reasonably argue that one distraction or another didn't significantly impair their ability to drive, but when it results in an accident, that question is answered. I do, however believe that distracted driving should result in something more than a $50 fine.
    - rhino369 9y ago
      But that's a bad argument, which is often used by drunk drivers to justify their behavior. "I'm fine, i've never gotten into an accident." And they do.
legulere 9y ago
Accidents happen, so we try to prevent them with rules. If you don't follow those rules, then you are absolutely responsible for accidents. There might not even need to be an accident for a crime, you just need to break the rules, depending on your jurisdiction and which rule you broke.
- scosman 9y ago
  Try to avoid the word "accident". Use crash or collision instead. A majority of fatal crashes are caused by intoxicated, speeding, distracted, or careless drivers and, therefore, are not simple accidents but the result of someone's dangerous choices.
oxryly1 9y ago
The term "accident" is outdated and inappropriate. Please use the term "collision".
- rhino369 9y ago
  Collision is broader than accident.
  - oxryly1 9y ago
    "Accident" is prejudicial -- it prematurely rules out intent, negligence, and other causes.
    - astrodust 9y ago
      May as well call them "oopsies" or "uh ohs". It's utterly offensive to the victims and those that are impacted by these careless incidents.
scosman 9y ago
This is my biggest annoyance with the traffic act. "Running a red light" and "Running a red light and killing a pedestrian" are the same crime/penalty. I was hit by a car and injured while in a dedicated bike lane and the penalty was $50 for improper turn. Society gains nothing by punishing any criminal. The punishments are there as deterrents and should be scaled to the risk/severity of the act. Any contact with a pedestrian or cyclist when at fault should carry extremely high punishment given the high risk. Any contact causing injury should carry a higher punishment. There isn't a flat 0.002% chance. Many drivers drive dangerously and put cyclists/pedestrians lives at risk knowingly and repeatedly. They will continue to do so unless we make a change.
hyperpape 9y ago
You're completely undermining the concept of deterrence. You're imposing a .002% chance of dying on someone else, you incur a .002% chance of jail. If it were feasible, we'd never put people in jail for risky driving, we'd just have immediate unavoidable small punishments (example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/2/9/10952842/rand-sobriety-study https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/2...). But there's no way to fine someone $5 every time they pick up that phone in the car, short of a police state.
- rhino369 9y ago
  >You're completely undermining the concept of deterrence. You're imposing a .002% chance of dying on someone else, you incur a .002% chance of jail. A .002% chance of jail is not an effective deterrence because people are shit at calculating low risks like that. We should treat it like we do drunk drivers. You get caught on your phone, you face serious penalties even if nobody is hurt.
dmm 9y ago
Calling all traffic collisions accidents is misleading. There are few true accidents, as in an event that is unavoidable. If a driver has a stroke or has a well-maintained tire blowout due to a manufacturing defect, that's an accident and I agree it doesn't make sense to punish the driver. In the majority of traffic collisions the driver made choices that contributed to the incident. For example, if you speed at night on a rural highway chances are that you are outdriving your headlights. This means by the time an object in the road is illuminated by your lights it's too late to stop your car without hitting it. The problem is that we Americans are so dependent on driving that taking away or denying someone a license is paramount to denying them the ability to commute to work or shop for groceries. Driving is a serious activity that demands care and attention but making it an undeniable right has led many to treat it trivially. The number of distracted drivers on the road is unreal.
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  > Calling all traffic collisions accidents is misleading. Right. In most US states when you drive an emergency vehicle (such as, in my case, a fire engine or ambulance) you are required to take a course called EVIP - Emergency Vehicle Incident Prevention. Among other things, this course serves as a partial exemption for a CDL, and discusses other laws of the road with respect to emergency vehicles (such as the fact that even an ambulance with lights and sirens on has to stop for a school bus). But... to your point, the course used to be called EVAP - Emergency Vehicle Accident Prevention - but was specifically changed to recognize that accidents are not preventable, but a cause of circumstance outside control, and that most collisions are in fact "incidents", not "accidents".
m3rc 9y ago
What an awful way of looking at things. So anything you do in the car is irrelevant to the outcomes and shouldn't be punished? Would you have said the same about DUI?
- closeparen 9y ago
  Do we execute doctors for murder every time it's conceivably possible that a patient's death could have been avoided? The law is hardly ever consequentialist. In almost any position where you can kill someone by mistake in the course of a legitimate activity, punishing the killer requires evidence that they were unusually reckless.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    > The law is hardly ever consequentialist. I would actually argue the opposite. The law is almost always consequentalist, it merely has a wider view of the consequences. Punishing someone for a mistake when they weren't unusually reckless would have negative consequences for society that outweigh the potential benefits of doing so, therefore we don't.
  - m3rc 9y ago
    We 100% hold doctors accountable for killing patients if it was through negligence.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      Correct. We punish doctors for negligence, not for the outcome alone.
- rhino369 9y ago
  No, I'm saying the punishment for risktaking or negligence should be the same whether or not the results were bad. I'd harshly punish DUI but I wouldn't suddenly demand 20 years for a DUI fatality. The crime is causing the risk.
  - 9y ago

serf 9y ago

"Like the article says, "Criminal law punishes bad intentions and bad acts, not traffic accidents.” Well, the article is quoting the attorney of the person who ran over a cyclist, so it's fairly narrow in scope. The law finds accidents worthy of punishment everywhere, everyday -- regardless of provable ill will. But I absolutely agree with what you've said. There is little to gain by punishing the perpetrator of an accident. The problem arises when the truly guilty use the facade of accident to commit crimes that they want to commit.

grey 9y ago
A while ago it was suggested to me to mentally translate "accident" to "collision" in context of cars hitting cyclists. Most collisions with cyclists are easily avoidable, and caused by negligence, impatience or ignorance. Treating collisions as unavoidable, unintentional mistakes relieves drivers of a lot of the inherent responsibility of controlling a vehicle. Watch the road. Respect other users of the road. Be patient, safe, and focused.

notauser 9y ago

By harshly punishing drivers you provide a deterrent against the next accident. It makes sure that drivers have both an atruistic reason (preventing an accident) and selfish reason (preventing their license being revoked) to pay attention. Also - banning a driver isn't really a punishment as they'll get to discover how much fun it is to cycle to work and gain the life-long benefits of exercise and a friendly, social, activity :-)

yardie 9y ago

I believe the punishment should act as a deterrent. In the same vein that DUI laws will strip you of driving privileges, extract high fines, and possibly jail. And it's in the same frame of thought, exercising poor judgement. Being inattentive, with a 2.5-ton vehicle, at 10m/s should be treated as being over 0.08% BAC. Yet, only one of them is treated as a criminal violation.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

>It makes no sense to throw B in jail and let A off with a 50 dollar fine just because driver B actually hit someone. Drive B should be liable for all medical costs and lost income. Users have the ability to think for themselves. Laws are not code. Nobody with a brain expects them all to be followed all the time (i.e. speed limit). If decide to talk on the phone at a dumb time and cause an accident you certainly deserve more punishment than the person who happens to drive by a bored cop while talking on the phone on a mostly empty highway.

astrodust 9y ago

If you've killed someone using a vehicle you should be held accountable. Would you use the same argument at a rape trial? People have, and it's utterly disgusting. "Why ruin this young man's life for a mistake," they say. Being called "accidents" is bullshit. These things often happen for reasons.

choko 9y ago
Let me give you a real-life example of an accident: My cousin, (completely sober, alert, and obeying all applicable traffic laws) ran over a slick substance on the road causing his car to slide into oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, his progress was halted by an oncoming vehicle. The person in the other vehicle was killed. Should my cousin be legally responsible for that death?
- astrodust 9y ago
  Regardless of cause, that's a collision. If there was nothing they could have done to prevent that incident, if any reasonable driver would have had exactly the same problem, then perhaps they're not at fault. If somehow other people managed to navigate that hazard without issue then there may be an element of fault. Were they driving too fast? Were they slow to react? A good lawyer would be able to argue that the root cause of that collision was the spill on the road, which seems like a reasonable defence. If it went to trial a jury would be inclined to agree, so there's no real risk of over-prosecuting here. Keep in mind that these sorts of cases are the exception, not the norm.
rhino369 9y ago
Rape and accidental or negligent homicide aren't comparable because, by law, you can't accidentally rape someone. You have to recklessly, knowingly, or intentionally rape someone for it to be a crime. When people say that a rape was a mistake, they mean they made an error in judgment or something else. When we are talking about a car accident, we mean that they didn't intend to hurt anyone.
- astrodust 9y ago

Zak 9y ago

> Like the article says, "Criminal law punishes bad intentions and bad acts, not traffic accidents.” To be clear, the defense attorney of someone who killed a person with her car said that, not the author of the article. I think driving a car with reckless disregard to the safety of others is a bad act. There may be no malice, but it's not behavior that should be accepted in present day society. At best, it's more selfish than is safe to allow in an area with even modest population density. That said, I'm not usually a big fan of punishment and don't care so much about whether people who do it are punished harshly enough. More important is to keep them from doing it again. Someone who injures or kills another person with a car should, if their negligence was a significant factor, lose their driver's license for some time and have to take active steps to improve their driving ability before getting their license back.

rhino369 9y ago
Of course reckless driving is a bad act. But most accidents aren't the result of reckless driving. And we don't treat cell phone driving as reckless driving, at least typically not. It's just a 50 dollar fine. Based on empirical data, maybe we should punish all cell phone drives as reckless like we do drunk drivers. But it makes no sense to single people out only if there was an accident.
- Zak 9y ago
  > But it makes no sense to single people out only if there was an accident. A driver could reasonably argue that one distraction or another didn't significantly impair their ability to drive, but when it results in an accident, that question is answered. I do, however believe that distracted driving should result in something more than a $50 fine.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    But that's a bad argument, which is often used by drunk drivers to justify their behavior. "I'm fine, i've never gotten into an accident." And they do.

legulere 9y ago

Accidents happen, so we try to prevent them with rules. If you don't follow those rules, then you are absolutely responsible for accidents. There might not even need to be an accident for a crime, you just need to break the rules, depending on your jurisdiction and which rule you broke.

scosman 9y ago
Try to avoid the word "accident". Use crash or collision instead. A majority of fatal crashes are caused by intoxicated, speeding, distracted, or careless drivers and, therefore, are not simple accidents but the result of someone's dangerous choices.

oxryly1 9y ago

The term "accident" is outdated and inappropriate. Please use the term "collision".

rhino369 9y ago
Collision is broader than accident.
- oxryly1 9y ago
  "Accident" is prejudicial -- it prematurely rules out intent, negligence, and other causes.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    May as well call them "oopsies" or "uh ohs". It's utterly offensive to the victims and those that are impacted by these careless incidents.

scosman 9y ago

This is my biggest annoyance with the traffic act. "Running a red light" and "Running a red light and killing a pedestrian" are the same crime/penalty. I was hit by a car and injured while in a dedicated bike lane and the penalty was $50 for improper turn. Society gains nothing by punishing any criminal. The punishments are there as deterrents and should be scaled to the risk/severity of the act. Any contact with a pedestrian or cyclist when at fault should carry extremely high punishment given the high risk. Any contact causing injury should carry a higher punishment. There isn't a flat 0.002% chance. Many drivers drive dangerously and put cyclists/pedestrians lives at risk knowingly and repeatedly. They will continue to do so unless we make a change.

hyperpape 9y ago

You're completely undermining the concept of deterrence. You're imposing a .002% chance of dying on someone else, you incur a .002% chance of jail. If it were feasible, we'd never put people in jail for risky driving, we'd just have immediate unavoidable small punishments (example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/2/9/10952842/rand-sobriety-study https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/2...). But there's no way to fine someone $5 every time they pick up that phone in the car, short of a police state.

rhino369 9y ago
>You're completely undermining the concept of deterrence. You're imposing a .002% chance of dying on someone else, you incur a .002% chance of jail. A .002% chance of jail is not an effective deterrence because people are shit at calculating low risks like that. We should treat it like we do drunk drivers. You get caught on your phone, you face serious penalties even if nobody is hurt.

dmm 9y ago

Calling all traffic collisions accidents is misleading. There are few true accidents, as in an event that is unavoidable. If a driver has a stroke or has a well-maintained tire blowout due to a manufacturing defect, that's an accident and I agree it doesn't make sense to punish the driver. In the majority of traffic collisions the driver made choices that contributed to the incident. For example, if you speed at night on a rural highway chances are that you are outdriving your headlights. This means by the time an object in the road is illuminated by your lights it's too late to stop your car without hitting it. The problem is that we Americans are so dependent on driving that taking away or denying someone a license is paramount to denying them the ability to commute to work or shop for groceries. Driving is a serious activity that demands care and attention but making it an undeniable right has led many to treat it trivially. The number of distracted drivers on the road is unreal.

FireBeyond 9y ago
> Calling all traffic collisions accidents is misleading. Right. In most US states when you drive an emergency vehicle (such as, in my case, a fire engine or ambulance) you are required to take a course called EVIP - Emergency Vehicle Incident Prevention. Among other things, this course serves as a partial exemption for a CDL, and discusses other laws of the road with respect to emergency vehicles (such as the fact that even an ambulance with lights and sirens on has to stop for a school bus). But... to your point, the course used to be called EVAP - Emergency Vehicle Accident Prevention - but was specifically changed to recognize that accidents are not preventable, but a cause of circumstance outside control, and that most collisions are in fact "incidents", not "accidents".

m3rc 9y ago

What an awful way of looking at things. So anything you do in the car is irrelevant to the outcomes and shouldn't be punished? Would you have said the same about DUI?

closeparen 9y ago
Do we execute doctors for murder every time it's conceivably possible that a patient's death could have been avoided? The law is hardly ever consequentialist. In almost any position where you can kill someone by mistake in the course of a legitimate activity, punishing the killer requires evidence that they were unusually reckless.
- Filligree 9y ago
  > The law is hardly ever consequentialist. I would actually argue the opposite. The law is almost always consequentalist, it merely has a wider view of the consequences. Punishing someone for a mistake when they weren't unusually reckless would have negative consequences for society that outweigh the potential benefits of doing so, therefore we don't.
- m3rc 9y ago
  We 100% hold doctors accountable for killing patients if it was through negligence.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Correct. We punish doctors for negligence, not for the outcome alone.
rhino369 9y ago
No, I'm saying the punishment for risktaking or negligence should be the same whether or not the results were bad. I'd harshly punish DUI but I wouldn't suddenly demand 20 years for a DUI fatality. The crime is causing the risk.
- 9y ago