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What a wild ride this has been. Looking at the police report, I do wonder what the punishment would be in other countries. It seems the victims were laying dru

• giancarlostoro 7y ago
  Honestly I could see that happening to me. Some cars have lights that make it hard to see clearly on my side of the road. I wish car windshields could shield your eyes from lights too bright or something. Especially now that cars have these bright LED lights depending on the angle they are as bad as high beams when they pierce your eyes. I kinda hate driving at night. People can barely keep from getting into accidents in broad daylight imagine at night time.
  • anitil 7y ago
    Often those LED lights aren't angled correctly (at least here in Australia), on the highway in a non-SUV I sometimes get temporarily blinded by oncoming and following traffic at night on the highway
  • MiroF 7y ago
    This was in a motorcycle.
    • agapon 7y ago
      Many motorcycles have windshields too. Many motorcycle helmets as well.
  • vbezhenar 7y ago
    There are glasses for night driving (yellow ones) which will reduce bright light and increase contrast in low light situations. You might want to check them out.
• nl 7y ago
  I haven't read the full coverage, but it does appear it occurred at a pedestrian crossing, and there doesn't appear to be any dispute that it was properly signposted. Most countries require greater care at pedestrian crossings.
  • jnbiche 7y ago
    Yes, but they were lying flat on the road, intoxicated.
    • sdegutis 7y ago
      If the google translation wasn’t too faulty, one was still lying down, one was getting up and probably trying to get out of the way. The main impediment to seeing them seems to be the headlights of oncoming cars, possibly while coming over a hill. I always slow down in exactly those circumstances (hill and oncoming headlights) for similar reasons: you just don’t know what’s over the hill, and it’s an extra few seconds of travel time. There’s no downside and only extra caution and safety for all involved.
      • jnbiche 7y ago
        There's a medium between being a super careful driver like you and I, and being a grossly negligent driver who drove in such a grossly negligent manner that they deserve over a year in a harsh prison system. I highly recommend driving like you say, and do so myself. The last points on my license were were over 15 years ago. But I don't think someone who was failed to be extremely careful to this level deserves 1.5 years in a harsh prison system. Maybe lose his license, but not prison.
        • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
          If he didn't slow down enough that he could stop in the distance he could see then he was grossly negligent.
  • 40four 7y ago
• jessaustin 7y ago
  One could go to prison for this in USA, but only if the local police and prosecutors already hated one's guts for other reasons. In most cases a drunk pedestrian would be considered less sympathetic than a sober driver. Yes it is a pretty shabby "justice" when sympathies rather than facts determine verdicts.
  • MiroF 7y ago
    The US justice system in general is pretty sympathetic to drivers in general, I doubt a case like this would see over a year of jail time here, and likely none at all.
    • globular-toast 7y ago
      Drivers yes, but I think he was riding a motorbike.
    • syshum 7y ago
      The US does not have a justice system, it has a legal system. Any "justice" served by the system is pure coincidence
  • tashoecraft 7y ago
    Someone I know was driving down a country road and struck a person in the middle of the road and killed them. The person wasn't drunk as far as I know, but their car broke down and they were trying to walk to somewhere. Why they chose to walk in the middle of the road at night no one knows, but due to the desolate region and the unexpectedness of it, they were not seen. There was no jail time and charges filled. It was understood that the pedestrian shouldn't have done that. It really messed the driver up, they're a very nice person and having caused the death of someone really hurt them, even though there really wasn't anything they could have done. Obviously every instance is circumstantial, and I didn't really read anything about the case, but if drunk people were lying down in the road, at night, in dark clothing, I don't see a crime.
    • valuearb 7y ago
• nostromo 7y ago
  If you'll permit a tangent, there are a lot of drunk pedestrian fatalities. I don't think we talk enough about the risk of drunk walking. Over one third of pedestrians killed in the US each year have been drinking too much to drive. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/05/drunk-pedestrian-fatalities/2621673/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/05/drunk-...
  • catalogia 7y ago
    How much of this is due to the immediate physiological effects of alcohol (e.g. impaired reaction time, etc) and how much of it is chronic depressed alcoholics disregarding their own well-being and possibly committing suicide? I've walked home drunk from bars more than a few times and I've never experienced any trouble using crosswalks like normal. I'm pretty certain it's much safer than driving home drunk (not that I drive to bars in the first place.)
    • fiblye 7y ago
      Driving at night down narrow streets, I've had some people pop out from behind a wall in front of me. Fortunately everyone involved has always had good reaction times, so I don't think I've killed anybody yet. Somebody who's not really thinking, or just stumbling around and being goofy. Lots of people including myself have said "DUDE wouldn't it be funny if we did [X incredibly stupid thing]?" while unreasonably drunk. Normally calm people start fights with people who can clearly kick their ass after a couple drinks. Probably a few think they can take on or play chicken with a car. Some people also just blink for a second and suddenly they're asleep, if they have enough drinks. Depression may be a cause, but honest accidents and impaired thinking are definitely big reasons.
      • pvorb 7y ago
        > I don't think I've killed anybody yet If you can't tell for sure, are you certain that you weren't drunk yourself?
    • cam_l 7y ago
• sdegutis 7y ago
  After reading the whole translation linked in the GitHub issue, and being a father of 6 kids who love to make me practice being a judge every day as if I have nothing better to do, I’m convinced the judgment is reasonable. Even in our tiny library parking lot, I very often see people driving unreasonably fast between all the parked cars and the library door, often within a foot of the cars. Even if they are driving within the speed limit, there are constantly people coming out from between cars in a way that they can’t be detected by cars ahead of time, especially young children who don’t have the life experience to know to come out slower. It’s unquestionably dangerous to drive like that, yet I see it almost every single day. One of these days someone is going to get hurt. And in this case it looks like the same circumstances: a bit of reasonable cautiousness could have possibly prevented the driver from not seeing the people apparently laying on the crosswalk. Unless the driver followed every single procedure of the road perfectly, they are at fault to at least some degree. And someone is dead. It’s just a generally awful situation all around and nobody wins.
  • jakear 7y ago
    The defendant actually admitted guilt, seemingly readily. His argument was not that he did nothing wrong, but instead that the sentence should be adjusted. Instead of the minimum jail time of 1.5 years, he was asking for the maximum suspension of driving privilege time of 3 years. If jail is for criminal activity and suspension of driving privilege is for poor driving practice, I can see his point. Of course it gets blurry when you have criminally poor driving practice.
    • sdegutis 7y ago
      Yes but assuming negligent driving is the cause of death of another person, it seems that just not being able to drive for a while is not taking into account the seriousness of the permanence or the consequences of the events. I am no fan of jail and don’t wish prison on anyone. But justice seems to demand at least some kind of serious retribution for the loss of life if there is any accountability. For intentional murder people get 20+ years. Accidental death having only 1.5 seems much smaller than that. That’s all I’m saying. If it wasn’t negligent but reasonable then I agree that no jail time makes most sense. But slowing down at cross walks at night in Russia seems like a reasonable thing to expect. But I’m no judge.
• manigandham 7y ago
  Perhaps this detail should be added to the Github issue to mitigate the misunderstandings and accusations already going on there.
  • scubadude 7y ago
    The lack of empathy displayed in that thread is disgusting.
• MiroF 7y ago
  I think it is worth including the fact that: a. He was driving a motorcycle and b. One of the victims was not lying on the road, but instead standing and trying to pull up the other (or so I've read)
  • lstodd 7y ago
    If he was driving a car there would have been two corpses. This is the only difference.
• baybal2 7y ago
  This is the very reason Russians buy dashcams by tonnes. Sold few thousands of them to Russian retailers at around 2008-2009, when I worked in a trade company in Singapore. Previously they were used by Taiwanese taxis to record what's going on inside the car. Russian's immediately found an inventive use for it, and instead made them to videolog what's going on in front of the car.
  • syshum 7y ago
    Everyone should have a dashcam.. I have had installed them in all of my cars fro the better part of a decade now. I am in the US
    • vbezhenar 7y ago
      Does every country allows filming everything outside? I could imagine that some laws won't allow that or won't allow such a recording to be used as an evidence in court.
      • Operyl 7y ago
        At least in the US, I believe it varies state by state with certain restrictions pertaining to audio specifically, iirc.
• throwaway147147 7y ago
  The following is case assured me that the justice system in Germany is good and just: A child was fatally hit by a truck at a tram station after another child pushed them. The truck driver tested positive for pot and was ultimately acquitted because the court concluded that even if the driver had been perfectly fit for driving, the accident would have been unavoidable. I can not remember but I am certain that the driver had to face additional charges for driving under influence but this is another thing.
• gbuk2013 7y ago
  > Looking at the police report, I do wonder what the punishment would be in other countries. In the U.K. 1-2 years it seems. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causing_death_by_dangerous_driving https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causing_death_by_dangerous_d... Having read the facts appeal case you linked to it does not seem unreasonable (colliding with pedestrians on a marked and signed road crossing, travelling at >30mph). In the U.K. there is definitely an expectation that you slow down before a crossing. In this case the court applied the minimum sentence and appeal rejected the victims’s side request for a harsher sentence. The facts in the appeal case list many factors, some of which are not in favour of the driver (one pedestrian was trying to pick up the other so they were unlikely to have been lying down on the road and oncoming vehicles were flashing lights as a warning).