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Vehicular manslaughter: California: A felony vehicular manslaughter conviction is punishable by 2, 4 or 6 years in state prison. Colorado: Under Colorado la

Vehicular manslaughter: California: A felony vehicular manslaughter conviction is punishable by 2, 4 or 6 years in state prison. Colorado: Under Colorado law, vehicular manslaughter in the second degree is considered a Class 4 felony, as outlined in Colorado Revised Statutes Section 18-3-106. The potential penalties for this offense include imprisonment for a term ranging from 2 to 6 years and a fine between $2,000 and $500,000

itslennysfault 3y ago
Those laws exist, but if it is a legitimate accident, and the person doesn't have a criminal history otherwise it is very likely that they walk away without any jail time.
- stickfigure 3y ago
  You want people thrown in jail for accidents where negligence was not involved? Do you drive at all? You could be a perfect driver, fully sober and alert, and one moment's distraction can easily kill. Maybe a sudden glare in the window, or your misbehaving kid in the backseat throws something. It happens every day. I don't see any social good to be gained from jailing people when negligence isn't involved. Human beings have failure rates. You're talking about taking an already horrible situation and destroying more lives and families.
  - vwcx 3y ago
    The burden of proof of negligence is problematic. Until we surrender additional privacy to a "more objective" monitoring system, it's too easy to murder someone with your vehicle and claim innocence. When I'm riding my bicycle in a perfectly legal way on a roadway, and a driver gets irritated and tries to clip me, it's very difficult for me to prove that they acted in malice. If they clip me and I die hitting a guardrail, it's incredibly easy for them to claim it was an accident. But that's an edge case and this type of culpability problem is common across many facets of humanity. The bigger issue may be that driving isn't treated with the seriousness it should warrant. In conditions where "sudden glare" is possible, one should drive their 4000lb vehicle at a speed that allows them to mitigate all but the most rare (freak) accident, like a 200lb alligator popping out of a manhole cover right in front of them. The human failure rate is real, but there's more we can do with process + tech + practice to mitigate it even smaller. This level of care as a driver is directly counter to what the automobile industry wants as the image of their product: an easy, convenient and essential tool to be used every day.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    I mean this is just the consequences of our increasingly atomized car-dependent society going further and further down the chain of human misery. The average commute in the US is 26 minutes, meaning people spend roughly 1 in 16 of their waking hours behind the wheel, doing a task most people view as a begrudging obligation. Most people don't like driving, therefore they do not put great effort into driving, or seek to be better drivers which is why the majority of drivers are utterly mediocre at it. And because it's basically a necessity of life here, we can't genuinely punish people too badly for fucking up at it, no matter how deadly it is: our prison population is already massive on a per-capita basis, the last thing we need is even more people in that system. The real problem is as the parent comment states, CAFE standards which have massively fucked with the incentives for car manufacturers to aggressively market previously SUVs and increasingly pickup trucks as family vehicles that are absolutely ridiculously oversized for their stated purpose (while also being remarkably and hilariously unable to actually carry cargo efficiently) and ludicrously inefficient, with all the blind-spots and difficulty to handle that that implies. Their higher stance and larger bodies make them infinitely more dangerous to pedestrians and smaller vehicles, which also incentivizes other drivers to buy the enormous fucking things, so if they get t-boned by someone driving them they don't have basically no chance of surviving. Which is not to say that a reasonably sized sedan can't also kill a pedestrian, but an Escalade has an infinitely better shot of managing it, both by size, and because the higher ride height greatly increases the odds of people going under the damn wheels. Speaking of going under the damn wheels, there's been a huge increase in the number of kiddos going under the wheels of these big stupid things in recent decades, which is a uniquely American phenomenon occurring basically nowhere else because these enormous stupid vehicles do not make economic sense anywhere they aren't subsidized like they are here.
    - rob74 3y ago
      Trust me, it's not uniquely American. Cars have been getting bigger in Germany too, and SUVs are the most popular category here too. Ok, most of them are not as big as in the US, but there are some (ex-Dodge) Rams (even the name is scary when you think about it) driving around here too. Every time I see one, I wonder where they find a parking space for the damned thing...
  - thot_experiment 3y ago
    No, the problem begins when you get in the car and begin driving it. I'm not pro jail in general so I probably agree with you there, but, you're speaking as though "driving at all" is a given. It is not and it is a big part of them problem that people have that view. It's honestly really disgusting to see this blase attitude. You must take responsibility for putting people's lives in danger and when you drive a car you are doing that, you make that choice every time you get behind the wheel. There are better, less convenient ways of transport, if you care about human life at the expense of your inconvenience you would use those, when you don't you make the choice to endanger lives. I still drive, this is the view I take every time I am behind the wheel, it seems the only responsible position.
  - eptcyka 3y ago
    Yes. People are wielding 2 tonne sledgehammers, often fueled by paleolithic compost. With great power comes great responsibility.
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    Yes, I do. That should be a risk that you accept when you get in the driver's seat. It would affect behaviors positively by disincentivizing driving. If you're unable to see what's in front of your 2-ton mile-a-minute machine because of a glare, maybe you shouldn't be driving a mile a minute? Clean the windows before you leave. Wear sunglasses. If the glare is "not that bad" so you don't regularly clean the windows and don't make sure you have sunglasses and occasionally someone dies because of this that is unacceptable. Glare does kill, as evidenced by increased collision rates when the sunrise aligns and misaligns with peak traffic - change the incentives so that people take steps to mitigate this. If you're responsible for managing the behavior of a kid and also piloting a car, maybe you should have a second adult in the car. Maybe the kid should be in a seat they can't easily unbuckle, or not have access to toys they can throw in front of you. You should think about the risk to other road users and your potential jail time when you take your eyes off the road to handle some other responsibility. Yes, I drive. Professionally! I deliver industrial equipment and travel all over the Midwest to perform upgrades, maintenance, and bug fixes on it. I take the safety of myself, pedestrians, and fellow drivers seriously when I have 20,000 lbs of steel on a gooseneck - more seriously than a lot of drivers I see around me. When I'm not traveling, though, I bike to work for 9+ months a year. And I've had my share of beer cans thrown out windows, and rearview mirrors hitting me in the butt, and coal rolled in my face, and panic from people scrolling TikTok and not seeing me until the last second. I haven't been killed yet, but I keep my life insurance paid up.
  - CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago
    For clarity, the vehicular manslaughter laws referenced by parent commenter are specifically for when [criminal] negligence is involved (and yes parent commenter’s use of “accident” does imply absence of negligence, so I appreciate your calling them out, they don’t seem to understand the law): > In cases of criminal negligence, the defendant is commonly charged with unintentional vehicular manslaughter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_homicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_homicide
  - trgn 3y ago
    > You could be a perfect driver, fully sober and alert These people should not be jailed. > and one moment's distraction can easily kill. Maybe a sudden glare in the window, or your misbehaving kid in the backseat throws something. It happens every day By phrasing it that way, you also admit that driving is incredibly dangerous, essentially murderous in the aggregate. The right response then is that we need to establish a transportation system where a moment of inattention doesn't cause death and destruction. Traffic calming, slower speed limits, more mobility options (walk, bike, bus, train), ... and to the point of the article, smaller and lighter vehicles.
  - itslennysfault 3y ago
    I didn't argue either way. Just saying that the reality is many people walk away. I think your reasoning is the exact logic that a judge/jury use. No sense in ruining the drivers life because someone "ran in front of their car" (as their defense attorney surely argued). I think appropriate justice is a spectrum and they often get it wrong. For example, 10+ years ago a friend of mine was rear ended by a drunk driver while sitting at a red light. She died. The driver lost his license (because he was drunk) and got a year of supervision. He probably should've spent sometime in jail imo. On the other hand, I'm well aware there are people sitting in jail right now that absolutely shouldn't be.
- jgeada 3y ago
  Define "accident". There are very few circumstances where correct attentive driving technique ends up as an "accident". Most so called accidents are not "accidental". It had a predictable causation chain caused by the driver's behavior. Personally, I hate that word, much prefer "incident". Driving too close is not an accident. Driving too fast for the conditions is not an accident. Weaving around in traffic to gain a spot. Not looking at who is in the crosswalk before driving through it. Not yielding at a merge. Racing the lights to get there before it is red/or just after. Not having your brakes, tires, lights, suspension, etc in correct working condition. Driving too tired, or under the influence. Sure, most of the time nothing happens, so people get used to thinking these are how driving is done (and it is in the US). But just because one normally gets away with it does not mean these are not dangerous behaviors, and they're absolutely under the drivers control. Not accident, incident. Read up on "normalization of deviance" (wiki page is pretty light but it is a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance). Aviation has long recognized this and training emphasizes not getting caught in that behavioral trap.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Pedestrian runs across the street and doesn't notice the oncoming car; driver starts to brake but the car doesn't stop in time. That is a very common type of accident that occurs even when the driver is going below the speed limit and is paying full attention. It is so common that drivers in suburban areas pay extra attention to the behavior of pedestrians, who very often run into the street for one reason or another. Contrary to the popular narrative, not everyone who drives a car does so drunk, high, and/or too fast - a lot of people are actually very good drivers. Many (most?) of them do all of the recommended maintenance on the car in a timely manner. That doesn't mean that every driver has the reflexes of a racecar driver, and nor can you expect them to. Blaming every accident on the driver by default and expecting jail time for anything with bad consequences is pretty toxic. Even the FAA doesn't do that for pilots.
    - tmnvix 3y ago
      Not a popular opinion, but in my mind every driver should at all times be prepared for a child to chase a ball onto a street. What that means in practice is a whole lot of inconvenience for drivers - but it is their responsibility and they should own it. Roads (other than motorways/expressways/etc) are not the exclusive domain of cars and people shouldn't assume that they are.
morepork 3y ago
How often do those charges get used? For example: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/driver-killed-south-la-sisters-in-crosswalk-facing-misdemeanor-charge/162290/ https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/driver-killed-south-la-si... A driver, allegedly watching youtube, runs over and kills 2 children of 12 and 14 at a crosswalk. But they were only charged with the lesser vehicular manslaughter, not felony vehicular manslaughter.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  Unbelievably tragic story. Thank you for sharing. I did not know about it.

itslennysfault 3y ago

Those laws exist, but if it is a legitimate accident, and the person doesn't have a criminal history otherwise it is very likely that they walk away without any jail time.

stickfigure 3y ago
You want people thrown in jail for accidents where negligence was not involved? Do you drive at all? You could be a perfect driver, fully sober and alert, and one moment's distraction can easily kill. Maybe a sudden glare in the window, or your misbehaving kid in the backseat throws something. It happens every day. I don't see any social good to be gained from jailing people when negligence isn't involved. Human beings have failure rates. You're talking about taking an already horrible situation and destroying more lives and families.
- vwcx 3y ago
  The burden of proof of negligence is problematic. Until we surrender additional privacy to a "more objective" monitoring system, it's too easy to murder someone with your vehicle and claim innocence. When I'm riding my bicycle in a perfectly legal way on a roadway, and a driver gets irritated and tries to clip me, it's very difficult for me to prove that they acted in malice. If they clip me and I die hitting a guardrail, it's incredibly easy for them to claim it was an accident. But that's an edge case and this type of culpability problem is common across many facets of humanity. The bigger issue may be that driving isn't treated with the seriousness it should warrant. In conditions where "sudden glare" is possible, one should drive their 4000lb vehicle at a speed that allows them to mitigate all but the most rare (freak) accident, like a 200lb alligator popping out of a manhole cover right in front of them. The human failure rate is real, but there's more we can do with process + tech + practice to mitigate it even smaller. This level of care as a driver is directly counter to what the automobile industry wants as the image of their product: an easy, convenient and essential tool to be used every day.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  I mean this is just the consequences of our increasingly atomized car-dependent society going further and further down the chain of human misery. The average commute in the US is 26 minutes, meaning people spend roughly 1 in 16 of their waking hours behind the wheel, doing a task most people view as a begrudging obligation. Most people don't like driving, therefore they do not put great effort into driving, or seek to be better drivers which is why the majority of drivers are utterly mediocre at it. And because it's basically a necessity of life here, we can't genuinely punish people too badly for fucking up at it, no matter how deadly it is: our prison population is already massive on a per-capita basis, the last thing we need is even more people in that system. The real problem is as the parent comment states, CAFE standards which have massively fucked with the incentives for car manufacturers to aggressively market previously SUVs and increasingly pickup trucks as family vehicles that are absolutely ridiculously oversized for their stated purpose (while also being remarkably and hilariously unable to actually carry cargo efficiently) and ludicrously inefficient, with all the blind-spots and difficulty to handle that that implies. Their higher stance and larger bodies make them infinitely more dangerous to pedestrians and smaller vehicles, which also incentivizes other drivers to buy the enormous fucking things, so if they get t-boned by someone driving them they don't have basically no chance of surviving. Which is not to say that a reasonably sized sedan can't also kill a pedestrian, but an Escalade has an infinitely better shot of managing it, both by size, and because the higher ride height greatly increases the odds of people going under the damn wheels. Speaking of going under the damn wheels, there's been a huge increase in the number of kiddos going under the wheels of these big stupid things in recent decades, which is a uniquely American phenomenon occurring basically nowhere else because these enormous stupid vehicles do not make economic sense anywhere they aren't subsidized like they are here.
  - rob74 3y ago
    Trust me, it's not uniquely American. Cars have been getting bigger in Germany too, and SUVs are the most popular category here too. Ok, most of them are not as big as in the US, but there are some (ex-Dodge) Rams (even the name is scary when you think about it) driving around here too. Every time I see one, I wonder where they find a parking space for the damned thing...
- thot_experiment 3y ago
  No, the problem begins when you get in the car and begin driving it. I'm not pro jail in general so I probably agree with you there, but, you're speaking as though "driving at all" is a given. It is not and it is a big part of them problem that people have that view. It's honestly really disgusting to see this blase attitude. You must take responsibility for putting people's lives in danger and when you drive a car you are doing that, you make that choice every time you get behind the wheel. There are better, less convenient ways of transport, if you care about human life at the expense of your inconvenience you would use those, when you don't you make the choice to endanger lives. I still drive, this is the view I take every time I am behind the wheel, it seems the only responsible position.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  Yes. People are wielding 2 tonne sledgehammers, often fueled by paleolithic compost. With great power comes great responsibility.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  Yes, I do. That should be a risk that you accept when you get in the driver's seat. It would affect behaviors positively by disincentivizing driving. If you're unable to see what's in front of your 2-ton mile-a-minute machine because of a glare, maybe you shouldn't be driving a mile a minute? Clean the windows before you leave. Wear sunglasses. If the glare is "not that bad" so you don't regularly clean the windows and don't make sure you have sunglasses and occasionally someone dies because of this that is unacceptable. Glare does kill, as evidenced by increased collision rates when the sunrise aligns and misaligns with peak traffic - change the incentives so that people take steps to mitigate this. If you're responsible for managing the behavior of a kid and also piloting a car, maybe you should have a second adult in the car. Maybe the kid should be in a seat they can't easily unbuckle, or not have access to toys they can throw in front of you. You should think about the risk to other road users and your potential jail time when you take your eyes off the road to handle some other responsibility. Yes, I drive. Professionally! I deliver industrial equipment and travel all over the Midwest to perform upgrades, maintenance, and bug fixes on it. I take the safety of myself, pedestrians, and fellow drivers seriously when I have 20,000 lbs of steel on a gooseneck - more seriously than a lot of drivers I see around me. When I'm not traveling, though, I bike to work for 9+ months a year. And I've had my share of beer cans thrown out windows, and rearview mirrors hitting me in the butt, and coal rolled in my face, and panic from people scrolling TikTok and not seeing me until the last second. I haven't been killed yet, but I keep my life insurance paid up.
- CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago
  For clarity, the vehicular manslaughter laws referenced by parent commenter are specifically for when [criminal] negligence is involved (and yes parent commenter’s use of “accident” does imply absence of negligence, so I appreciate your calling them out, they don’t seem to understand the law): > In cases of criminal negligence, the defendant is commonly charged with unintentional vehicular manslaughter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_homicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_homicide
- trgn 3y ago
  > You could be a perfect driver, fully sober and alert These people should not be jailed. > and one moment's distraction can easily kill. Maybe a sudden glare in the window, or your misbehaving kid in the backseat throws something. It happens every day By phrasing it that way, you also admit that driving is incredibly dangerous, essentially murderous in the aggregate. The right response then is that we need to establish a transportation system where a moment of inattention doesn't cause death and destruction. Traffic calming, slower speed limits, more mobility options (walk, bike, bus, train), ... and to the point of the article, smaller and lighter vehicles.
- itslennysfault 3y ago
  I didn't argue either way. Just saying that the reality is many people walk away. I think your reasoning is the exact logic that a judge/jury use. No sense in ruining the drivers life because someone "ran in front of their car" (as their defense attorney surely argued). I think appropriate justice is a spectrum and they often get it wrong. For example, 10+ years ago a friend of mine was rear ended by a drunk driver while sitting at a red light. She died. The driver lost his license (because he was drunk) and got a year of supervision. He probably should've spent sometime in jail imo. On the other hand, I'm well aware there are people sitting in jail right now that absolutely shouldn't be.
jgeada 3y ago
Define "accident". There are very few circumstances where correct attentive driving technique ends up as an "accident". Most so called accidents are not "accidental". It had a predictable causation chain caused by the driver's behavior. Personally, I hate that word, much prefer "incident". Driving too close is not an accident. Driving too fast for the conditions is not an accident. Weaving around in traffic to gain a spot. Not looking at who is in the crosswalk before driving through it. Not yielding at a merge. Racing the lights to get there before it is red/or just after. Not having your brakes, tires, lights, suspension, etc in correct working condition. Driving too tired, or under the influence. Sure, most of the time nothing happens, so people get used to thinking these are how driving is done (and it is in the US). But just because one normally gets away with it does not mean these are not dangerous behaviors, and they're absolutely under the drivers control. Not accident, incident. Read up on "normalization of deviance" (wiki page is pretty light but it is a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance). Aviation has long recognized this and training emphasizes not getting caught in that behavioral trap.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Pedestrian runs across the street and doesn't notice the oncoming car; driver starts to brake but the car doesn't stop in time. That is a very common type of accident that occurs even when the driver is going below the speed limit and is paying full attention. It is so common that drivers in suburban areas pay extra attention to the behavior of pedestrians, who very often run into the street for one reason or another. Contrary to the popular narrative, not everyone who drives a car does so drunk, high, and/or too fast - a lot of people are actually very good drivers. Many (most?) of them do all of the recommended maintenance on the car in a timely manner. That doesn't mean that every driver has the reflexes of a racecar driver, and nor can you expect them to. Blaming every accident on the driver by default and expecting jail time for anything with bad consequences is pretty toxic. Even the FAA doesn't do that for pilots.
  - tmnvix 3y ago
    Not a popular opinion, but in my mind every driver should at all times be prepared for a child to chase a ball onto a street. What that means in practice is a whole lot of inconvenience for drivers - but it is their responsibility and they should own it. Roads (other than motorways/expressways/etc) are not the exclusive domain of cars and people shouldn't assume that they are.

morepork 3y ago

How often do those charges get used? For example: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/driver-killed-south-la-sisters-in-crosswalk-facing-misdemeanor-charge/162290/ https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/driver-killed-south-la-si... A driver, allegedly watching youtube, runs over and kills 2 children of 12 and 14 at a crosswalk. But they were only charged with the lesser vehicular manslaughter, not felony vehicular manslaughter.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
Unbelievably tragic story. Thank you for sharing. I did not know about it.