I’d believe it if:
we have reason to believe he knew the road - it was 10 miles south of his hometown, he’s ‘bragged’ about his lead foot in the past, has had 13 traffic citations since 1990, and was estimated as going at least 70 in a 55. I cannot believe that he didn’t know the road (10 miles south of his hometown?), therefore should have been aware of that intersection, that the other road had the right of way, and there was a stop sign. going 70 in the intersection means he had made any realistic attempt to slow down to check for oncoming traffic.
nope, not a ‘tragic unforeseeable accident’ in my book.
I would be curious that Janklow’s verdict is different from others in the same situation. I don’t know it’s overly light, compared to others… I have heard of or more than one case of people who did NO time after killing someone while driving (and due to their own poor driving). In fact, I work with such a guy.
I’ve seen other cases where celebrities got the maximum possible sentence for their criminal violation, and people say “if that had been me, I would have been sent up the river.” Not true…
Maybe people just don’t realize that people aren’t generally sent to jail for traffic violations, even when they are fatal. Spend a day in court at a big city, and you will see several drunk drivers (or sleeping drivers, or distracted drivers) get fined and sent home. Some of them probably would have injured or killed people. They won’t necessarily be famous. When the person isn’t leading what you would traditionally call a “life of crime,” there is little motivation to take them out of the tax revenue column and put them in the tax dependent column.
from the link I just posted:
seems that the sentence had to do more with who was being sentenced than the crime itself. Especially the part about his conviction being removed from his record after his 3 year probation.
Wasn’t Janklow driving on a gravel road and not a primary road? Have any of you guys lived in South Dakota? IIRC and it was a gravel road, the odds were in Janklow’s favor, since South Dakota doesn’t have all that much traffic even on primary roads and often hardly any at all on the gravel ones. Running the stop sign was the real mistake, but the speeding isn’t uncommon and certainly is not limited to Janklow. Admittedly he has a bad driving record and was a notorious speeder—in South Dakota, a lot of people fall into that category. I think the sentence may appear to be a light one, but it has effectively ended the career of a man who gave large chuncks of his life to public service and to the law. He has lost his ability to practice his profession as surely as if he had been sentenced to life in prison.
So, breaking the law is OK as long as you don’t believe there’s anyone else around to suffer for your idiocy? The fact that “the odds were in Janklow’s favor” is surely not much consolation for the family of the dead driver.
In fact, your post is a perfect demonstration of why stricter punishments are needed for this type of thing–people need to have it jammed into their thick skulls that killing another human being through negligent driving has consequences. The fact that so many people break the speed limits (as you correctly point out) suggests that the current level of punishment for killing somewhile breaking the traffic laws does not have much of a deterrent effect. Furthermore, when the person in question has shown flagrant disregard for traffic rules over a long period of time, it’s a little difficult to argue that this was just an unfortunate aberration.
I’m not advocating locking up some poor schlub who loses control on an icy road, or someone who kills a pedestrian who runs straight out into the road, giving the driver no time to stop. There are times when an accident is really no-one’s fault. But, whether you agree with posted speed limits or not, they’re there for a reason. And whether you like it or not, it’s your responsibility as a driver to keep an eye out for stop signs and other traffic signals.
I’m also curious as to why some people think that it’s sufficient punishment to lose your job if you happen to be a highly visible politician or jurist. Would the same people be happy if a plumber or a teacher did the same thing, and the only punishment was loss of employment? If not, why the double standard?
As i said before, i’m still not convinced that Janklow’s sentence was a case of preferential treatment (despite the cites provided regarding other cases), but whether or not the judge in that case was biased in favor of the politician, it certainly seems that some in this thread are happy to cut the rich and prominent more slack when it comes to breaking the law.
Does he have to be a left-handed cross-dresser with a mole on his ass? :rolleyes:
I didn’t say it was okay for Janklow to speed; he probably should have lost his license some time back. I said it was a common occurence on the rural roads of South Dakota. As a former resident, I will stand by the statement that the odds were in his favor. All I meant to say about his sentence is that it is (probably) more severe than it appears. Janklow has been forced to resign from the Congress of the United States and has lost his license to practice law. Janklow wasn’t driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs and, so far as I know, has no history of doing so. He has been found guilty of manslaughter and if the family of the deceased needs more in the way of punishment, they are welcome to sue Janklow in civil court.
How you can get from my statements to saying that I think it is okay to cut the rich and famous some slack is beyond me—that wasn’t my intent; I do think the sentence is reasonable.
As to speeding being equal to idiocy, I suppose you have never driven faster than the posted speed limit at any time in your life and therefore have the moral authority to cast stones at those who have. I wish I could have lived a blameless life.
Please explain to me how those things should influence sentencing.
According to This story Janklow’s prior’s will be made more public shortly. Possibly will gvie more of a basis for deciding if he did this thing multiple times before(with the exception of actually hitting someone).
Among the reported testimony in the trial:
Janklow knew that neighborhood quite well, knew there was a stop sign there, was apparently lucid up to the very second of the accident, and had been pulled over for running that stop sign previously. Janklow was a notorious speeder, having received 12 speeding tickets from 1990 to 1994, the years in which he was out of office as governor. Curiously enough, he was not ticketed again once he resumed office.
As I understand it, manslaughter in South Dakota must be proven by showing that the defendant acted with " “a conscious and unjustifiable disregard of a substantial risk,” over and above that of mere traffic violations. That’s what Janklow was busted for.
However, there is no minimum sentence for manslaughter in South Dakota, so Janklow could have, at least in theory, walked with a guilty charge. In that sense, at least, Janklow might not have been given what he deserved, but he got more than he could have gotten away with.
I should also add something else. Janklow’s conviction almost guarantees the ruin of his ambitious political career, which damages not only Janklow himself but the Republican party.
You might ask yourself why a four-term governor would submit to becoming the lowly Representative-at-large for the sparsely populated state of South Dakota. I offer a simple, yet un-citeable explanation.
Traditionally, the Representative in South Dakota has a supreme advantage when it comes to moving up to the Senate. Unlike most states, the SD Representative represents the entire state, and has fundraising and activist networks firmly planted throughout, placing that candidate on a near-equal footing with the Senate incumbent.
Tom Daschle and Tim Johnson both moved up to the Senate this way.
The plan had already gone awry before Janklow’s incident, but it was still a plan, according to my sources: John Thune, the previous Representative and a Republican, was personally asked by George Bush to run against Tim Johnson in 2002. He lost by only a few hundred votes. But at the same time, Janklow won Thune’s vacant seat. Why? Because Janklow was supposed to gun for Tom Daschle’s Senate seat in this election, thus knocking off a very savvy and effective Democratic leader.
Now the Republicans have only one heavy hitter to cover two open slots in South Dakota, and Thune has already announced his intention to go after Daschle. But Thune is now at a disadvantage because he already surrendered his political network to Janklow, who royally fucked it up.
The end result may be that the conservative-leaning South Dakota may wind up with two Democratic Senators–and possibly a Representative as well–for the next two to four years. And Janklow’s shot at the Senate–and the rarified political atmosphere above that–is all but gone.
It may be only 100 days in the can, but the guy will never be President now. That’s gotta hurt.
Sorry, I meant to click a smilie and missed. You were attaching conditions like no alcohol, no priors, etc. It was a small joke. But this is the pit and I don’t think I’m required to do exhaustive web searches to satisfy your request.
he didn’t “not see” the stop sign. this was a road the man had driven many times. he knew full well the stop sign was there and made the decision not to stop for it. Anyone living in South Dakota at any time mr janklow was governor would be fully aware of his penchant for speeding. the big issue is how many times he got away with it because of who he is.
I’m really not seeing how “I didn’t see the stop sign” should even remotely be a mitigating factor.
Unless the stop sign was obscured so that the average reasonable driver couldn’t see it, his failure to see it is just further evidence that he was driving recklessly, either not paying attention to road, or driving so fast that couldn’t pay proper attention to the road.
An “accident” is when something happens that couldn’t be reasonably forseen. “Criminal negligence” is when you don’t intend for bad stuff to happen, but behave like such a flaming fuckwit that bad stuff (someone getting killed, for example) becomes a reasonably forseeable outcome.
This is not an “accident”.
It would help by not shredding the concept of equal justice under the law. It damages respect for the law by establishing one set of consequences for the politically connected, and another for the rest of us. I don’t care what the effect is on Janklow, this sentence is an affront to our system of justice. Conservatives are fond of sending the right message to our children; the message here is “congressmen are better than us, and don’t have to suffer the same consequences for their actions as we do”.
And i’m still interested in why this makes a difference. The odds are usually in one’s favour, but that doesn’t change the fact that crashes happen all the time. As i suggested before, an explanation of the odds isn’t generally much consolation to the bereaved family.
He wasn’t driving drunk? Well, that changes everything. Let him go free! After all, it’s not like he’s shown a habitual contempt for traffic laws or anything like that.
All the “punishment” he received connected with his employment (i.e., losing his job as a politician, and losing his law licence) is stuff that would apply to anyone in South Dakota, as this article points out:
Given that these things are pretty much standard procedure for anyone convicted of a crime and given jail time, it’s fair to say that Janklow has received similar treatment to anyone else in SD. But the fact remains that the sentence is not “more severe than it appears.” It’s loss of job, plus 100 days in jail. Big fucking deal. Just about anyone who gets convicted of a felony loses their job, so why should we consider Janklow’s loss of employment as particularly harsh?
Because you made such a big deal out of the fact not only that he lost his job, but that the job itself was a public, political job. This suggests, in the absence of evidence from you to the contrary, that loss of his job is a greater punishment for Janklow than it would be for some other schlub who loses his job as the result of a conviction. In fact, loss of employment might be a lesser penalty for Janklow, because he is far more likely than the average citizen to be financially secure and not to need his job to pay the rent/mortgage or put food on the table.
If some Wal-Mart employee with a long history of traffic infractions ran a stop sign while speeding and killed someone, do you think that people would be satisfied with loss of job plus 100 days? Personally, i doubt it.
Spare me your faux self-deprecation. Given that i was referring directly to the Janklow case, i thought it might be obvious that i was equating idiocy with: speeding and running a stop sign, on a familiar road, after have received many speeding tickets previously, with the result that an innocent person ends up dead.
And, as i like bacon and [bSublight** and Sofa King have pointed out, this road was not exactly new territory to Janklow. Also, saying that you “missed” the stop sign doesn’t constitute much of an excuse, unless the sign itself is positioned in such a way as to be hidden from the typical motorist, and if this had been the case i’m sure it would have come up at trial. But all Janklow could muster was the diabetes defence.
The point I was trying to make was that the cases you all had factors involved that would have a big impact on the sentence. For example, people with a lengthy sheet of priors tend to get much nastier sentences (see: “Three Strikes” laws, although those are an extreme example), likewise cases involving innebriation, etc. Those cases seemed like an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I’d love to hear from a lawyer or someone with access to the relevant statistics on this: Is this guy’s sentence in line with similiar cases involving non-notable people?
I had a damn bad day yesterday. I was recovering from a severe migraine and I think I must have been more than usually pugnacious.
Yes, Janklow’s actions were and are reprehensible, his punishment is minimal, and why I thought otherwise is a mystery. I guess I need more and better medication for the damn migraines.
Anyway, I won’t post in the pit again until I feel I have better control over my emotional reactions.
Sorry to hear about your migraine, but don’t let a heightened pugnacity stop you from posting. Half the reason i hang out at these boards is for a good, pugnacious debate. I don’t always agree with people, but it doesn’t mean that i don’t enjoy the argument.