A maximum penalty of one year for plowing into a car and causing a death? HUH???

[Lemur866]

One more thing. Brandy was cited for excessive speed. Because she rear-ended someone. It means she was traveling down the road and didn’t stop in time to avoid an accident, which is taken as proof that she was driving at excessive speed…if she was driving at a reasonable speed she would have stopped in time to avoid the accident.

But the citation doesn’t say anything about what speed she was actually traveling. The people assuming she must have been going waaaay above the speed limit–really speeding, not just a little above the speed limit, which isn’t really speeding, c’mon, everyone knows that–or that she must have been chatting on are cell phone or putting on makeup or watching a movie or some other negligent behavior, are making huge assumptions.

She rear-ended someone, which is evidence that she wasn’t driving safely. But it isn’t evidence that she was driving in a manner that reasonable people would instantly judge as unsafe. You can rear-end someone simply by misjudging your speed or not reacting to brake lights fast enough. It doesn’t require egregious unsafe behavior. Of course, maybe she had a hibachi set up in the passenger seat and was grilling some steaks and was distracted by having to flip them.

[Key_Lime_Guy]

@Lemur866

…maybe she had a hibachi set up in the passenger seat and was
grilling some steaks and was distracted by having to flip them.

If THAT’s considered illegal I’m totally screwed. mmmmm freeway steaks

[Hogwash]

Maybe she was watching Madagascar on the in-car DVD player. As we all know, those animals are so fucking funny it makes you want to plow into the back of people.

[Sal_Ammoniac]

@Mellivora capensis

Sal, as a Land Rover owner I feel I need to take issue with your post on a couple of fronts. Firstly, and for some reason I couldn’t open the link in the OP, so I’m going with the synopsis, Land Rover has more than one model. There are Freelanders, Defenders (3 main types, 90, 110, 130), and Discoveries. All of them have different weights. Depending on the model, the Freelander weighs anything between 3600 and 4500 lbs, and in fact has a very low ground clearance for a 4x4. I think it is just a tad unfair to automatically assume that because the report says it is a Land Rover, it therefore weighs 6700 pounds, has a high clearance, and that it automatically weighs more than the Honda. Do we know which model Land Rover, and for that matter, which model Honda? Maybe the Honda in this case actually weighs more than the Land Rover?

I got the 6700 lbs. figure for the Land Rover using Google. Don’t know about South Africa, but the Land Rovers you typically see in the States are big cars. And I can’t imagine, with my vast knowledge of the nature of celebrities gleaned from the National Inquirer, that Brandy was driving one of the smaller ones. And the point I’m making here is not about stopping distance (though, as Ford itself admits, “Because SUVs generally are heavier than passenger cars, they generally have greater stopping distances”), the point was about the potential damage to others in any given crash. The greater the weight of the car, the greater the impact of the crash, and the greater the danger to others – simple as that.

[magellan01]

@Apos

If in fact the court can only establish a certain degree of negligence, and no more, then they select the charge that they feel they can establish, and then that IS “adequate punishment,” regardless of your belief that you know the facts and truth of the matter better than the facts themselves, and believe that they are guilty of a more severe charge.

Blah, blah, blah…

I see that your bluster and twitiness is dialed up today. Maybe that’s why you replied to me twice without answering the questions posed. I guess that’s an answer in itself. Thanks for typing stuff though…

Pretty neat how you hit the keys and those funny marks appear on the screen, huh?