Basically, Jr. is driving recklessly through traffic, crashes, and takes down a power pole.
Would-be rescuers are electrocuted when they try to help him, due to the downed power lines.
I’m all for piling on charges to really crush a criminal who has hurt or victimized someone, but this may reach a little far.
If he had hit someone, I say charge him, but you can’t foresee this type of thing.
I know if you rob a bank, and a responding officer is hurt or killed, it’s on you, but their job is to come after you. I didn’t think civilians had that “protection”.
The intersection is on a residential street. He’s driving at a recklessly high rate of speed at night.
Note that the friend is admitting speeding up to 50 mph, so 70 mph would not be unlikely.
It looks like the rescuers didn’t see the wires.
Good god. Passing people in the center lane, driving 70 mph through a residential neighborhood. Yes, charge him with vehicular manslaughter, which he has been.
Let’s say he hit the power pole, and it fell onto another car, killing the occupants. Unforseen, but a direct consequence of reckless driving. I think this situation can be compared to that. I don’t think you get to say that you didn’t think the downed power line you caused by driving recklessly would hurt anyone.
I think the issue is that he couldn’t foresee that his driving recklessly would bring down a power line.
But I’m all for making someone who is reckless pay for all the actual consequence, foreseen or unforeseen. He might not have foreseen what actually did happen, but he certainly could foresee stuff like fatal collisions which didn’t.
I think that downing a pole and causing an electrical hazard is in fact a foreseeable consequence of reckless driving. Maybe not a guaranteed outcome, but then neither is any specific outcome.
Power poles are not a rare or unexpected object to find on the side of the road.
The danger from a downed pole is also a foreseeable consequence when trying to help the person who crashed his car into it. It might be a tough call in the end, depending on the law that would apply. I don’t have any problem with throwing the book at him though.
Rescuing someone from immediate physical danger very often poses some risk of injury to the rescuer, but many times people will still try to so (and thank goodness for that!). This is not a good reason to absolve a deliberately reckless driver of legal consequences resulting from injuries sustained by rescuers, though. Quite the opposite, I’d argue: the driver should not have been doing things that he knew might result in well-meaning bystanders putting themselves in harm’s way for his benefit.
I wouldn’t argue the principle, but what the law says will be important here. There must be some level of disconnection between events where you can’t hold the driver responsible. At least in this case there is no question that the driver was reckless, and violating the law.
I can think of situations where I might have trouble justifying holding this guy responsible for his rescuer’s injuries, sure. If they’d been caused by a freak roadway meteor strike, for example, because who expects that to happen? But this dude was driving recklessly on streets that he had to know were lined with electrified cables, and it doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that smacking into one of those might lead to trouble.
My laymen’s understanding of criminal negligence (which often leads to manslaughter convictions) is that if you are doing something illegal, regardless of your intent to maim or kill, you can be held legally culpable for manslaughter. If there is no malice aforethought, it’s involuntary manslaughter. If someone can prove that you were thinking, “I’m gonna drive like a maniac and I don’t care if I kill anyone who gets in my way!” then you probably could be found guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
So this guy seems guilty of manslaughter in the least, to me, since his illegal actions directly lead to the deaths of the people who tried to help.
When you go driving 70mph through a residential street at night, it’s not that hard to predict that something is likely to go wrong, and it won’t be too unexpected if people die or get thoroughly hurt in the process. That’s why it’s against the frigging law in the first place!
Now, it may take a certain amount of creativity to predict in advance exactly how things will go wrong. You might not have predicted the electricity poles. But that the night is going to end in bloodshed and tears, is a rather plausible outcome in itself. It’s not like doing something illegal but very unlikely to cause physical harm, like cheating on your taxes, and then killing someone via death-by-papercut through a fantastically improbable series of events.
Bottom line, he did something which was very likely to cause harm and which is illegal for that very reason, and it did indeed cause harm. Surprise, surprise.
IANAL, but second degree murder requires intent. That doesn’t seem possible under the circumstances to prove that.
He is facing vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, which he could face several years in prison.
This is the streethe was turning onto when he lost control. Had he navigated the turn he still clearly he should not have been going that fast down that narrow of a street.