And, more seriously, if folks are thinking that 7 years is too much for the traffic cone incident, imagine seeing a furious guy rear back and throw one at your car while you’re driving at normal city speeds. That would be strange and terrifying enough that, even if it didn’t hit your windshield, it could cause a swerve and a serious accident.
I’m not a giant fan of long prison sentences in general, but as long as we have them, this doesn’t seem out of line with other long prison sentences.
Well, I suppose you could argue that a traffic cone flying toward you is a self-warning hazard. Kind of like soap being self-cleaning.
Several years ago, I lost a significant amount of weight. I was given escitalopram, and gained all of it back and then some. I have spent the last year working on my weight loss. I’ve finally lost what I gained, and am a little lower than I was.
None of this “made” me do anything to commit a felony.
Seek out therapy. Talk to your PO.
That second coneing video made me laugh until I cried. It’s been a long year.
Yes.
Off-topic, I know. But until we get over this bullshit about having to take meds for psychiatric reasons, and making it some secret, shameful thing, we’re not going to be able to fix a lot of stuff.
And, parenthetically, until we cover psychiatric care and meds like we cover anything else, whether through private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other insurance program.
The brain is an organ, same as a kidney or an intestine or whatever.
Lt Wharf, take these people to the brig.
Is this a whoosh?
Some people get less than seven years for actually killing someone.
And if some yayhoo threw a cone at me, well, absolutely nothing would happen, even if it hit the windshield. It isn’t going to punch through and impale me with its coneness.
But it could create such a startle reaction (or shatter your windshield and effectively blind you) that you steered your car into oncoming traffic where you were killed by a tractor-trailer going 60mph in the other direction.
It’s not a trivial offense.
A tractor trailer full of bowling balls, which got loose and bounced into a bus full of nuns taking orphans to the zoo, and the bus hit a gas tanker truck which exploded and burned down a bridge post and twenty cars fell into the Mississippi river.
Seven years is still too much.
Without anyone getting hurt, even getting jail time for malicious cone-tossing seems a stretch.
Unless you’re black in a red state.
I very strongly disagree. Throwing anything at a vehicle moving at a decent speed should be punished severely. I can agree that 7 years might be far too long but some jail time isn’t out of line. Here is a discussion with lawyers about the potential consequences of egging a moving car, and you could potentially serve jailtime depending on what kind of a record you have. The OP claimed a previous crime that had a 3 1/2 year sentence that we can only speculate about, but he did claim to be on supervised probation while committing the second crime and as the lawyers in the thread state, committing a crime on probation makes it far more likely to receive jail time.
https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-i-be-arrested-for-egging-a-car--2911529.html
Keep in mind that an egg might of course startle someone into an accident, or obscure their vision if splattered the wrong way on a windshield, but doesn’t have the potential for damage that a traffic cone might have. An already-cracked window could shatter, or if it struck someone on the head while the window was down it might cause serious injury (while driving at 35 MPH) which itself is bad enough, but that is also very likely to cause an accident. To me the concern is less the potential direct damage you are doing (though that is bad enough) but the damage that the vehicle itself might do once you cause it to lose control.
In the OP’s fantasy situation where nobody was hurt I’d agree, but in your hypothetical situation where multiple fatalities resulted, maybe not. It is at least debatable.
In that case you don’t even necessarily need to do anything at all.
Where is it that one gets a federal felony conviction for chucking an item into traffic?
Was it tossed at an FBI agent’s car or into a presidential motorcade?
The OP didn’t say anything about “federal.” I think Knowed Out introduced that idea in post 6. It may be an autocorrect error, and he may have meant “felony.”
Yes, I meant “felony.” Brain fart.
The OP also mentioned gaining weight from his medication. How does that happen? Pills weigh milligrams.
The Mayo Clinic has suggestions for how weight gain may coincide with (while not necessarily being caused by) taking medication.
The examples here are for antidepressants, which seem plausible if we want to humor this story.
Really? I thought the Pit was the Black Hole of forums; once it enters it can’t ever come out.
Hey now… Scientologists do exist, you know.
(cant find the trash can to delete this)
I know it’s not really relevant here any longer, but just as a matter of interest any traffic violation inside a National Park is a federal ticket. So I assume if you tossed a cone at car on a road inside a National Park and seriously hurt someone you’d be doing federal time. Especially if the cone was the top of a hoodoo.
The legend is that once every thousand years Satan lets a soul escape Hell in order to give others false hope that they too can escape. It is no fun if they totally give up.