Driving is different from walking – distracted driving is a crime, isn’t it? I’ve never heard that about walking. (FWIW, that’s seriously fucked up, and I hope that guy gets what’s coming to him someday)
There’s a huge difference between that and just walking into someone. :rolleyes: I’m not saying the person who did so to Annie wasn’t a dick, but it’s not nearly the same thing. And I think you know that.
While carefully avoiding the epilogue and index?
This reminds me of an arrest of a driver that was actually shaving her private parts. This was several years ago but easily found since it was in the Keys. If I knew how to link I would. I will try. Cops: Woman Crashes Car While Shaving Her Privates - ABC News
I don’t know if she was just fiddling with her phone or texting but a lady clipped my saddlebag and knocked me and my motorcycle over. Luckily I was watching the mirror and saw she WASN’T watching the road and I had started to evade. If not she would have nailed me well and good. I was tempted to take off after her after I picked me and the Dark Ride up but I was smart enough to realize just how pissed off I was.
I’ve been lucky so far. A couple of close calls on my motorcycle where I had enough room to avoid a incident and once on foot where I saw the girl out of the corner of my eye in time to plant so she just bounced off of me.
Sometimes when I’m next to a driver texting or talking on their phone, I honk my horn in the theory that it will make them look up and remember that they’re driving a car.
Not once has anyone looked away from their phone to see what the honking is about.
Thais are notorious for not looking where they’re going, due largely to staring at their phones. But I’m a large guy, and they were the ones who got the worst of it when they collided with me. They would comically bounce off me and many times go sprawling.
When this story appeared in the Register, from England, my favorite comment on her arrest was
Nicked!
No injuries for me, but I have 5 confirmed “kills” with my pickup’s rear bumper. In every case I was driving normally, with no sudden stops etc. The only thing keeping me from painting silhouettes of little cars on the doorsill is the fear it would look bad in a legal sense. Two of those kills were courtesy of Apple’s iBaubles.
In one case, I was at a lonely Texas intersection that looked like the ending scene from Castaway (where Tom Hanks stands alone looking around). I’d been sitting there for a minute or two consulting a map, and “WHAM!”, my truck lurches forward a couple of feet. A woman in a Taurus plowed into the back, oblivious that there were other vehicles in her universe. We were literally the only two cars in sight, and could see miles of flatland in any direction.
All smartphone have accelerometers and it wouldn’t be very hard to implement a system whereby they internally log large G forces that occur when using certain apps. I for one would be happy to have such a thing mandated so long as cops are required to show reasonable cause to access the log.
I know next to nothing about criminal law, and was a pretty lousy law student, but my dim recollection was that “assault” was the threat of harm, and “battery” was the actual touching.
But who am I kidding? If I wasn’t willing to do the research back then, I’m not about to do it now! 
LOL!! I looked up as she rear ended me at a stop light. She was looking down and to her right. Her phone was found on the passenger floor board
The one and only accident I’ve been in since I started driving decades ago was due to a texter - I was in a line of vehicles waiting at a red light when suddenly a car behind me hits my pickup truck. Seriously, you didn’t see the bright red pickup filling up your windshield? No, of course not, she was looking at her phone.
Fortunately, nothing moving at great speed and no one hurt. Her insurance paid to replace the back bumper on my truck.
“Oh, no that wasn’t when I was driving. I dropped the phone. You know that a phone hitting the floor after dropping triggers the accelerometer too, right?”
Your move, prosecution.
Not saying Annie is not being truthful, but my husband and I had dinner with an Essex County (NJ) Assistant Prosecutor last night and my husband did the driving. There was a texter incident and just for conversation I mentioned Annie’s incident and the charges she relayed. I’m not going to pick everything apart, but there was much laughter.
Sure, let’s laugh at someone who got hurt because someone else wasn’t looking where they were going. Wow, you are so cool :rolleyes:
I’ll break it down for you.
The Essex County (NJ) Assistant Prosecutor was laughing at the supposed charges.
I don’t think anyone is laughing at the fact that Annie got hurt. Annie has a history of sharing…interesting interactions with other people, let’s say, and the story shared in the OP raises a lot of questions, which is why I asked for clarification. I mean, let’s take the OP completely at face value for now and say that someone was arrested and charged with assault for bumping into someone, causing her to fall down and resulted in some bruises and scrapes. If it were you, would you support this? Would you be okay with someone being jailed, with a very real possibility of prison time, over this incident? I wouldn’t. Again, assault is a very serious charge. He could lose his freedom over this. That is a big fucking life altering shitfuck of a deal which would devastate his family, friends, co workers, anyone in this person’s life who cares. It would cost thousands of dollars in court costs and legal fees. This is a proportional response to bumping into someone and scraping her knee?
So yeah. Her story doesn’t quite add up, and the reaction of LurkerinNJ’s prosecutor friend seems to support my assessment. It is a pretty laughable claim, unless there’s relevant details that were left out of the OP. So they laughed. No need to go all cyberbully victim by proxy on us.
I’m not the “cyberbully” here, friend.
Yes, there may be some exaggeration, but given Annie only has one usable hand, was significantly smaller than the other person, and does appear to have been injured in her sole usable hand the officer involved might have had some sympathy for her. If the other party got confrontational with the officer rather than admitting they did a stupid, negligent thing I could see something like those charges, even if the officer didn’t expect anything to really come of them. People who are so wrapped up in their phones they aren’t paying attention to the world around them do cause accidents and do fuck up other peoples’ lives - if this dork had wandered in front of a car and been injured or killed do you think that would have no effect on the driver? How about knocking a toddler into something hazardous? Some elderly person with fragile bones being knocked down and breaking something?
Yes, it’s easy to laugh this off as not serious, or accuse the OP of lying (something some posters are all too ready to do, and that rises to the level of bullying too often) but something that seems no big deal at first can wind up life-changing. And given just how careless/stupid people who can’t take their eyes off their phone can be, I don’t have a problem with treating these incidents as serious breaches of responsibility.
You will get a different signature to the reading in different circumstances. In the scenario you outline there will be an acceleration of 9.8m/s[sup]2[/sup] as it falls followed by an almost instantaneous rebound on impact. Very different from a car wreck.