Let me be more specific, since your answer is technically accurate but not responsive to the context in which I asked my question:
Since you relate the story and then ask why the driver was not charged with manslaughter, you presumably believe that this story illustrates the crime of manslaughter.
What are the elements of the crime of manslaughter, and where does each appear in this story?
And of course not everyone who happens to be driving a particular car, owns said car…
Well hey, he could be an owner or administrator of the nursing home. And I’m sure Ghana has white people too. But yeah, it is distressing how quick some people are to paint their own images or heroes and villains on top of reality.
images of heroes and villains
I just watched the video, which has a few shots of the McDonald’s in question, and it does nothing to change my mind that he had to have been accelerating away from the drive through too fast when he crushed the woman. The window was several feet from the corner of the building, and so he would have had to travel forward several feet before hitting the divider.
The Navigator was in good shape and a recent model, implying that he probably bought it new (it said he’d had it about a year). If he wasn’t rich, he was wasting a huge portion of his income in car payments.
So you think your little fender bender compares to a fatal accident? Of course you were issued a ticket right away. You were expecting the CSI crew to come out? I have seen many fatal accidents. I have never seen an arrest made on the spot except in the case of DWI. Even then they only get charged with the DWI until later. For a fatal there is usually a full accident reconstruction. There are taped witness interviews. If it is not an obvious DWI the driver is usually asked to take a blood test anyway to rule out impairment (sometimes compelled by court order) it takes a while before the test comes back. Then it may go to the grand jury. There is no need to rush to arrest someone. They have time to get it right. These are not imponderables.
Funny you should say so! My job happens to involve auto finance, and I am in a position to tell you that many non-rich people do exactly that.
Yeah, pretty funny.
It went from “Rich white guy in his brand new $50K Lincoln Navigator blabbing on his cell phone mad about his order taking off like a bat out of hell hitting a pedestrian”
when in reality it was
“Young black man from Ghana who works at a nursing home driving a used navigator (a 2000 used navigator runs around $12K) has foot slip off brake while reaching for food at a drive-thru and crushes pedestrian between vehicle and landscapping.”
That doesn’t seem to be in dispute. Actual speed, distance travelled and probable cause of acceleration are being investigated and the story will probably be forgotten when the information is available.
This has a bearing exactly how?
Do you still stand by this statement
now that you know the facts? Or would you like to earn some respect around here and admit that you jumped to conclusions in the absence of facts, and attempt not to do that so quickly in the future?
Uh, the post you are quoting is quite void of the terms accident and mistake, and seems to be written to deliberately convey the subtleties of the situation. It is almost as if you are quoting his post, but actually responding to somebody elses.
But (and certainly not a lawyer, nor a Diogenes, but something of a cynic) “accident or mistake” is different from “reckless or careless”, isn’t it?
Roddy
No, I stand by it. The race of the person who was crushed hasn’t changed, just the race of the driver. Rich black guys can get away with a lot too.
And everybody seems to be taking the driver’s account of events as gospel. The police were the ones who reported that he was talking on the cel phone, that he may have driven off too fast because he was upset about his order. Of course he’s going to say “my foot slipped”, that doesn’t explain how he picked up so much speed so quickly and travelled that far.
Why wasn’t he taken into custody and given a blood test?
Yes. But the point is that a mere accident in which someone dies is not enough to create the crime of manslaughter. Simple negligence which results in someone’s death is not enough to create the crime of manslaughter. The negligence has to rise to a criminal or reckless level.
I’m wondering what, in the story, is evidence of criminal negligence.
Waiting for proof that the driver was indeed “rich”… (although I guess, as this thread indicates, facts ain’t that big a deal)
There is such a thing as Misdemeanor Manslaughter.
I definitely allowed my imagination to fill in the blanks. :smack:
Won’t SOMEBODY think of the rich people. :rolleyes:
What facts has Blanche refused to acknowledge?
Apparently you’ve never been in a high powered heavy automatic vehicle.
You don’t need to hit the gas. You take your foot off the brake and the thing is going to roll forward with a lot of weight behind it.
You can do a lot of damage within 10 feet with a tank like that without ever stepping foot on the accelerator.
I will admit that I’m unfamiliar with such large vehicles, but can they truly cover ten feet so quickly that the driver wouldn’t be able to react and put his foot back on the brake?
On my maternal side, my family is mixed black and Native American, and mostly middle and upper middle class. They are located in NYC, Long Island and upstate NY mostly.
On my paternal side my family is Sicilian, and tops out, on a good day, at middle class. They’re now located mostly in central and southern Florida.
Based on purely anecdotal data, well-off blacks are still treated worse than less well-off whites.
I don’t hold any story to be the absolute truth. I’m willing to wait until the facts are fully released - until then, I go with the best available data. If the data changes, I will fully re-evaluate my positions, and won’t doggedly protect one based on bad data. One piece of that data clearly shows that despite the horrific accident, the police did not believe him to be impaired in any way. The few officers I know deal with drunk and high people constantly. They know what to look for and what constitutes reasonable suspicion. So either this man was as cool a customer as possible, cool enough to fool everyone on scene, or he wasn’t impaired. Smart money would be on option B.