Preach it, brother! That’s all I have to say. Preach it!
ETA: I second your second post, too.
You could say the same for a million activities that go on in a car. They wouldn’t call it murder if a person looked away to grab a map, or a french fry, or to wipe the baby’s nose. All those activities are dangerous and they happen all the time.
I’m not defending cell phone talkers, texters, or CD-fucker-arounders. They are all activities that take your attention away from the task at hand and people who engage in these activities have an overblown sense of self-importance. There is nothing so important that it can’t wait until your trip is over or you’ve pulled off the road. I have a much bigger problem with texters than I do with talkers, but in my opinion it still isn’t murder.
And I agree the guy had no right to be on the road. I don’t see how that would change a manslaughter vs. murder decision.
I agree. Is it especially offensive when the negligence involves a cell phone? It sure feels that way.
I’ve got mixed feelings here.
It’s obvious to me that this yahoo had no business driving, let alone texting while driving.
It’s obvious to me that he should be slammed, and slammed hard, by the criminal justice system for his demonstrated recklessness, and indifference to the risk he was posing to others.
That doesn’t mean that I think that he should be convicted of second degree murder. I’m not going to say that I don’t think he should be tried for that - for the most part I’m willing to allow prosecutorial discretion come into play for the specific charges tried. And if he does get convicted of it, I’m not going to cry any tears, nor feel that he was unjustly charged. I’m simply saying that I would need to be convinced that his actions met the requirements for second degree murder. Which, I’ll admit, is one of the things that a trial is supposed to do.
Having said all that, I’ve also got to express my support for monstro’s post. I do not, for example, believe that using a cell phone is automatically more distracting to the driver than driving with a fractious toddler in the vehicle. She’s right that there are a number of distractions that are “allowed” to impinge upon the driver’s attention, simply because we accept them as normal. Or in the case of the toddler, I can’t see how one would avoid the situation: Does the state require a car-babysitter for any travel with a toddler to prevent the driver from being distracted by the hypothetical actions of the toddler? Obviously I don’t think that’s a reasonable position.
I don’t know where the line should be. I would like to think that more people could learn to accept that pulling over to deal with the shit going on that’s not related to driving duties might be an acceptable answer, but I am skeptical that it would ever catch on.
In the meantime I’m going to keep my eye on the bus drivers in town (while riding the bus, that is) and continue to rat them out when I catch them breaking company policy and using a cell phone while driving.
“Offensive” is neither here nor there. It is especially dangerous with a cell phone because the distraction from the road is greater while conversing on a cell phone than eating french fries or some of the other piddly things that people do while driving. Studies show that talking on a cell phone causes the same level of impairment as driving drunk. This is true even for hands free devices. It isn’t the fiddling with the hands that makes it dangerous so much as the level of concentration which must be diverted from the task at hand to focus on a phone conversation. Toss in the fact that the majority of these conversations are utterly unimportant and you have an aggravated level of obnoxious self-absorbtion and reckless indifference. It’s not the same thing as eating or adjusting the radio. That’s just a canard thrown out by people who want to justify their own bad habits.
I agree with the concept that it is murder. He knew that texting while driving was negligent, he chose to do it anyway. It’s the same reason that I think drunk/stoned drivers who kill people should be tried for murder.
A toddler should be strapped into a car seat and hence, not be able to do anything which would be dangerous to the driver or other passengers. I have plenty of experience driving with toddlers in the car. I do it on a daily basis. When they’re properly confined in their rocket seats, they can’t do anything more distracting than scream and any parent who has made it to the toddler stage is already completely inured to mere screaming.
It’s all jurisdictional. But generally…
Criminal homicide is causing the death of another unlawfully (so that’ll exclude soldiers at war, etc.). But criminal homicide in and of itself isn’t a punishable crime. It needs to be categorized:
First degree murder is criminal homicide with premeditation and malice aforethought. It is a fairly common (and reversible) error for the court to confuse or conflate “premeditation” with “aforethought.” Premeditation must involve actual planning: lying in wait, using poison, stuff like that. Malice aforethought is a very complicated doctrine, but can include gross negligence.
Second degree murder is criminal homicide with malice aforethought but without premeditation.
Third degree murder is an unusual jurisprudential niche. I have no idea whether there is any such thing in the jurisdiction in question, and if there is, I don’t know what the elements of the crime are.
Voluntary manslaughter is criminal homicide without malice aforethought. Often the “crime of passion.”
Involuntary manslaughter is criminal homicide without malice aforethought, but with “recklessness” or “gross negligence.”
Homicide caused by mere negligence (not “gross” or “criminal” negligence) is often not a crime at all, or is some lesser degree of manslaughter
Our texting driver was certainly negligent. And it is certainly possible that his negligence will be found to rise to the level of criminal negligence. But I don’t see where they’re gonna find premeditation. IMO, the absolute highest charge the driver could get would be 2nd degree murder, and involuntary manslaughter seems more appropriate.
Of course, when this gets to civil court, there is no need to prove criminal negligence. The guy will have a lot more trouble in that venue.
Diogenes, either my experience with The Monster was with a defective seat, or your toddlers are exceptionally well-behaved. I have seen toddlers wriggle their way out of car seats. FTM, my personal experience with The Monster was with a car seat that met all current regulations, and I will swear it was completely fastened in. She worked her way out, anyways. (So I pulled over to deal with the situation.) While I agree that any parent who has made it to the toddler stage should be inured to mere screaming, I will testify that this is not true for all parents. A trip to any local toy store should be sufficient to convince most people of that.
My disagreement isn’t with what I believe the proper behavior of drivers should be. It’s with where the law should be placed. IMNSHO one aspect of the law is to provide a bar against behaviors that are determined to be dangerous, when practiced by a significant fraction of the population. That fraction need not be a majority of the populace, nor even a majority of the described minority, in this case, parents or guardians of small children. It need only be a perceived trait performed by a fraction of that population, and legal bars may be raised.
My belief is that a general law based upon driver distraction, as its raison d’etre, that doesn’t address those drivers who are distracted by fractious children, or by eating in a car, or by hunting for just the right radio station, or CD, is going to leave a loophole for someone. FTM, I’ve seen serious claims from people who want to ban books on tape, or even talking with the driver of a vehicle, because it’s an unacceptable distraction in their personal experience, for someone operating heavy equipment.
One of the things that I think should be emphasized is that familiarity with automobiles has desensitized much of the public to the reality of what they’re doing: I have no proof, but I suspect that if we were to ask a proverbial cross-section of American society whether people should operate multi-ton equipment at high speed, while using a cell phone, or texting, the majority would respond with some variation of, “Hell, no!” And asking a few questions later, whether they’d ever used a cell phone while driving, you’d get the majority answering in the affirmative.
This past summer I was on a jury for a civil case involving an MVA. I was shocked by how many of my fellow jurors didn’t think that the automatic response, if blinded by another vehicle’s lights while knowingly exceeding the speed limit, should be slowing down, if not stopping and pulling over. And this was with clear-cut laws on the books saying that, in case of accident the vehicle that was speeding is at fault, unless proven otherwise.
If the law is written contrary to what the population thinks it should mean, it won’t get enforced: jury nullification will, and does, happen.
I can’t prove that many parents are grossly distracted by toddlers while driving. I can point to at least one parent in my limited experience who is. FTM, drunk-driving laws are, on the books, pretty firm and straightforward. And still drunk drivers involved in fatal accidents are often found to have had a history of slaps on the wrist after being cited for it, in the past, simply because of the divergence between what the law the says, and what society will accept as excuses.
Barring a huge grassroots campaign, I believe that any attempt to make all wireless communication illegal by drivers of vehicles is impossible. In a large part because some of the worst offenders are those people charged with writing, and enforcing the laws.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I think it’s worth repeating as long as the woman is still in office. A local state representative had been chair of the Assembly’s Drunk driving and drug committee. And got caught driving drunk about 8 years ago, now. At the time of her sentencing (suspended, in case you were wondering) she said something about how this experience would enhance her work on the committee. :smack: :mad:
There should be no cell phone usage in automobiles. I have followed coworkers down an expressway when they got a business call. They could have been pulled over for drunk driving
they were so sloppy. There is nothing so important that it can not wait til you pull over.
Well, actually it’s not “a canard thrown out by people who want to justify their own bad habits” when that person doesn’t own a cell phone or have a CD player in the car. The degree of attention that children and other (not all) distractions require in the car are equally dangerous in many cases. The point I was making is that an accident due to those other distractions would not receive an outcry for a murder charge, even though they resulted in someone’s death. The mother who is fiddling with the baby had no more intention of killing someone than the cellphone talker did, but both knew that it would be dangerous to divert their attention to that activity.
Absolutely, everyone knows that babies get terrible reception.
What?
I agree with you to a point (and I don’t call them “accidents” any more, when almost all vehicular collisions are preventable); just because people talk on cellphones, and text, and eat, and look after their kids, and put on makeup while driving doesn’t make cellphones and texting less bad; it just makes all those things equally bad. This is a real bugaboo for my husband and me, how carelessly us North Americans look at something as common and dangerous as driving, and how little we require training and monitoring for the privilege of operating a motor vehicle.
A quick search turns up a figure of 1.2 million people killed worldwide in vehicle collisions annually, with 48 million injured, and we just look at this like a fact of life; people get killed/permanently injured on the road all the time, what can you do? Oh, make cars safer, that’s the only thing we can do. Can’t possibly train drivers better, that’s stepping on your god-given right to drive with completely inadequate training. Or an even better argument, it would cost too much to require proper training and monitoring of driving. Yes, I’m sure that would cost much more than the ongoing healthcare for the millions of people injured every year. And even if it does cost more, what price are you going to put on the lives of every person in the world who is in danger from all the incompetent drivers around them? If a drug was killing 1.2 million people annually, you’d hope it would be pulled from the market, but we don’t blink an eye at 1.2 million car deaths a year. It’s just the cost of doing business.
Okay, I think I’m done. For now. 
I don’t believe anyone here is advocating for murder 1. I think the confusion started with post 12.
When I answered kalhoun in post #15 I did not make myself clear
If I had stopped right here, I would have been fine. Instead I added the following (meaning the difference between murder 1 and murder 2) which muddied the waters.
In the case I sat on, the defendant was charged with both murder 1 and murder 2. It was not a crime of passion. It was up to us, the jury to decide if he went down for murder 1 or 2.
ETA: Once again I am not pushing for a murder 2 indictment, all I am saying is that depending on local laws, it could happen.
Then it’s ignorance of just how distracting cell phones really are.
I don’t believe the studies back you up on this.
I don’t believe those other distractions have anywhere near the same potential to cause accidents. A hypothetical mother turning around in the drivers’ seat to fiddle with a baby is an extreme (and in my opinion, implausible) example but this hypothetical mother would indeed be guilty of extreme negligence and such a scenario does not excuse the cell phone texter in any way.
Do you have a problem with charging drunk drivers with vehicular homicide when they kill people?
The company my husband works for, a major construction management company, pays massive lip service to the idea of safety in the workplace, but they are dragging their feet to the point of not moving at all on the idea of banning cellphone usage by employees on company time. This after my husband created a water-tight proposal showing them beyond a shadow of a doubt that cellphone usage while driving is just plain dangerous, and an obvious safety issue. The only thing he can figure is that the executives in charge of making this decision are some of the worst offenders. That makes my blood pressure sky-rocket, if I let myself think about it too much.
what kind of man does not marry his girlfriend of 12 years whom he had 4 children with? …
From Virginia’s Worker’s Compensation Program:
In my opinion, drunk driving homocides are a different classification. It’s not a distraction; it’s a self-induced impairment. I have no problem with the charges in those cases.
Forgot to add this link:
http://www.expertlaw.com/library/car-accidents/distracted-driver.html#1
Which talks about how distracting children can be.
So is talking on a cell phone.