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“Speed in and of itself is not reckless”

More Rumsfeldian parsings from the bizarre world of traffic law:

“Jockers said Danks was driving 59 mph in a 45-mph zone – or 14 mph over the speed limit – but speed alone is not sufficient to level a charge of vehicular homicide, he said. If Danks had been weaving through traffic or changing lanes before the collision, he might have been charged with a more serious offense, Jockers said.

Given that the chances that a pedestrian will live or die when struck by a car rises exponentially with speed, it seems strange to leave it out of the equation.

“His overall driving pattern did not rise to the level of recklessness, which is what you have to have to prove if you want to charge someone with vehicular homicide,” Jockers said. “Speed in and of itself is not reckless.”

Note the the “millionaire DWI killer,” in another case, was said to be going 60 mph in Manhattan. Good thing he didn’t change lanes — they would have thrown the book at him!

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 6:11 am and is filed under Traffic Enforcement, Traffic Laws, Traffic safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to ““Speed in and of itself is not reckless””

  1. Jack Says:
    January 12th, 2009 at 2:33 pm

    “Speeding not reckless” makes Orwell’s Doublespeak doubly painful.

  2. Gary Kavanagh Says:
    January 13th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

    Ridicules, speeding is always reckless. I’m tired of cop out excuses for accidents, things like accident believed to be caused by rain, how about accident caused by speeding in unsafe conditions, it’s not the rains fault drivers crash.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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