The Law, It’s a Funny Thing
Following up on a story I mentioned a while back, a driver in DeKalb County, Georgia, who struck and killed a child at a crosswalk in front of a school, despite a crossing guard and a line of stopped cars, has been charged with “misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter.” My first question is: Do the words misdemeanor and manslaughter appear anywhere else together save the curious field of traffic law?
The second is a bit from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story:
“Misdemeanors can be punished by up to one year in jail. State law makes vehicular homicide a misdemeanor except in certain cases such as drunken driving or ignoring a stop sign on a stopped school bus.”
Well, first, if a driver claims to not see the stop sign on a stopped school bus, is that the same as ignoring it? Second, is there any reason for a driver to less cautious at a cross-walk in front of a school than around a school-bus dispensing children? If the law makes legal protections for children being dropped off from a bus, why wouldn’t it do the same when they are in a protected crosswalk, under the care of a crossing guard?
(Thanks Lucas)
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 6:58 am and is filed under Traffic Laws. 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.
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March 31st, 2009 at 8:51 am
“My first question is: Do the words misdemeanor and manslaughter appear anywhere else together save the curious field of traffic law?”
Yes. When unintentional death occurs as the result of an illegal act, the person responsible for the death is guilty of homicide. If the underlying act is a felony the charge is felony-murder. If the underlying act is a misdemeanor the charge is misdemeanor-manslaughter.
A basic tenet of our criminal justice system is that there has to be intent for an act to be a crime, the thinking being that there is no deterrent value for unintentional acts. What felony-murder and misdemeanor-manslaughter do is allow for enhanced punishment for the underlying act, due to the severity of the consequences, since the death itself is not a criminal act since it was accidental.
Note that many states have “decriminalized” their traffic codes in recent years, making offenses that were misdemeanors civil offenses. This was done to strip defendants of criminal rights so that traffic cases could be heard in traffic courts and basically make it easier to get convictions. A side effect is that there is generally no consequence for killing or injuring someone in a civil infraction, which leads to puzzling outcomes like Robert Novak getting a $50 ticket after running down a pedestrian in a crosswalk.
The whole notion of intent is tricky when it comes to driving because so much of driving is done without conscious thought. In drunk driving cases there is also the problem that impairment diminishes the ability to form intent. Legislatures have responded by making drunk driving an intent-less crime.
March 31st, 2009 at 9:17 am
Thanks Nick for the elucidation. I was interested in your comment, “a basic tenet of our criminal justice system is that there has to be intent for an act to be a crime, the thinking being that there is no deterrent value for unintentional acts,” and wondered if we need some whole new way to think about this in light of the act of driving, in which few deaths on the road are “intentional” as we think of it (in the sense that someone had in mind to kill someone), but a great majority, rather than being unforeseen “acts of God,” nevertheless involve either negligence or violation of a traffic law.