Hacker News Reader

Comment by bqe | Hacker News Reader

It isn't just cyclists, but pedestrians too. The best way to murder someone in America is to run them over with your car and say it was an accident. The other person, being dead, can't testify otherwise.

There's a particularly egregious example of an NYC taxi driver killing a child when the pedestrians had the right of way[1]. No charges other than a minor traffic ticket.

[1]: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/cabbie-mowed-m...

View on HN

You can also kill someone in another car and not be charged and convicted, unless you did it purposefully or were driving with reckless disregard for human life.

It's not that pedestrians and cyclists are treated as a special case.

Right, it's that being in a car is treated as a special case where you can kill someone and the legal system mostly doesn't care unless it's blindingly obvious that it was intentional.

That's also known as "innocent until proven guilty". Should it rather be the driver's fault to prove that it was an accident instead of intentional? How might one go about proving such a thing?

I think the suggestion is rather that it should be a felony to kill someone in an accident, unless that person was acting recklessly (e.g. running a red light).

If it's an accident the person is not a danger to society and we gain nothing by locking them away.

What else would be a suitable punishment for this freshly minted felon?

I think the argument goes something like this. We fine people who text while driving because it’s a distraction, potentially leading to dangerous situations that might otherwise be avoided. Thus, if you kill someone while texting and driving, you at least share the responsibility because you were distracted by your phone. It’s also about the responsibility to watch where you’re going with your superfast two ton hunk of metal, and to ensure that you’re not endangering others with it.

It bothers me that dead cyclists are seen as an inevitability, that “accidents happen”, rather than as the result of irresponsible behaviour.

> It bothers me that dead cyclists are seen as an inevitability, that “accidents happen”, rather than as the result of irresponsible behaviour.

Not all dead cyclists are the result of irresponsible behavior on the part of a driver.

Sometimes people die even when everyone does everything right, or at least nothing wrong. And sometimes people die when the cyclist does something irresponsible.

A few days ago I was driving down the road through a crosswalk. There were no pedestrians in sight and no visible cross traffic, so I continued through. A cyclist shot out at a high rate of speed (for a cyclist) from behind a building and shot into the crosswalk while I was checking the other side of the road and very, very nearly got hit. (And then had the temerity to scream and cuss at me, but that's adrenaline I guess.)

All it would have taken would be more me to have been driving maybe 1mph faster and he would have been toasted, but I did nothing wrong. Even if I had been watching his side of the road (I caught him in my peripheral vision) I couldn't have reacted any faster. In this case the cyclist did do something wrong (in this area he should have been behaving like a car and therefore driving in the road and coming to a complete stop as required there, not assuming the crosswalk granted him invincible right-of-way powers), but there are plenty of cases where nobody did anything irresponsible and an accident happened anyway.

Criminalizing accidents sounds to me like a way to just indulge the people who want to get rid of cars altogether.

Yes, someone linked a news article here about a tragic accident in Munich. The truck driver was cleared of all charges. Sometimes genuine accidents happen. But that's not what the article or this discussion are about, is it?

I don't know about the laws where you live, but in Germany cyclists are not permitted to use crosswalks (or, for that matter, sidewalks). It'd be stupid to assume that a motorist could see them coming, even at normal bike speeds. That's just reckless behaviour.

But these are not the cases I'm talking about. The law in places like Germany recognises that they exist and has appropriate provisions for them (see the above-mentioned article). This isn't magic, and it's not criminalising accidents. It's criminalising irresponsible behaviour while operating dangerous machinery when that behaviour has tragic consequences.

How about this: we treat owning and driving a car as the privilege it is? Whenever you start the engine, you assume full responsibility of the vehicle's behavior. If that behavior results in death or injury, your vehicle is responsible for it, and by extension, you.

This would at the very least make many very cautious behind the wheel.

So if someone deliberately commits suicide by car, that's legally on the driver?

> is treated as a special case where you can kill someone and the legal system mostly doesn't care

No, it just happens to be far more common than job-site accidents because nearly the entire population frequently uses road transportation.

If you drive a forklift into something and it falls over killing someone it would be treated in about the same way. The legal system would care even less because it didn't happen on a public road.

Granted some lawsuits would probably fly after the fact but as far as civil/criminal penalties goes a job-site accident is basically the same as a vehicle accident.

It's not a special case - you can't convict somebody of a felony murder if there was no intent to kill and it happened by accident. I.e. if you were standing on a ladder, and it suddenly collapsed and you fell on top of somebody and that person died, it's not a murder. Even if a car is not involved.

It's easier to kill a cyclist or pedestrian though, without much risk to yourself - maybe a few scratches on your car.

"But officer, he swerved into my lane" and you get a slap on the wrist, because the only other witness is dead.

Or in China when tradition says the driver pays the victims hospital expenses or (generally lesser) funeral expenses, some drivers insure it is the latter. I have even seen movies depicting this quandry.

That sounds like one of the more striking cases of something well-intentioned going horribly awry due to perverse incentives, at least on an individual scale.

Do you know which films?

The new Right Of Way law has theoretically helped this in New York, but it's rarely invoked and the consequences are usually a few thousand dollars and cancellation of your driver's license. I don't think anyone has ever seen jail time for it, and the only cases that are prosecuted under this law are cut-and-dry, video evidence available, driver clearly behaved recklessly and killed someone.

I saw a PSA the other day reminding pedestrians that you do not have armor and that cars act like they own the road because they do. The best thing you can do as a pedestrian or cyclist is to assume your are invisible and to not escalate road rage situations. Telling yourself "but I had the right of way" won't speed your convalescence.

They were already in the crosswalk when the car hit them. What should they have done, precisely? This victim blaming that happens to cyclists and pedestrians after they're hit is shameful.

Sorry, I was making a general comment and I didn't read the article because others warned it was too disturbing.

I find blaming oneself is always the best strategy in life especially in a close-call life-and-death situation. Agreed, it is self-deluding at times. And I would never apply such judgement on others especially the dead -- what would be the point.

> There's a particularly egregious example of an NYC taxi driver killing a child when the pedestrians had the right of way[1]. No charges other than a minor traffic ticket.

What charges do you think he should have been brought up on? Manslaughter?

If the father and son were in a car that had the right of way, would that also justify a manslaughter charge or is it only egregious because they were on foot?

> What charges do you think he should have been brought up on? Manslaughter?

And why not?

I think vehicular manslaughter is a reasonable charge. If you can't not plow into pedestrians who have the right of way, you are negligent.

Manslaughter if not negligent homicide. License suspended for a minimum of ten years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com