The default needs to move to charging every driver involved in a fatal crash with manslaughter. Currently the police won't even perform basic investigative work that would make any charge possible.
That is not the correct analogy for this accident. The correct analogy is "Someone runs across a live firing range." The shooters would not be charged.
We know that kids are unpredictable, adults get distracted, and reducing vehicle speed reduces the chance of a collision being fatal: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/r...
We don't need to accept that roads are deadly places for non-drivers. We should strive to make our environment more liveable - by changing road design, vehicle safety features and driver attitudes - and this includes enforcement.
It's accurate from a safety perspective, but otherwise a roadway is not like a firing range.
The streets are paid for by every citizen, yet pedestrians have to adapt to car traffic, even though they are not the ones carrying a weapon.
Accidents do happen; you can't make the world perfect because it is full of imperfect and sometimes irrational (like a 4 year old) people. Personally, I drive extra slow in residential areas just so I can hopefully prevent something like this from happening to someone's child.
In civilized society, there is some evidentiary threshold for arrest and initiating charges. Manslaughter is a crime with specific elements; the absence of sufficient evidence of those elements makes it inappropriate ton arrest or charge.
The absence, as the police expressly found upon initial investigation, of evidence of even negligence in the operation of the vehicle rightly would foreclose such arrest. (And presumably the only reason the police stated that it because it was a threshold issue that, had it gone otherwise, there would have been an arrest.)
On top of the other points people have made about why this is a bad idea, it would also probably make people somewhat more likely to avoid reporting the crime all together in situations with no witnesses.
One time I was riding my bike when nearly the exact same thing happened to me as this woman, only instead of a small child the person was an older man. He, looking for traffic the wrong way on a one-way street, mistakenly thought it was safe to run across the road. I was doing the speed limit (60kph) when I hit him, full force, and sent him tumbling down the hill about 15 feet.
It wasn't my fault at all, but that guy was totally wrecked. I was a bit sore, but overall I was fine. Him on the other hand - his body helped break my bike frame (bent one tube, snapped another right from its welds, broke my wheel, ripped cables free), he had nothing to protect his head, and he looked frail to begin with. It was bad.
Should I have been charged for that? I don't think so. He did it far too suddenly for me to do much more than hit my brakes. I felt awful about it, but I definitely don't feel responsible for it.
If I'd been going the wrong way, he was at a cross walk, or something - something where I should have been more prepared to stop or avoid him - then absolutely. But sometimes pedestrians make really bad calls and road users just aren't at fault.
We should all be safe to make mistakes trying to walk somewhere without risk of serious injury or death from our fellow road users.
That's recklessly fast for a vehicle people are far less likely to hear, see, or be familiar with judging the speed of. Could he had seen you, and figured you were compent enough to slow down & avoid slamming into him?
In Italy they have introduced the crime of “automobilistic manslaughter”. It made no difference whatsoever. Nobody wakes up thinking “Today I’ll drive fast and maybe kill someone”, and nobody drives thinking “oh I must be careful or I’ll murder someone”. People just go from A to B as fast as possible. There is only so much fear of the Law you can put into them, and it doesn’t work at all when the triggering event (death) is so huge that most brains simply cannot process it or imagine it.
What really makes a difference is trying to build an environment where people don’t drive at all, or they do in segregated roads away from pedestrian traffic, as well has having speed bumps and so on.
What we need is better prevention and less cars.
What an utterly silly opinion, anyway.