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Comment by superfrank | Hacker News Reader

Slight correction, it's not known whether he was drunk at the time or not. He drank the night before. The city and Bird claim he was still drunk, he claims he wasn't. The article states

> As for whether Peña was legally drunk or high at the time of the crash, that is unclear. A judge who ruled against the city when it asked that the lawsuit be tossed wrote in her order that no forensically defensible blood alcohol test had been administered. Avina told me that two toxicologists agreed that while cannabis may have shown up in Peña’s urine, there was no way to tell when it was ingested.

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He'd drunk 750ml of cognac. Cedars noted he was under influence and smelled of marijuana. I think he'd stopped at a weed shop at 11AM or so on day of accident.

He was going downhill on a sidewalk covered by trash. It's actually not totally clear the sidewalk issue was cause of accident. He hit a tree parallel to the uplift, the city wonders how that was possible, if he hit the uplift and pitched forward it would be weird to hit a tree parallel to the uplift. There were other issues on the hill (trash etc).

There had been no service records to fix sidewalk in 10 year search by city.

Smoking weed impairs you. He smelled of weed and stopped at a cannabis store. Even ignoring all this, he accelerated down this hill, never applied the brakes. I'm just pointing out some other factors that may have caused his accident other than the city being idiots.

> He'd drunk 750ml of cognac. Cedars noted he was under influence and smelled of marijuana. I think he'd stopped at a weed shop at 11AM or so on day of accident.

Seriously? If true, then it would have taken him 30(!) hours to metabolize all that alochol[1]. Depending on how the timeline is (eg. drinks at 10pm, interview at 12pm the next day), it seems very plausible that he's over the legal limit.

750ml * 40% ABV = 300ml of alcohol. The human body can metabolize 10ml of alochol per hour, so that works out to 30 hours to metabolize it all. Even if it was 15 hours since he drank, his ABV would still be way over the limit[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_alcohol

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content

Being drunk obviously makes take bad decisions, but doesn’t make your spine crush any more, nor does wearing helmet would make any difference.

Accidents like that happen all the time, regardless of mode of transport.

I'd risk hypothesizing that "accidents like that" happen quite a bit more to people who are drunk. This is, after all, why we have laws prohibiting "driving while intoxicated" and not, say, "driving while fabulous".

Well, driving distracted probably kills more…

I really don’t know how law works, but drunk drive prevention should be separate issue from attributing malice. Do we really incarcerate people who get t-boned while hungover?

> He'd drunk 750ml of cognac. Cedars noted he was under influence and smelled of marijuana

Not arguing, but where are you getting that info. None of that was mentioned in the linked article.

> I think he'd stopped at a weed shop at 11AM or so on day of accident.

That doesn't really mean much. Going to a weed store doesn't mean you are intoxicated and it could explain why he smelled like weed.

I agree with you that he's at fault, all I was saying was that I've yet to see anything that proves he was intoxicated.

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