Would there not be some police investigation and possibly prison time if you recklessly caused such a serious accident?
I’m not sure how this misunderstanding could occur for so many years.
I’m not sure how this misunderstanding could occur for so many years.
Humans make a lot of mistakes and unless there were extenuating factors (DUI, for example), they are very unlikely to become criminal. In many cases, they wouldn't even be ticketed.
Given that there was a yield sign involved, it also may be a known problematic intersection. Sadly, we have a lot of those in the US too. Yield signs in places with low traffic and poor visibility are way more common than they should be.
Even if you have to show up to court, people almost always walk away after pleading "not guilty," because again, the officer who reported the incident can rarely be bothered to show up on the court date.
It's a huge contrast between the US and European approach though.
The complete inefficacy and refusal to do any work of most american police departments is absurd. It's like they still believe their primary mission to be slave retrieval and violently suppressing strikes, as if it's still 1890.
Our system is really weird.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bzdpv/you-can-kill-anyone-y...
My friend's teenaged son, while biking, was run over by a driver who did it completely intentionally. Zero charges or tickets.
From my link above
>Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault.
>But if the public is at a loss, so are prosecutors. Portland, Oregon, attorney Ray Thomas explains that DAs don’t like to go after “some soccer dad who made a mistake… The police, prosecutors, and courts don’t feel it’s a mistake that should net someone jail time… There are criminally negligent homicide laws. But [a crash] has got to be really, really bad.”
But you show nicely the differemce between history / facts (number of accidents from official statistics matched against charges and results of analysis of each accident) and feelings / story / narrative (someone says something to a journalists who then reports on it).
In the end he got 10 days in jail, 4 years probation, and had to pay the cyclist's funeral expenses - for plowing him over from behind while driving home drunk from a bar.
So apparently even if you hit someone while DUI nothing really happens.
It's appalling.