> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.
Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...
The standard for human drivers is through the floor.
Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...
The standard for human drivers is through the floor.
When things are normal and happening all the time, they’re not reported as abnormal outcomes.
The world is a big place. Being able to think of a counter-example does not negate a general point.
those who probably have exhausted all the various escape hatches built into the "vehicular manslaughter & mutilation forgiveness program" worldwide by the automobile industry, may get a year or so in prison — usually extreme repeat offenders, high profile deaths, homicide cases, or drivers who were already criminals just having the charge thrown in.
most people who "slipped up" are just fined and forgotten, at the cost of global pedestrian safety.
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1856923/do-s...
[1]: https://gothamist.com/news/95-of-nyc-drivers-avoid-criminal-...
When the Uber self-driving car struck and killed the pedestrian, not only did the internet peanut gallery largely blame the pedestrian for the first 24 hours or so after the death, but the local police force did as well for a couple of days. I rather suspect that without the national spotlight of being the first pedestrian killed by a self-driving car, the local police force would have been happy to absolve Uber and the driver of any liability.
And the driver is at fault in the cases where the driver is at fault. 18% of pedestrian fatalities are cases where the driver was drunk. Meanwhile 30% of pedestrian fatalities are cases where the pedestrian was drunk.
Your example is actually a pretty rare cause of pedestrian fatalities because even if someone doesn't see a pedestrian, cars turning right on red are almost always traveling at low speed.
> if a driver is fast enough to kill them, then the driver is almost certainly already at fault because they were driving faster than conditions warranted.
There is a double digit percent chance of a fatality if a vehicle hits a pedestrian at 25 MPH. The vast majority of roads allow speeds of 25 MPH or more. That doesn't mean you can stop if someone without the right of way who you had no reason to expect to step out directly in front of a car suddenly does.
>>2008, nearly 40 per cent of pedestrians killed on Canadian roads were impaired, with two-thirds of them having a blood alcohol concentration more than double the legal limit. In fact, of all the fatally injured pedestrians with alcohol in their systems, fewer than one in five was at or below the legal driving limit of 0.08 blood alcohol concentration (BAC), according to the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators* (CCMTA).
https://canadasafetycouncil.org/impaired-walking/
And just try discussing drunk biking and you will be run out of town by a spandex army shouting about thier "right" to use the roads while drunk or high.
A bicycle's brakes are far less effective than a car's. I don't know how a man got to middle age not knowing this. A lot of cyclists ride like they have an invisible shield protecting them.
When I use a crosswalk, I wait until the cars stop before I cross. It's nuts to step into it assuming the cars will stop.
Or they are looking at their phones standing on the wheelchair ramp or chatting with someone, kinda going in, maybe, maybe not, and when it looks like they’ll be crossing the street parallel to yours and you start going they change their minds and cross diagonally in front of you?
Because I’m all for pedestrian safety and prioritization. But SF has gone so “safe” that it’s back to unsafe. Runners will join an intersection from behind a tree in front of a car that had stopped and was starting to go without even looking up. People join a crossing looking down or away from the flow of traffic, it’s insane to me. I find that kids cross streets much better than adults here. A kid will stop, look, check if they were seen and then proceed.
There’s no need to make eye contact. Crosswalks (or Zebras) are the ultimate "pedestrian has all the rights" element.
That's not true: 30km/h is enough to kill, and that's a very sedate speed.
Whether we like it or not, pedestrians and cyclists have to also follow the rules.
If you want change the rules, well that's a different argument to the one you appearing to make which is that certain entities should not be bound by any rules.
Meanwhile:
> Sure, it's possible for a pedestrian to be at fault, but even if they step out from behind an occluded object, if a driver is fast enough to kill them, then the driver is almost certainly already at fault because they were driving faster than conditions warranted.
"A pedestrian can be at fault in a fatality but the driver would still be at fault anyway" is apparently not a straw man.
> "A pedestrian can be at fault in a fatality but the driver would still be at fault anyway"
That's not what they actually said ... work on your reading comprehension, ability to reason, and intellectual honesty--faking up quotations is not legit. a) A pedestrian could be at fault in other scenarios, like running into the middle of the street in dark clothing at night. In California, if a pedestrian is in a crosswalk then the driver is legally at fault. b) Morally, both parties could be at fault.
I won't respond further.
The intention of the comment you accused of replying to a straw man was meant to point out that a pedestrian could be at fault instead of the driver.
That reply is pretty clearly arguing that even if the pedestrian was at fault, the driver would still have to be at fault anyway. Summarizing an argument after quoting it isn't misquoting it.
> A pedestrian could be at fault in other scenarios, like running into the middle of the street in dark clothing at night.
There is nothing to distinguish this from the original argument where the driver could still be be accused of "driving faster than conditions warranted" because visibility is lower at night.
> In California, if a pedestrian is in a crosswalk then the driver is legally at fault
And strict liability rules like that often lead to ridiculous outcomes, e.g. if someone jumps out of the back of a truck into an intersection and you then hit them, technically they were a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Or there is a pedestrian standing next to a crosswalk but they're stationary and talking on their phone without seeming to want to enter the crosswalk, so you start to proceed and then they step in front of your car.
In the real world, pedestrians don't play frogger with highways all that frequently. When you talk about pedestrians suddenly jumping onto the road, that is usually because they are in an area where pedestrian and vehicular interaction is likely--school zones, residential areas, parking lots, etc. In those scenarios... yeah, speeding is the fault here, not the pedestrian. I thought this was an obvious consideration that I didn't need to spell it out so clearly. But it turns out that the tendency to try to shift the blame from the driver to pedestrians in every scenario is just too ingrained into people, I guess...
[1] This isn't exactly a strawman--someone here was trying to argue that the driver isn't at fault in this scenario just this past week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877232
https://www.santamariasun.com/news-2/fatal-dui-case-closes-w...
Last year I was on the jury for someone who drove drunk, caused an accident, and fled the scene. They had multiple prior DUIs but still had their license.
[edit]
Some details from the story for those who don't want to click through:
An unlicensed driver drank, did some cocaine, drove on one of the more dangerous stretches of road in the area, crossed the centerline and killed someone. Probation.
Yes and no.
Here in the UK, I read/post a bit on https://road.cc about road cycling and the perils of traffic and poor road designs. There's a surprising amount of clearly illegal driving that is rarely punished severely and it's notable that due to juries being motornormative, the prosecution will often not attempt to push for "dangerous driving" and will instead go or "careless driving" as it's notoriously difficult to get a jury to give a guilty verdict for "dangerous". I suspect a lot of jurors are thinking "I sometimes don't pay attention when driving, so that could have been me".
There's also a lot of media bias (I'm looking at you, BBC) with reporting of RTCs (Road Traffic Collisions - they should not be referred to as "accidents" as that is loaded language), especially when one of the participants is a cyclist. A lot of stories are framed as "car and cyclist in collision", rather than "driver and cyclist in collision" or even "car driven into cyclist" (that last one may be contentious, though I propose that it is usually factual). The issue is the use of the "passive" framing so that it doesn't give the impressions that a driver is likely to be at fault (percentage wise, driver inattention is the most likely cause of RTCs). See https://www.rc-rg.com/home for more details on reporting guidelines.
Also, most RTCs don't even merit a news report as they are so commonplace.
What does a jail sentence deter? ("[no] gross negligence [...] wasn’t engaging in a race or sideshow, was not texting, and was not under influence")
This person was 80 years old with no criminal record, needs to pay $67400 in restitution, do 200 hours of community service, isn't allowed to drive for 3 years but "never intends to drive again". Apologised to the family of the victims. She's taking responsibility and I can't imagine forced labor at that age is fun. What more can you ask for here? The family member isn't coming back if she gets what's not unlikely to be a life sentence
Edit:
> She told a witness at the scene that she was trying to park her car when she accidentally moved her foot to the gas pedal.
This seems to happen a lot. Don't know about statistics but this happened to someone I know at 50yo (thankfully only damaged their own car minorly), and you hear it on the news with some regularity. Maybe the gas needs to be in a fundamentally different spot from the brake? We can jail the people to whom it happens, sure, but I can understand a judge using their head instead of their heart. The real solution must come either from the automotive industry or legislation
Laws are also meant to deter bad behavior, people who aren't able to drive safely should know there will be consequences
Other irresponsible drivers.
Since the article doesn't speak of her well-being, I don't think we can judge here whether this woman should have taken herself out of society already (from what I hear, the USA isn't exactly public transport or walking friendly, assuming she can still walk distances in the first place, idk what old people are supposed to do there)
The other three factors you mentioned were not at play here according to the linked article. But I agree in general of course, and in those cases I don't disagree with extra punishment (and/or, the better preventor: increasing the odds of being caught)
The next person they'd mow down. (Also, retribution. It's a real human need and attempts at philosophising it away degrade trust in our justice system.)
> isn't allowed to drive for 3 years
This is the wild part. No! You don't drive again!
> What more can you ask for here?
For her to have recognised her own limitations before they took lives. Failing at that, her family–or literally anyone who cared about her, and didn't want to see her spend her last years in jail–having taken initiative.
She's not going to drive again.
> For her to have recognised her own limitations before they took lives.
This is something that humans suck at.
> Failing at that, her family–or literally anyone who cared about her, and didn't want to see her spend her last years in jail–having taken initiative.
You shouldn't punish her for other people failing to take action.
She gets her license back. That's wild.
> This is something that humans suck at
Not usually with fatal consequences. These were preventable deaths. Not only that, the driver was being incredibly reckless, apparently driving 70 mph in a residential area.
> You shouldn't punish her for other people failing to take action
You're punishing her for being criminally reckless. You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
In 3 years, at age 83, if she wanted to... she could try and take the driving test again and become licensed. This is just not going to happen :P In the end, the court can only prohibit her from driving while she is on probation.
Would it be great if this time she could be banned forever? Sure. But there's reasons why we don't just let judges make up arbitrary penalties and permanent restrictions on their own.
> Not usually with fatal consequences. These were preventable deaths. Not only that,
Humans don't misestimate their remaining ability with fatal consequences?
> the driver was being incredibly reckless, apparently driving 70 mph in a residential area.
Yes, by confusing gas and brake. She clearly has significantly reduced capacity.
> You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
I do not think that the behavior of 80 year old people will be meaningfully changed by the degree of punishment applied here. This is a person that has lost a significant degree of capacity; unfortunately, humans losing capacity tend not to realize it or correctly estimate how much they have lost.
Why? More importantly, why is it on the table?
> the court can only prohibit her from driving while she is on probation
This seems incorrect. Lau was placed on probation for 2 years and had her license revoked for 3 [1].
> Would it be great if this time she could be banned forever? Sure. But there's reasons why we don't just let judges make up arbitrary penalties and permanent restrictions on their own
Straw man. Harsh and arbitrary are mostly orthogonal.
If you kill someone from behind the wheel, and you are at fault, the default punishment should be long-term license revocation and jail time. In almost no case do I see a reason for removing the requirement to spend time in prison altogether.
> Humans don't misestimate their remaining ability with fatal consequences?
Humans get taken off the roads and otherwise criminally incapacitated.
> do not think that the behavior of 80 year old people will be meaningfully changed by the degree of punishment applied here. This is a person that has lost a significant degree of capacity
I do. If the headline were she got years in jail, I'd bet at least a few families would weigh the cost of confronting a relative against the risk that they have to see them behind bars.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...
Really?
The deterrence argument is used to throw the book at people committing minor crimes like shoplifting. Let's apply it to quadruple homicide, eh?
Mary Long Fau should have died in prison.
And it doesn't work there, so why would it work for impaired driving?
You seem to be operating under the idea that because she didn't go to jail, there were no consequences. This seems false.
It does actually. See how thieves resident in Florida travel to New York to work because of the different enforcement regimes for one of the clearest possible examples[1].
Even if deterrence didn’t work at all putting people in prison is good because of incapacitation. Committing crimes is stupidly right tailed[2]. Every career criminal in jail for a year is a year society doesn’t suffer their crimes.
[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/02/02/cnns_john...
[2] https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-e...
It also seems like the percentage of goods lost to retail theft is slightly lower in New York than Florida.
c.f. you have a thirdhand cherry-picked quote from someone on a political site that implies differently.
It's "arbitrary" because it's something that the legislature has not specifically allowed for. We do not allow judges to make up things on the spot for good reason.
> I do. If the headline were she got years in jail, I'd bet at least a few families would weigh the cost of confronting a relative against the risk that they have to see them behind bars.
I think the chance that grandpa might see prison time for driving is not really something that is going to change things much for families compared to "grandpa might kill someone" or "grandpa might get himself killed."
See my comment just above, where I reply to someone who replied to you. "Confronting a relative"? Shit, I'd be happy if a few less relatives actively enabled people, "That doctor doesn't know what he's talking about, you're fine, mom, besides, it's kind of a pain for us to drive 10 minutes over to your house to help with an errand and then 10 minutes home. Just drive, no-one's going to pull you over."
I don't defend that woman at all and as someone who walked by that intersection on the day of the incident, 70 mph seems physically impossible there for a reasonable driver.
But it was not a totally residential area, it was a major transit hub of that part of town, where light rail and bus lines meet, a verrry short block away from lots of retail and restaurants.. That actually is an argument to go slower than in a purely residential area, because it's actually a congested area.
Definitely not given back. If I didn't misread it, she needs to take a new driver's test at 83, which she already declined applying for (though it'll be her right; we'd have to see if she stays by the decision or if the examiner deems her a safe driver)
> You're punishing her for being criminally reckless. You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
Wtf? Try applying logic somewhere in the process. People don't enjoy killing others by accident, paying 64k, 200h community service, three years of trying to use American public transport before you can start the process of getting a license back, going through a whole court system, and, y'know, guilt that I'd imagine would cripple me for years
Edit: I'm very surprised, reading your other comments, they're overall legit sensible. Really struggling to comprehend how, here, you get from "someone did something by accident" to "you need life punishments or they'll have an incentive to mow the next person down". There's zero incentive for citizens to kill people in any society that I'm aware of, again even ignoring the internal problems it causes
Pretty likely that DMV Driver Safety has her record flagged and wants some additional evidence of medical capacity if she reapplies, too.
> For her to have recognised her own limitations
Surely I don't need to look up the statistics of people under 30 killing others by accident. We're humans, not infallible. The judge didn't think they took any undue risk here
But sure, enact your vengeance on the person that fate picked out. Comment sections are always full of it anyway so I'm sure the voting booth will be too and this is just going to spread
Called out for an eval with law enforcement, thankfully non injury (however, there -are- about half a dozen vehicles who are going to be filing insurance claims).
Grandma is on her way to the doctor, and is in husband's old Caddy. Problem, she couldn't figure out what to do at "the worst roundabout she'd ever seen" and kept circling it, causing other cars to swerve off the road into drainage ditches, over curbs etc.
Know why it was the worst roundabout she'd ever seen? Because it wasn't a roundabout. It was a T junction and there were those concrete lane separators. According to witnesses she'd been circling it for several minutes, occasionally putting the car into reverse to navigate it.
"Ma'am, where are you headed?" "My doctor, for an appointment". "Where's your doctor's office?" "[insert town name 40 miles away from us]" "And where do you live?" "[insert same town name]" She's nowhere near that town, there's no understood way she got from there to here other than mass confusion.
So LE call her adult kids, while we're assessing her, and figuring out a plan. They've also discovered in the meantime that her license was medically revoked five years prior by said doctor.
Kids: "Oh that? That doctor has no idea what he's talking about, she's perfectly competent, he just doesn't like her. She tells us she's fine to drive and we've been telling her we agree with her" and "What do you mean you're going to have her car towed? We can be there in two hours. Can't she just stay there with the paramedics til we get there?"
Cops: Your mom is about to be hit with at least six or seven insurance claims that are going to argue that the doctor, and the DOL, were right, and that your mom actually isn't medically suited to be driving.
I still guarantee she probably didn't face any legal consequences beyond insurance, though. Certainly we were never called as witnesses. And her family probably still thinks it was a fluke and that her doctor was just an asshole when he had her license revoked.
As well as incapacitation and retribution.
But, yes, also those two. It's a very multifaceted sword, and thankfully not the only option, not for any of the three goals
And yet I've seen way more people call an Uber instead of drive home drunk not because they thought they'd kill someone, but because they didn't want a DUI.
I don’t see anyone in this thread arguing for this. Just backing up the notion that vehicular manslaughter is almost tolerated by the justice system.
> The function of prison sentences is deterrence.
The definite article is typically used to indicate 'there is only one'[1].
1. https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/free-resources/gramm...
Citing a random source for CA vehicular manslaughter law, it looks like you can get up to six years: https://www.kannlawoffice.com/california-penal-code-section-...
So, like, a six year prison sentence? Maybe more for multiple counts here? At least revocation of driving privileges forever (she's not getting any younger)? None of that happened.
When there's significant extenuating circumstances or "the book" wouldn't serve the purposes of justice, they don't.
It feels unfair to me, like it could have been me or the commenter in a parallel universe, and I don't expect either of us are evil and intending to do bad, so I bring up what the article actually says were the circumstances (no intent or recklessness proven beyond doubt) and consequences (at least, besides the guilt factor). Don't you feel this could happen to you tomorrow just as easily as to anyone else? Should you get a worse punishment than all of what this woman got (see above) for getting into an accident with a fatal outcome? (Assuming you drive a vehicle, of course)
No; unlike Mary Lau, I don't choose to drive while incapacitated.
(and the same pattern plays out on a much larger scale in the world of big business)
This is a state that made me a criminal for putting the wrong air filter on my car (Clearly my bad for putting on the 49 State legal version that makes the tailpipe emissions cleaner).
If they just told the truth, they wouldn't lose their licence, but they couldn't even oblige by this piss-poor regulatory action in which they were required to do nothing but self-report any incident.
That sort of behaviour should be an aggravating factor if they're actually misbehaving. If they aren't, then it is poor policy to try and put them out of business over paperwork.
That driver was never found. It's not clear what efforts, if any, were made to find them. After all the Cruise is covered in cameras.
The linked article doesn't describe the standard. It describes a single, exceptional example.
There's a tradeoff between reducing the very low rate of unsafe driving by the elderly and the burden added to the very old. People over 65+ are still possibly safer, overall, than teenagers.
Someone got old and hadn't figured out they were unsafe to drive. It's not the same thing as me choosing to drive 100MPH in a city, operate a vehicle drunk, or keeping going after receiving clear evidence that I'm unsafe behind the wheel.
This is the assertion. You can recognize it because the obvious reply is that it is not at all a representative example, but one that you just handpicked. You're question-begging.
Twin Cities, 2010-2014: 95 pedestrians killed in 3,069 crashes. 28 drivers were charged and convicted of a crime, most often a misdemeanor ranging from speeding to careless driving. ~70% of pedestrian-killing drivers faced no criminal charge[0].
Bay Area, 2007-2011 (CIR investigation): sixty percent of drivers that were at fault, or suspected of being at fault, faced no criminal charges. Over 40 percent of drivers charged did not lose their driver's licenses, even temporarily[1].
Philadelphia, 2017–2018: just 16 percent of the drivers were charged with a felony in fatal crashes[2].
Los Angeles, 2010–2019: 2,109 people were killed in traffic collisions on L.A. streets... and nearly half were pedestrians. Booked on vehicular manslaughter: 158 people. The vast majority of drivers who kill someone with their car are not arrested[3].
I can literally do this all day. The original statement was correct, the case representative.
[0]: https://www.startribune.com/in-crashes-that-kill-pedestrians...
[1]: https://walksf.org/2013/05/02/investigative-report-exposes-h...
[2]: https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-drivers-rarely-prosec...
[3]: https://laist.com/news/transportation/takeaways-pedestrian-d...
Criminality is basically just a checkbox for this stuff. Most of the time people wouldn't be going to jail for these sorts of crimes, it'd just be big fines and penalties. There's almost always administrative/civil infractions of the same or similar name that has the same or greater punishment but are far more efficient for the state to prosecute because the accused has fewer rights.
It makes for good appeal to emotion headlines to say these people aren't getting charged with crimes, but that's only half the story. They're likely lawyering up and pleading to a civil infraction that has approx the same penalties.
And this is true not just for this issue but for many subject areas of administrative law. Taxes, SEC, environmental, etc, etc, all operate mostly like this.
It's easy for a writer to pander to certain demographics and get people whipped into a frenzy by writing an easy article about prosecuting rates using public data. Actually contacting these agencies and figuring out what they actually did is hard and in the modern media economy doesn't offer much upside for the work.
Personally i would like to see a more granual permission to drive based on performance, need and demography.
See also: http://archive.today/2026.03.23-031145/https://www.nytimes.c...
> And there is precedent for the light manslaughter sentencing of an older driver. In 2003, George Weller, 86, killed 10 pedestrians at the Santa Monica Farmers Market after confusing the gas and brake pedals. He received five years of probation. The judge in that case said that Mr. Weller’s age and declining health had contributed to the decision.