Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Just looked up some “penalties” in Canada for murdering people with your car.
If you use a car to drive aggressively and cause death, you only get a maximum of 2 years in jail. That's it. Take a life for maybe up to 2 years in jail.
It's not taken seriously at all.
You are using loaded language here. The penalties for provable murder with a car are the same as for murder by any other method. Murder and homicide are not synonyms. Aggressive driving that results in death is not murder, which is an intentional, pre-planned action, not something that happens incidentally or even negligently.
I understand the differences in language, but none of that matters at all to the victim or their family.
The fact is, you can kill someone with a car while being reckless, and it's a very minor offence.
It's only under the most extreme circumstances that someone killing a person by car is taken seriously.
Okay? Not to take the bait, but so? Whether or not it is murder is a legal matter, which would be completely unchanged if there was no grieving family.
If you accidentally lock your coworker in the walk-in oven at work and they die, you probably never see the inside of a prison. (A jail, maybe.) What is your basis for comparison? Oh, right, "murder."
Right, and actual murder is always one of those.
You can't use loaded language and then be all, "well I don't want to get into a semantic argument." Your argument would be meaningful if it wasn't hyperbolic. Drivers do get breaks and you don't have to exaggerate.
Fair points, for sure.
The only major difference between manslaughter, 1st degree or 2nd degree murder is intent.
I would argue that if you are driving recklessly or dangerously (two different legal definitions), especially at high speed or while drunk/high, there's a reasonable expectation that your actions can and will kill someone.
Manslaughter isn't good enough. To me, it's as equal to murder as firing a gun into a crowd (even if you claim you didn't intend to kill people).
Completely different from being reckless and/or dangerous in a vehicle.
Dangerous driving causing death would not, and should not, ever be considered an “accident”.
If you dropped bricks from a building, anyone would agree that those actions will probably kill someone. It's not good enough to say "three people died because you decided to throw bricks off a building, we'll give you six months probation for being reckless.". That's not justice for anyone.
If “murder” doesn't fit in the context of death by car, let's come up with another legal charge that's more appropriate than manslaughter.
We constantly read stories like this one, where three people were killed by a DUI driver who was also speeding, yet served no time and only 1 year driving suspension.
Or a trucker who killed four and was only given six years in prison, despite being given the "harsher" charge of dangerous driving.
Or this guy, who was racing and killed a woman in a hit-and-run, only got two years. And the only reason why he got a slap on the wrist, is because it wasn't proven that he wanted to kill the cyclist.
The moment your actions behind the wheel are deliberately dangerous, the context changes, IMO.
I don't doubt that deaths by cars aren't taken seriously. I doubt that deaths by guns are.
Btw. if you're willing to prevent deaths in either of these cases, you should actually work on preventive measures instead of penalizing after the killing. As the diagram above clearly shows, even harsh punishments don't prevent gun crimes, so what makes you think it would work for car crimes?
What you could do instead is:
100% prevention is the best way to do things. But you also have to make sure that you don't devalue a victim's life by giving their killer "up to 2 years" in prison. I don't know how I'd react if a loved one were killed by a reckless driver, only to get 4 months in jail (or none, as is usually the case).