Comments

1. Doug Bostrom

   November 18, 2011

   Concerning “Here’s what it takes to get your driver’s license revoked (and for how long) – WA State Licensing: License suspensions – vehicular homicide”

   If you hate somebody badly enough, kill ’em with your car. The worst punishment you’ll likely face is a plea deal and parole, maybe a license suspension at worst.

   We really do afford exceptional status to automobile drivers, no doubt about it. The guy who snuffed the couple on Lake City Way the other day committed the physics equivalent of firing about four hundred .45 pistol rounds into their car. This -after- he did the same thing to another random person a couple of years ago. If he’d been going after strangers with a gun, he’d be called a serial killer, but instead we just call him “accident vehicle driver.”

   Weird.

   1. Pedals Don’t Peddle

      November 18, 2011

      I wonder what the penalties would be in this situation. First, I pick up a kitchen knife (a tool which can also be a deadly weapon, like a car). Then I proceed to behave in a very negligent and dangerous way by running through the crowds at Pike Market waving the knife around (behavior similar to one seriously speeding and weaving in and out of traffic in a car on a busy street). Oops, someone gets stabbed and dies. A few years later, I go do exactly the same thing but this time two people die in another accidental whoopsie-daisy stabbing.

      For some reason, I’m not so sure I’d end up with an equivalent of a slap on the wrist after the first “accident” because I supposedly had a psychotic episode, and get a year in jail after the second. The relative indifference with which deaths in automobile collisions are treated is terrifying.

      1. Al Dimond

         November 18, 2011

         Consider guns, which you’re supposed to need a license to use, like cars. If you went around shooting a gun off in public, it’s entirely possible that you could manage to avoid conviction because of insanity. But you’d almost certainly be charged. And the state surely would confiscate your weapons, revoke your permit to own them, and though you may avoid prison you’d probably be under some other sort of court-ordered supervision. If you actually killed someone by doing it you’d have a pretty hard time getting off.

         So… maybe the driver in this case would have been hard to convict, maybe not. But the state shouldn’t be under any obligation to issue him a driver’s license — in fact, quite the opposite. A lot of “accidents” result from driver negligence, the drivers face no real consequence for them, and that’s a real problem… but what this guy did was beyond the pale. No excuse his lawyers could come up with should obligate the state to license him to drive. Ever. If we’re going to issue a licence to that guy, we might as well give up and call driving a car a birthright, instead of a responsibility.