It sounds horrible, but the article isn't very illuminating. There's a lot of information about the driver but nothing about any of the other circumstances. I can't imagine anything justifying a vehicular homicide charge against the mother, but I could easily imaging something that might justify a lesser charge like negligence. Did she fail to make use of an available crosswalk & traffic light? Did she lead her kids out into a clearly risky situation? Etc.
That is absurd. Is there a fund for an appeal?
Well, she should have driven him across the street.
The recklessness charge seems wrong to me but colorable. How can you make a claim for "homicide by vehicle in the second degree"?
It sounds horrible, but the article isn't very illuminating. There's a lot of information about the driver but nothing about any of the other circumstances.
Raquel Nelson is, presumably, black?
Guy confessed to having consumed "a little" alcohol earlier in the day, being prescribed pain medication and being partially blind in his left eye,and answering to the name of 'Lucky', said David Simpson, his attorney.
Both she and the driver are black.
The man has previously been convicted of two hit-and-runs - on the same day, in 1997, one of them on the same road where he killed Raquel Nelson's son.
Sweet Jesus. How did he still have a licence?
http://peds.org/resources/pedestrian_right_of_way/ is linked in the comments in Apo's link - seems to say that it's perfectly reasonable to cross roads when there's not an marked crossing. So unless she ran out into traffic with the kids, this just seems appalling.
How can you make a claim for "homicide by vehicle in the second degree"?
By taking a pay off from whoever runs the private prisons in that wretched third world state?
6,8: Yes. Much more complete article here in the Daily Mail!
During the hearing, Nelson claimed she and her children were waiting on the median to cross the busy four-lane road when her son ran out into traffic. Also crossing from a bus stop t their apartment complex. Criminally negligent transportation design.
This isn't a matter of race. It's part of the War on Mothers and the general principle "It is always the mom's fault."
The same people who want to charge mothers with homicide when they miscarry, have decided, for once, to extend the notion of personhood past the womb, and actually punish mothers for things that happen to post-birth babies.
11: nah, not even necessary. Everybody knows you shouldn't cross street like that on foot! You should drive. People drive fast on that road!
I know I've related this here before, but when I lived in LA I was a couple of blocks from a major surface street. There were two options for crossing: one, a light with a walk signal, required you to wait on a tiny concrete traffic island through a full multi-minute cycle of the lights, cars whooshing by on either side. The other was a non-signalized crosswalk where you would have to hope that the cars would stop for you (as is required by the law). The latter was much faster, but was basically only used by homeless people, and I have no doubt that if you got hit in that crosswalk a large majority of people would regard it as your own fault.
So unless she ran out into traffic with the kids, this just seems appalling.
This is what I'm getting at. I can't imagine a DA's office pressing the charges unless it was either (a) a flagrantly irresponsible move on the part of the mother, or (b) 11.
And as I said in 1, unless she literally shoved the kid in front of a car the homicide charge is absurd.
This isn't a matter of race. It's part of the War on Mothers and the general principle "It is always the mom's fault."
It might be both.
In any case, it is appalling.
Can I get a woop-woop for this being primarily part of the War on Pedestrians?
17: Woop. Woop. Being told you should have gone 1/2 mile out and a 1/2 mile back to use a crosswalk is functionally equivalent to telling anybody with a small child that they can't walk.
A drunk, half-blind driver - who is also a black man in a Southern state - hits three people in the same day, killing one of them, a little kid, and gets six months in prison?
I'm never going to listen to anyone who says the US justice system is too harsh again. Either that or the defence lawyer was Obi-Wan Kenobi.
It's part of the War on Mothers and the general principle "It is always the mom's fault."
Is this the case? I do not practice many filial pieties, because my mother and grandmothers made Medea look like one of those Grace Kelly-styled suburban hearth goddesses from the children's Band-Aids commercials I'm a feminist, but my impression is that maternity is, after (probably not coincidentally) The Children, the last redoubt of anything resembling a common value, the value in question being "Mother is Priestess and Honorand of the Cult of Innocence."
20: It's all part of the same thing. Moms exist only to love and care for their children, and so if they get distracted for a moment, and something happens to their child, they are horrible monsters and not True Moms at all.
I just hope that neither of them ever walked across the street with you.
That's like being charged under the Computer Misuse Act because the News of the World was listening to your voicemail.
23: Do you know anybody from NOTW that needs a quick job fixing my voicemail? The indicator light on my phone flashes all the time unless I have a mesage.
A black mom with more than one kid. Not irrelevant.
Because having lots of kids has given her experience with voicemail?
A drunk, half-blind driver - who is also a black man in a Southern state - hits three people in the same day, killing one of them, a little kid, and gets six months in prison?
They weren't all on the same day. A while back, he hit and ran two people on the same day, for which he was convicted. Then this time, he hit and killed the child, on the same street as one of the previous victims.
No. He hit mom, daughter, and son on the same day. Plus the other people back in the day.
Per the article in 12, he has hit at least five pedestrians on three separate occasions plus injured at least two occupants of a motor vehicle other than his own.
29: well, but, over how many years? He can't be averaging more than one a year. Not bad!
And what could you do? Take his driving privileges away? Then how would he live?
He probably can't walk around very well as he's partially blind.
Given the nature of the pedestrian facilities in the area taking away his license is tantamount to a death sentence.
33: well, he can probably run faster than a four-year-old.
I liked this from the article:
Guy confessed to having consumed "a little" alcohol earlier in the day, being prescribed pain medication and being partially blind in his left eye, said David Simpson, his attorney.
"This still affects [Jerry] to this day," Simpson said. "It is tragic all around."
Let's not forget who the real victim is here. I'm surprised he hasn't asked for an apology from Nelson, cf. Dick Cheney. After all, I bet all those dents in the bodywork were expensive to fix.
28-9: thanks. That bit of the article was a bit confusing. The Mail, however, isn't a reliable source.
There would probably be cost savings in hiring a full-time chauffeur to drive him around.
Sifu has it right. It is functionally illegal to be a pedestrian in Atlanta. And Outside the Perimeter (past 285)? Being on foot is considered an abomination. There are no sidewalks outside of stripmalls for a reason. I can't help but wonder if the prosecution isn't in some part motivated by officials wanting to head off any liability charges against themselves for not doing anything to promote pedestrian safety. "We gave you a crosswalk just half a mile away! You negligently chose not to use it."
That this happened in Marietta is also significant. It's a northern suburb, and therefore has primarily been rich and white. It almost certainly still is further north toward Marietta proper, but as Atlanta has continued to grow (and as in-town housing gets more expensive) more poorer black and brown people are moving out there. I wonder what that jury looked like, that they were able to look at this tragedy and see it as her fault for not perfect controlling all three of her kids at the same time.
Blagh!
35.last: It is confusing, but the article in the OP still says that he hit three people and killed one that day. I may have inflated his count by one pedestrian because it appears that the other two hit and runs may have been one pedestrian and then the two people in the car.
It's a northern suburb, and therefore has primarily been rich and white
However, it only became that -- and not totally so since the 1980s or so when the northern Atlanta suburbs exploded; before that it was its own small southern city with those demographics. Today 33% black in the city.
I just google street view walked to the nearest marked cross walk from there. It is a long ass way. The north end of Austell Circle is almost directly opposite the bus stop, while the nearest cross walk is up at Roberta Dr and Cochran Rd.
And of course, ATL drivers don't pay any more attention to pedestrians at cross walks than they do any other time. Probably less, actually, because some of them are concentrating on not getting hit by other cars while turning. Have I mentioned that I don't miss Atlanta traffic even a little?
39: Right, I thought about including a parnethetical to that effect. From like the mid 1970s (the Maynard Jackson period) to the mid 1990s, white people leave the city for the northern and eastern suburbs. Blacks stay in the decaying city or move to the southern and western suburbs. Mid 1990s to nowish, professional class whites and blacks start moving back into the city, and new immigrants from Asia and Latin America start moving into the northern suburbs.
The little kid ran out while they were waiting in the meridian, right? If there's a road which is so wide that you have to stop at the meridian and people need to cross, there ought to be not only a cross walk but lights so that you can make it across in one go. Not blaming the mother at all. Criminally negligent traffic design is right.
19
I'm never going to listen to anyone who says the US justice system is too harsh again.
"Too harsh [overall]" is not incompatible with being inconsistent, haphazard, schizophrenic and/or based on different principles than we'd want.
As for Guy's driving privilege, I certainly hope they'd be revoked for a very long time in addition to the short jail time, but the article doesn't say one way or the other. In general the bar for revoking driving privileges is pretty high (and it should be, at least given the state of public transportation) but this guy is way past it. Forcing him to rearrange his life actually doesn't seem to harsh after the fifth time he injures someone in a hit-and-run.
On a marginally related note, rush hour traffic sucks. Biking home yesterday wasn't fun, but driving would have been even less fun. And probably not significantly safer, either, because while on a bike I'm not really in danger from cars that aren't moving. I'm glad I don't normally take that route any more.
I detect some poorly drafted legislation here if someone can be convicted of homicide by vehicle without having even been in the car. The definition, I find, is:
ยง 40-6-393. Homicide by vehicle
...(c) Any person who causes the death of another person, without an intention to do so, by violating any provision of this title [Motor Vehicles and Traffic title] other than subsection (a) of Code Section 40-6-163 [stopping for school buses], subsection (b) of Code Section 40-6-270 [leaving the scene of an accident], Code Section 40-6-390 [misdemeanor reckless driving] or 40-6-391 [DUI], or subsection (a) of Code Section 40-6-395 [fleeing or eluding a police officer] commits the offense of homicide by vehicle in the second degree when such violation is the cause of said death and, upon conviction thereof, shall be punished as provided in Code Section 17-10-3.
Messed up; and shows the inherent problems, I hypothesize, of making a grab-bag reference to an entire title (for example, all the laws about pedestrians might not have been in there when the vehicular homicide part was written).
Of course, the main culprit is the prosecutor for actively choosing to drop homicide charges against the driver and keep trying the mother to the bitter end. At least sentence appears not to have been passed yet.
This story makes me physically nauseated. Part of it is my extreme fear of having a kid dart out into traffic. But then the sickening aftermath...it's really affecting me viscerally.
Presumably the goal of this sort of sentence is to get future mothers in similar situations to commit suicide.
I mean, seriously, I've just been repeating the same lame, grade-school-level insults for several years now. I'm not even any good at trolling, which is probably the lowest common denominator of social interaction. But I admire all you guys so much that I can't just walk away. You're all like superheroes to me, with your proper English and coherent arguments and stuff, so I come back every day in an obvious display of affection. I'm not worthy, I know. But maybe one day, you'll allow me to be one of your friends.
Please? I'm so very lonely. All I want is to fit in here.
"wars on mothers"? I just heard on the break room tv how we need to listen to mothers fears about vaccines. This is a war on non drivers (poor)
44: surely the jurors deserve to be pelted with written eggs, too
50: Assuming the facts fit the wording of the charge, their sin was just in not nullifying, so non-rotten eggs may be more apt.
51. Yoyo is specifying written eggs, which seem altogether appropriate. "Stupid jerk!", "Can you wipe your own butt?" and "God help America" seem like appropriate slogans that would fit on an egg.
Huh - I really thought that said "rotten" when I read it. Auditory bias, I guess.
Sharon Astyk recently wrote about two women convicted of negligence (IIRC) when their children got into trouble while they were asleep. Both cases sounded like lots of things my sibs & I did. Bad results could have followed, but controlling the kids enough to prevent them would be difficult and creepy.
Astyk sees it as an impossible motherhood standard that controls mothers. Pedestrian mothers must need the most control. I think the vaccine nuts go both ways, yoyo-- some of the recommendations for raising kids without are extra demanding of parental time (and some just reckless).