On bikies, "Robert F. Nagel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: >...The issue isn't whether there was negligence for civil liability. The issue was whether there was negligence that was criminal and that someone should perhaps lose their liberty over. The jury could not agree unanimously that there was such a level of negligence. We should neither rejoice nor despair in such a disposition. But, we should rejoice in a justice system that, at least this one time, stood between the preservation or loss of liberty for a single individual. ...one thing in this county that actually works pretty well for individuals, the jury system. >
I beg to differ. Here we have a jury which couldn't decide if this guy was guilty - despite the fact that earlier this year, a truck driver named James Sharp was sentenced to a year in jail and six years of probation for a similar crash, one that killed a DeForest woman and her granddaughter in a rear end collision on the Beltline under similar circumstances? In the Beltline crash, Sharp had bent down to pick up a pack of cigarettes from the passenger side floor of his truck and in doing so failed to notice the slowed traffic in front of him, and ended up crashing into the rear of the vehicle carrying Peggy Hanson, 51, and her 4-year-old granddaughter, Lilyana Thomas, killing them. The judge said that while he considered the crash to be an "accident", the driver's negligence justified the jail sentence. So here we have a similar situation where the driver takes his eyes off the road for a full 12 seconds to check his throat out in his mirror and as a result crashes into a bicyclist and kills her and the jury fails to find the driver guilty of negligence? Or maybe the judge in the previous case was wrong? This is a good example of a justice system that's screwed up in my opinion, not one that's working fairly. Mike Neuman _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
