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Fort Pierce driver who killed man on bicycle gets 25 years
This is the kind of story motorists need to hear. The part about spending the next 25 years in jail, anyway:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/co...svc=7&cxcat=77 Excerpt: "By SARAH PROHASKA Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Tuesday, April 29, 2008 FORT PIERCE — A 30-year-old man will spend 25 years in prison for plowing his car into a mentally handicapped man on a bicycle and leaving the man's near lifeless body on the side of the dark road. A jury in March found Antonio Antwan Smith guilty of vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of a crash in connection with the April 2006 crash that killed 20-year-old Terrance White. He said little during his sentencing hearing other than to deny there was blood on his car. White's body landed in a driveway about 70 feet from where he was hit. He died several hours later at Holmes Regional Medical Center in Melbourne. After his arrest, Smith told police he thought someone had shot a gun or thrown a brick through his windshield when he struck White on South 29th Street. Smith's family and Circuit Judge Larry Schack questioned how Smith could not have known he ran into White, who was stuck with such force that the impact severed his brain stem. "I'm trying to imagine how you could have driven like you did, and did the damage you did and not have known," Schack said during the hearing. Smith's family members remembered him as a fun person who could always make them laugh. They said justice was served with the 25-year prison sentence...." |
No mention of alcohol, so apparently this driver was just an idiot???
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Hang on, there must be something I am missing here.
How come he gets 25 years and others get just a tiny fraction of that? I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it just doesn't follow the trend. |
Originally Posted by damnable
(Post 6606691)
How come he gets 25 years and others get just a tiny fraction of that?
Originally Posted by OP's link
Assistant State Attorney Jeff Gorman said this was Smith's fourth felony conviction
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Originally Posted by ac220v
(Post 6607072)
That must be it. He got 5 years for hit-and-run and 20 for everything else, Whether this is legit way to put him behind bars for 25 years or "toughness on crime" (bigotry), well, only those involved know for sure. Probably the former, given that he thought of gunshots first.
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Originally Posted by OH306
(Post 6607729)
bigotry**********???
But still, such a practice could be abused, although probably not in this case. edit:
Originally Posted by G.K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown
But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect: in what they would call a dry impartial light, in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his ‘criminal skull’ as if it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros’s nose. When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour.
.... .... .... Snipped some of the best mysteries ever written.... ... ... ... “Don’t you think,” he said, abruptly; “that this notion of yours, of a man trying to feel like a criminal, might make him a little too tolerant of crime?” Father Brown sat up and spoke in a more staccato style. “I know it does just the opposite. It solves the whole problem of time and sin. It gives a man his remorse beforehand.” There was a silence; the American looked at the high and steep roof that stretched half across the enclosure; his host gazed into the fire without moving; and then the priest’s voice came on a different note, as if from lower down. “There are two ways of renouncing the devil,” he said; “and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues.” |
I think he was a black driver, blacks or hispanics tend to get big time for hitting cyclists or pedestrians, that's the only trend I see when I read about these accidents
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Originally Posted by Clarks
(Post 6608355)
I think he was a black driver, blacks or hispanics tend to get big time for hitting cyclists or pedestrians, that's the only trend I see when I read about these accidents
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do you believe that the biker's "mentally handicapped" condition had anything to do with the strong ruling?
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The biggest factor in sentencing is probably that this guy had a lot of other felony convictions. You can read about him here, if you're interested:
http://www.dc.state.fl.us/ActiveInma...ist&Bookmark=9 The fact that the victim was mentally handicapped also probably played a role (as it would if he hit a kid). Also, in my state courts are fairly harsh on people who leave the scene of an accident involving injury or death, since that is often considered tantamount to leaving someone to die. |
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