TallRider

Main headline in the sidebar of https://edition.cnn.com
Full link here.
It's good that news is getting around at least. Interestingly, it's not on the main U.S. edition webpage. Crux of the text is this:
"Please give to the departed eternal rest - let light perpetual shine upon them."

peripatetic

It was on the afternoon broadcast, around 2 pm today (Friday.) They had images of the scene. Haunting.

Pedal Wench

Rebroadcast again on Wolf's Situation Room at 4:20 Eastern on CNN Domestic

CastIron

WE all make mistakes--some bigger than others--but if that happened to say, my wife, I'm not sure I'd wait around for the misdemeanor court date to see 'justice' done.

Any reaction from the driver or family?

EricDJ

Driver or his family won't be on the news because he's a minor.

Jeprox

That article is about sydney (RIP): https://www.bikeforums.net/bicycle-mechanics/155557-regarding-sydney.html

Guest

Just ridiculous. A life is only worth UP TO a year in jail. Yeah, the kid is young, but at least he gets to live.

Koffee

CastIron

That doesn't stop them from comming forward and making a statement (apology).

Portis

That kid won't see anyting that resembles a jail. Our injustice system has no provisions for pedestrians hit by motor vehicles. We are the equivilant of road kill.

skingry

Seeing as the kid was a minor, the punishment he is receiving is the norm. When I was in high school, a girl at my school drove recklessly, and managed to kill three of her friends who were in the car with her when she ran off the road (its a long story, but basically she turned her lights off on an unlit street at night). Three counts of vehicular manslaughter later, all she got was a suspended license and a slap on the wrist.

However, just because the boy only gets a few days in juvy, this doesn't stop the cyclist's family from filing a wrongful death suit in civil court (and I would recommend that this be done).

--Seth

duckliondog

A whole year locked up sounds like the perfect punishment. He's still young, so a year really means something to him. He won't be texting in the joint, so maybe he'll break tha habit. It was an accident, so it's not like he's going to lead a life of crime from now on and needs to be eliminated from society. I think he just needs a year of his life taken away to think about what he did. I would be surprised if he didn't come out a very cautious person. If he kills or nearly kills anyone else, then he can be burned at the stake for all I care.
Yeah, but he won't ever see jail time.

TallRider

I wouldn't. And, from what I've gathered about Jim Price's wife and daughter, I don't expect them to. They don't seem like the vindictive-for-the-sake-of-retribution type.
As I've said before in another thread here, I'm pretty confident that said 17-year-old kid isn't going to be texting while driving ever again.
(Of course, this discussion reduces almost entirely to unprovable presuppositions about whether justice is fundamentally (a) restorative, (b) punative, or (c) retraining. And by unprovable, I mean that there is not empirical proof that justice should be one way over the others. Rather, these are belief commitments, deep in themselves, that may rest on deeper commitments to certain ends or means.)

What the cycling community would really benefit from here is a change in the overall legal structure's view of driving. It is presumed by most Americans as a right, and I think that it should be a tenuous privilege. Of course, such status would put economic growth in second (or more like seventh) place, and so I don't expect our government to do anything toward change in this direction. It's possible to socially engineer change in this direction apart from the government, but that is not going to be effectively started by a civil suit against a 17-year-old who feels like s*** right now. Got it?

veneer

yup.. totally agreed. friday morning i heard the news on the radio when i was driving on the freeway.. and that just totally ruined my day. to think that kind of sentencing is given just cus he's young.. that's not acceptable.

RIP sydney.. he help me a lot with my Fetish build.. i'm gonna miss him.

bellweatherman

A maximum 1 year penalty in jail - what that means in reality is about 20 hours of community service.

peripatetic

Thing about the age limit is: people (i.e. your elected representatives) who pass laws (i.e. criminal statutes) make policy decisions about age and standards for criminal liability. In most jurisdictions in the U.S., a negligent homicide (also referred to as involuntary manslaughter) receives a fairly low sentence (e.g. here in New York, it's 1-3 yrs*), and for someone under the age of 18, who's considered 'less blameworthy' because of their age, then that sentence is even lower. You may say, yes, but c'mon, a 17-yr old knows what they're doing, and they're old enough to drive, which is true, but the response to that is the "slippery slope" argument: if you make someone under 18 criminally liable as an adult, then exactly what age should they not be liable.

(*Note that even if this had been an adult, their maximum sentence would not be much higher.)


Tim Cupery put it well in stating that no one wants to age knowing that as a teen-ager, they killed a man because they were reckless with their cell-phones. I would think that this kid is going to have some heavy garbage hanging over their heads for a long time. And a longer prison sojourn would just be that much more likely to actually turn them into a violent criminal (imagine if the kid were to get 5-10 years.)

Here in NYC, the number of cyclists killed in traffic incidents this year (maybe twenty) has increased over last year, and there's been not one arrest. At least the local Colorado police and D/A are willing to state that there was a crime committed.

Now, none of this is to discount the idea that maybe those policymakers should draft statutes that offer more/any protection to cyclists from drivers, and generally create punitive disincentives to careless driving in the vicinity of cyclists. (Or, taken in another light, as someone mentioned above, maybe shift from the idea of the driver's license as right to license as privilege. But as that person posted, that would entail cyclist's advocacy groups out-lobbying deep-pocketed auto manufacturers with state legislators. Tough tough tough. Even if they were to get financial backing from Trek et. al., that'd be a one-sided fight.)

The final option for affording negative incentive is the civil lawsuit, which could or could not discourage similar situations from occurring. But Tim Cupery's probably right: kids just don't pick up on the potential risks until it's too late (part of the reason they're given leniency in these cases), and Jim's family doesn't sound like the type to want to sue; I don't think Jim would, either, even for the nose-picking, runt carpet smoker text-messagers...


Unfortunately, none of this makes the deafening silence from sydney any less saddening for me.

TallRider

@peripatetic: thanks for taking the time to write out a careful message on the sydney in the CNN news thread, and put things even more in perspective. And I agree, it doesn't make sydney's not being around any better. Though most people think/feel that "doing something about it," even if ineffective and actually counterproductive, will feel better. This is often happens in death penalty cases - families want punishment and vengeance to be dealt to the killer, partly because of justice, and partly because they think it will give closure and make them feel better about what had happened. Thing is, it usually doesn't make them feel any better. This situation has been pretty well studied by criminologists, and is somewhat comparable to people in this forum calling for harsh punishment for the 17-year-old kid. I think it's pretty clear that doing so wouldn't help the kid, wouldn't make cyclists safer, and probably wouldn't make any of y'all actually feel better. Justice may sometimes demand vengeance, but it usually doesn't make people feel better even if they expect it to do so. Sometimes it's more disappointing because they expect it to do so.

Daily Commute

There is a discussion of the charges, as well as the text of various laws that the driver could have been charged under, in this Advocacy thread. A prosecutor even chimed in to give his take.

Scooby Snax

If that kid was selling weed at school he'd get a stiffer penalty.

Society has officially gone down the sh1ttube!!

Nashville Man

The story was on the 6pm Friday Nashville news as well.

dobber

Having been a passenger in a car which did hit and kill a kid on a bike (no charges, unavoidable accident), this youth will be haunted by it for the rest of his life.

Prision time is justified, but I think a bigger part of his sentence should involve speaking with others about his (in)actions. Preventing another death would seem more appropriate in this case.

Nessism

I'm of the opinion that the kid does not deserve to be "put away" per say, rather he should be forced to do a lengthy community service to pay his debt and remind his what he did.

My larger concern is this whole cell phone nonsense in America; how many people must die before we have appropriate laws in place? My understanding is that countries like Japan ban all cell phone use while driving. There are other countries that have similar restrictions and seem to get along okay, so why not here?

Old Hammer Boy

I'd sue, but I would give the money up to promote bicycling safety. I don't think that's vindictive, and if every time this occured, victims exercised such actions, a message might just be sent. Driving any vehicle carries with it a large responsibility and the average American takes the seriousness of driving way too lightly.

TallRider

Yeah, don't you long for the days when society used to punish irresponsible text-messaging use by auto drivers?
My point being, if you're talking about a trend and a decline, you need to make the case that things were better in the past, as well as that things are bad now.

Exactly. I recommended in the initial "is sydney dead - news of sydney's death" thread that the kid be required to read all of the "we'll miss sydney - we appreciate sydney/bourdeaux/Rusty Cogs/etc." threads on the various forums, so that he can learn something about the guy and how many people appreciated him.

dbg

If the kid has any conscience, he feels pretty bad right now. And that will stay with him forever. It will likely have a profound effect on the rest of his life. If he has no conscience, there's not much anybody can do ..and he may get into deeper trouble someday anyway.

But I do agree that driving is a privilege, not a right. It doesn't seem extreme to me to revoke that privilege "forever" when someone takes a life. It would be the ultimate irony if he were forced to ride a bicycle for the rest of his life.

budster

That's very close to the way I feel about it.

In favor of lenient punishment:

• The kid didn't mean to do any harm.
• He's too young to fully understand what he did.

In favor of "harsh" punishment:

• He killed a human being with a deadly weapon
• He was operating the deadly weapon carelessly

Clearly, the kid doesn't deserve life in prison. But he does deserve a punishment worthy of his offense. The law says this type of offense is worthy of the loss of up to one year's liberty. That's not a small thing, especially for a 17-year-old. Six months in prison would certainly leave a permanent impression, and send a message to drivers that the kid's actions were Very Wrong.

The law also allows for recovery of damages by the victim, or in this case, the victim's -- sydney's -- heirs.

If the kid had destroyed someone's $50,000 Mercedes because he was too busy texting, how much of the value of the Mercedes would the kid be expected to pay for? All of it. Does anyone dispute that?

He deprived sydney of his life. He deprived sydney's loved ones of sydney. We can't put a true dollar price on the value of a human life -- but insurance companies do such things all the time.

The average 9/11 victim was "worth" about 2 million dollars. How much would an insurance company say sydney was "worth"? How much of that should the kid pay?

All of it.

No amount of money will bring sydney back, but a just penalty -- 6-12 months in jail + the "insurance company value" of sydney's life -- would give a measure of justice to sydney's heirs, would teach the kid the appropriate lesson and would send the appropriate message to all drivers: "if u kill, u pay."