There is an old saying in the legal profession, of which I am a member, that "hard cases make bad law." One sees a terrible case like this where a beautiful family is decimated and the knee jerk reaction from many is to throw the guy in jail regardless of his level of culpability. Any one of us is capable at any time of making a simple driving mistake which has terrible consequences. What if this driver had instead been a mother who took a quick glance at her baby in the back seat to see why it was crying and in doing so crossed the center line. Do you think she should be jailed?
My point is that I don't think for a hot second that justice is served when a traffic accident that causes the deaths of five people results in probation for the person that caused the deaths, even if unintentional. Such a decision reeks of a thought process that goes something like: "Well, because the defendant didn't kill the five people on purpose and because the five people are all dead and we cannot do anything more for them (or, even worse, 'we can't bring them back'), why should we ruin the life of a person for making a 'simple driving mistake' even if the independent review of the facts detemined the 'simple driving mistake' was due to criminal negligence?"
Do I think the "mother who took a quick glance at her baby in the back seat to see why it (sic) was crying and in doing so crossed the center line" should be sent to jail for decades for killing five people? Of course not; but I also think the investigators would not have concluded "criminal negligence" for such a cause even if it resulted in multiple deaths. But I do think some jail time is warranted, along with a lifetime suspension of driving privileges, for killing -- killing -- a family, particularly in view of the conclusion of "criminal negligence" by the investigators. Justice for the victims, I think, requires more than simply a monetary penalty. (Then again, the victims are dead so I suppose the law and justice no longer applies to them.)