What they did was wrong, and they deserve to be punished.
They are responsible for their actions, and they should be held accountable for them.
The driver is also accountable for his actions.
You are required to be able to maintain control over your car and stop it something is obstructing the road. That's the law.
I agree with you that they should have realized that their actions might very well lead to someone who was driving less carefully than they should have might collide with the decoy and damage their car.
However, they couldn't know that the driver was going to swerve off the road at a high rate of speed and roll the car.
The driver's responsibility to drive at a safe speed and maintain control of the vehicle even in the event of something being on the road.
To make convoluted excuses that shift most of the blame to the victim is ludicrous.
I'm not using convoluted logic or trying to shift blame from one person to another. I'm suggesting that each person be accountable for their own actions. Nothing more and nothing less.
The accident wouldn't have happened if the idiot kids didn't put the decoy on the road.
However, if the driver was driving safely and maintained control of their vehicle, the accident also would not have happened.
The actions of the kids that put the decoy on the road are definitely more unusual, for the lack of a better word, and arguably they bear the majority of the responsibility for causing the incident. However, the difference between an incident resulting in minor or no damage, and what happened is the driver not being able to stop or even slow down in time.
Both the kids placing the decoy on the road and the driver who was not driving the car performed actions that were not within the law.
The driver is suffering enough for his mistake. I don't see any need to add to that. However, it's also not fair to hold the kids fully responsible for the severity of the accident in an emotional response to the injuries that were sustained by the driver and his passenger.
They deserve their share of the blame, and deserve to be punished accordingly, but that's it.
I think what your really saying is that being safe is the law then? That would make driving one of the safest modes of transport, by law terms...which ummm....it isn’t, words sound nice, reality is ugly. What if they didn’t actually avoid it on purpose, but because you are on a rural country gravel road hit your brakes, and maybe hit loose gravel, and therefore swerved, producing your so called victim induced accident. The thing is maybe this wouldn’t have occurred if it had been on paved roads, but your on gravel, don’t forget that. Your words would say this should have been avoidable, yes in a picture perfect directions sense, I guess. But reality seems to shake things up a bit, throw in a bone or two, and that is why we see accidents all the time. I’ll give you error some of the time, but in this case....NO....i will not. Your reasoning would have me believe that all accidents and deaths should not have happened because guns are illegal, underage drinking is illegal, etc, etc, where do you live? clearly not in reality.