Posted on 11/20/2006 11:40:52 AM PST by Wiggins
LOS ANGELES — An elderly man who killed 10 people and injured more than 70 others when he drove through an outdoor farmers market was sentenced Monday to probation by a judge who said he believed the crime deserved imprisonment but the defendant was too ill.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
No with my luck, I would get a real judge and get sentenced to life
it is far more complicated than just that,
this is not TV.
If this old man has a true physical ailment (if it was just mental he would be going to a mental facility)
"... Weller's health problems including severe heart disease would make him a burden on prison authorities and taxpayers, and that imprisonment would most likely kill Weller."
Now he is NOT a burden to the tax payers,
His conviction IS admissible for purposes of summary judgment in a civil trial,
AND
while alive he can be ordered to redo his life insurance beneficiaries if the law allows.
Plus probation is no cake walk. If he has the restrictive monitoring probation of the house arrest type, one little mis step and he is toast.
The fox article does not say the probation rules.
For murder they must be draconian.
It happened to 2 teenage girls learning to drive who killed their mothers..These were separate tragedies a few years apart.
Old man Kennedy.
House arrest would be fine....until he forgets he's under house arrest...
It would be a lot more than $35k a year, given his ill health. The state taxpayers would be footing the bill for his medical care, and I suspect that it wouldn't be cheap.
An elderly (98) friend of mine told me with great indignation that Indiana had made it too much trouble for her to continue driving after she turned 80. The state started a requirement for elderly drivers to retake their written driver's test every month. Does anyone know if that's actually true?
For economic reasons, this makes sense.
However, ten lives were taken, and many others were severely injured. That kind of toll demands justice. There needs to be an accounting for those lives. If the idiot wasn't too old to drive, than he's not too old to suffer the consequences of his driving.
Probation doesn't cut it for me. Let him die in prison.
That's the real issue. At what point is someone's dignity less important than protecting the public? Just imagine how the punishment would have gone down if he would have been a drunk driver.
So he was trying to "run" from the scene of the original accident, and once he hit one person he just kept accelerating to get the H@ll out of there.
Lock him up with the rest of the murderers.
That one works for pretty much anything. Murder? Eh, you can't unkill a person. Free the prisoner!
"The state taxpayers would be footing the bill for his medical care, and I suspect that it wouldn't be cheap."
The state is under no obligation to provide other than enough care to prevent suffering. No surgeries, IIRC!
Hmmm. Same purpose, I suppose, that is served when anyone is put in prison at $35K/year.
Are you thinking that because of this guy's age, he should get a pass?
Killer gets probation. God bless California.
If that old coot had any sense of decency, he'd off himself tonight by running his car in an enclosed garage after drinking a few cups of antifreeze.
I wish him nothing but the worst for the rest of his hopefully short amount of days.
There was evidence in the trial that this was no accident. Several witnesses described the driver as angry and indifferent to the victims after the "accident". There's more to this than the headlines.
We do it all the time when the "accident" was avoidable.
In most states a criminal conviction wins a civil summary judgement motion as a matter of law.
This is a Solomon moment the judge can not win. The man obviously thought he could save his car by going into the crowd where people would get out of the way. He paniced perhaps, did not think, definitly.
He may become a ward of the state anyways. He very well end up in one of those lowest end nightmare convalecent homes.
Self driving cars are hopefully going to make these events a thing of the past. (if a lexus can park itself, how soon before all cars can drive themselves.)
I thought he had already been sentenced to prison. Maybe I am getting mixed up with the article a few months ago saying he had been convicted. In any case, this hardly seems like punishment, no matter his age. What's to stop him from driving again??
Actually, I think California has that law, too. An 86 year old relative there just had to take the DL exam. She failed it, of course, but they have a special class for elderly drivers where they bone up on their skills. She took the class and passed the test.
The problem is that she still doesn't see very well and is losing her depth perception, her car is now covered with scratches and goudges on the right side from cutting things too close, and she really shouldn't be driving. On the positive side, the last time I saw her, she said that she herself had finally decided that her driving days were over. Some people have enough courage and concern for others to admit this.
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