The Roanoke Slant

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Roanoke Times, 1-31-12, Pg 4: Florida: Patrol defends reopening interstate ahead of wrecks that resulted in 10 people killed in fiery crash where visibility was reduced to zero by smoke from an ongoing fire.
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This tragic situation will likely not result in any action taken against those who are responsible for “the public safety” and who made decisions that in retrospect should be subject to the “known or should have known” or “failure to foresee” rules that have become so rigorously applied to ordinary citizens in accident situations in recent years.
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Prior blog item: Criminalizing Accidents
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2012/01/criminalizing-accidents.html
Everyone is subject to involvement in an accident. The targeting of those involved by aggressive law enforcement personnel and the associated district attorneys can result in draconian outcomes considering the lack of Malice aforethought or depraved indifference involved. Apparently disregard for an actions possible bad outcomes or failure to foresee negative outcomes has become the standard for determining who goes to jail in many cases. That applies to driving on ice or snow if a DA decides to make the case that you should have foreseen bad things before starting your trip in bad weather!
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Included in this big chasm, between those who are prosecuted as the results of accidents and those who are not, often include a hostile rush to judgment if a business is involved.
Of note would be the 29 miners killed in 2010 in the Massey Energy Mine in West VA.
The lynch-mob mentality demonstrated by the media, unions and government investigators clearly made a deliberate and professional investigation impossible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/10/us/10westvirginia.html
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Society needs to assess this crusade to criminalize those involved in accidents where there was no malice aforethought and there is reasonable doubt about the persons involved having acted in a “reasonable and prudent” manner. We also need to demand that whatever the rules are they be applied equally to all persons and situations.
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