I just don’t understand drinking and driving

Duh...do you even understand what manslaughter is?

Of course it requires demonstrating that the reckless or negligent behavior of one person caused or contributed to the death of another.

Driving while intoxicated is a violation of traffic safety laws. If a driver causes the death of another while driving in an impaired state, he has caused the death while driving in violation of DUI traffic safety laws.

You aren't making any sense at all.

If the victim died as the result of the impact with a motor vehicle, the person operating that vehicle was involved in causing that death. The driver is responsible for the operation of the motor vehicle. It doesn't matter if the driver is drunk or sober--if they were operating a motor vehicle, and that vehicle hit and killed another person, their motor vehicle was a cause of the death.

The actual cause of the death is the impact with the motor vehicle.

When a DUI manslaughter charge is made, the driver was in a legally impaired state while operating the motor vehicle that caused the death. Evidence of the impairment is shown by the BAC level.

You are confusing actual cause of death, as determined by a coroner, with the condition of the driver. The alcohol in the driver did not cause the death--the impact with the car caused the death. The alcohol in the driver's blood affects the driver's legal liability because he was driving in violation of DUI traffic safety laws, and the fact that alcohol impairs driving abilities is the reason for those DUI traffic safety laws.

You have a very big problem understanding that alcohol, in any amount, affects the human central nervous system. At a level of .08+, definite impairments in central nervous system functioning can be shown which affect driving abilities. That's why we have DUI laws which put the cut-off point for driving an automobile at that level--for the operation of larger vehicles, like trucks, the cut-off BAC level is even lower. The known impairing effects of alcohol have been well established and accepted--by everyone, it seems, except you. They do not have to be demonstrated in each and every case of DUI because they are already the basis for the DUI laws.

We punish all reckless and negligent acts while driving a motor vehicle that cause or contribute to the death of another person--that's vehicular homicide.
It doesn't matter whether you are extremely fatigued and doze off, or if you're distracted and texting on your cell phone, or seeing how your car handles at 100 mph--if those reckless and negligent actions affect the operation of your motor vehicle, so that the vehicle hits and kills someone, you will be held legally liable for the death.

It is not an exception to the manslaughter laws--as you just pointed out by describing it as "a reckless act". The driver was reckless in getting behind the wheel in an impaired state, the driver was reckless in driving in violation of traffic safety laws--therefore, the driver was reckless in choosing to operate the motor vehicle, which caused the death, under such conditions. The responsibility, and legal liability, for that decision, is on the driver.

You understand neither the impairing affects of alcohol, nor the laws, nor the basis for the laws. And you keep demonstrating that.

And, if people don't drink and drive, they don't have to worry about any of these things.

Wrong it is presumed that a driver with a over the limit BAC is the cause of an accident as in no other type of manslaughter cases.

If that's the case, and it probably only is in your head, it shows how crucial it is not to drink and drive. I don't, I like drinking, it's something I enjoy doing, but if I'm driving, I don't drink. It's simple. Just don't do it, you seem to have a problem with it. Do you think you might be becoming alcohol dependent?

In the state of Florida courts there is an ongoing legal battle over the proper jury instructions to juries in manslaughter cases over this very issue of negligence or deviation from a standard of care of the driver DUI or no DUI driving.

To sum up at least at the moment DUI manslaughter cases is not treated like any other manslaughter crime in the courts of Florida.

caselaw.findlaw.com/fl-supreme-court/1341477.htmlCached
PROCEEDINGS BELOW


Respondent Frederick Van Hubbard (Hubbard) was convicted of DUI manslaughter.   Hubbard claimed on appeal that the trial court erred in utilizing a standard jury instruction adopted by this Court and not instructing the jury pursuant to a special requested jury instruction containing a negligence element.1  The First District agreed and reversed and remanded for a new trial.   The court began its analysis by noting that the statute at issue, section 316.193, Florida Statutes (1995), was amended in 1986 and construed by this Court three years later in Magaw v. State, 537 So.2d 564 (Fla.1989).   Hubbard, 748 So.2d at 289.   While emphasizing that Magaw interpreted the amended statute as containing an explicit causation requirement, the court acknowledged that it “makes no mention of negligence or deviation from a reasonable standard of care” by the operator of an automobile.  Hubbard, 748 So.2d at 289.   Nevertheless, the First District noted that a majority of Florida's district courts of appeal have interpreted Magaw as reading a simple negligence element into the crime of DUI manslaughter.  Hubbard, 748 So.2d at 290.   The court also recognized the Fourth District's contrary interpretation in Melvin, 677 So.2d at 1318, that Magaw did not “requir [e] that the standard instruction be broadened to specify lack of care as a distinct element.”

Turning to the case at hand, the First District detailed that over Hubbard's objection the trial court used the standard jury instruction for DUI manslaughter adopted by this Court in 1992.   See Hubbard, 748 So.2d at 291 (citing Standard Jury Instructions-Criminal Cases No. 92-1, 603 So.2d 1175, 1195 (Fla.1992)).   That instruction precisely mirrored the elements of DUI manslaughter adopted in this Court's 1992 opinion, which contained an explicit causation requirement but made no mention of negligence or deviation from a standard of care.   The First District then noted that this Court recently adopted a revised DUI manslaughter standard jury instruction, which again cited Magaw in support of the causation element while remaining silent regarding negligence or deviation from a standard of care.   Nevertheless, while acknowledging that sequence of events, the court ultimately reversed the trial court's ruling and certified conflict with Melvin, reasoning:

Of course, the fact that the Supreme Court has adopted a standard jury instruction does not make that instruction the substantive law of Florida.   See Steele v. State, 561 So.2d 638, 645 (Fla. 1st DCA 1990) (“While the standard jury instructions are intended to assist the trial court in its responsibility to charge the jury on the applicable law, the instructions are intended only as a guide, and can in no wise relieve the trial court of its responsibility to charge the jury correctly in each case.”)   Nevertheless, we cannot completely ignore the fact that twice, since the Magaw opinion, the Florida Supreme Court has adopted standard jury instructions that do not contain a negligence element.   This may well be because, despite the language in the Magaw opinion, the substantive statute for DUI manslaughter does not contain any reference to negligence.   See § 316.193(3)(c)3, Fla. Stat. (1995).   In its brief in this case, the State urges that “ ‘causation’ adequately covers the statutory topic, without an explicit digression into ‘negligence.’ ”   The State's position is not completely without logical force, given the appellant's concession at oral argument, that, if negligence must be part of the jury charge, the standard instruction (adopted less than a week before this case was argued) will never be legally sufficient in a DUI manslaughter case where causation is contested.   Nevertheless, we follow the precedent of this court and others and hold that the trial court erred by failing to give the Magaw instruction.   In hopes that the Supreme Court will soon resolve this question that has arisen repeatedly in the nine years since Magaw, we certify direct conflict with the Fourth District's Melvin

Izzy hello .......

Do you drive when you are short of sleep or very emotionally upset or under dozens of other conditions that can degrade your driving skills to the same degree as a BAC of .08?

Hell some studies claims that talking on a cell phone even non hand held cell phone degrade your driving skills to the same degree as .08 BAC!

I don't use a mobile phone when I drive, I don't drive when I'm really tired either. I'm a tranquil sort. I drive very carefully, my insurance premiums are very very low. It's called being a grown up, and showing regard for one's fellow human beings. The way you carry on, screaming about how life is so unfair makes you sound like a stroppy teenager. Time to grow up.

Sorry life may not be fair however as far as humanly possible the laws and the legal system as a whole should be as fair and as rational as possible.

To not speak out then the laws are not rational and fair is not doing your duty as a citizen.

Swift also received a citation for Careless Driving--so negligence, beyond his being just DUI, is alleged in his case.

To not get involved in the legislative/democratic process, when bills and laws are up for consideration, and public opinion can be registered, is not doing your duty as a citizen.

The DUI laws of Florida, including DUI manslaughter, are both fair and rational. It is illegal to drive while drunk because it has been well established that alcohol impairs driving abilities. If you choose to drive while drunk, you know, in advance, the penalties you will face if you are involved in an accident and kill someone by hitting them with your motor vehicle. That seems quite fair--drivers know the penalties in advance. All drivers have a choice not to drive drunk.

It is your inability to understand this topic that is irrational, not the laws.

Base on what fact him hitting the cyclist?

If so that is meaningless and just an add on charge.

Once more what was the conditions of the cyclist, was he obeying the Florida law and had lights lit on the bike, what was the visibility due to the known weather conditions and so on.

If that bike was not lit up you or I or Hawkeye could had hit it as once more such bikes are very near invisible until you are top of them and that is not taking into account the reports of fog that been posted about on this thread that morning.

You are so full of ****. All you care about is what affects you. Executing a man before examining DNA evidence that could acquit him is hardly 'fair and rational,' but you were all in favour of that. Hypocrite.

The bottom line is that Swift should not have been behind the wheel drunk. He was driving in an illegal, impaired condition.

Stop with the nonsense about whether the bike was lit up, or whether there was fog. You adjust your driving speed for weather/road/visibility conditions, so you can stop your car without hitting anything--like a cyclist--traveling ahead of you. And a cyclist traveling in front of the car can certainly be seen in the range of a car's headlights, as well as the illumination of streetlights, well before he lands on your windshield, and in time to either stop the car or swerve to avoid hitting him. Other drivers managed to avoid hitting that cyclist.

It was Swift's car that hit and killed the cyclist--he didn't have his car under proper control, and he was driving illegally because he was drunk.

For all you know, he might have forgotten to turn his headlights on, or was driving too fast for the visibility conditions, or was fiddling with his car radio and not looking at the road, or he might have dozed off, or been swerving all over the road. He didn't see the cyclist until the man landed on his windshield--that's why he thought he might have hit a pedestrian, and that tells you he was inattentive and not watching where his car was going until the time of actual impact.

You keep wondering whether the cyclist was "obeying Florida law" and disregarding the fact that Swift definitely was not obeying Florida law--he was driving illegally and in an impaired condition. The legal liability is on him as the operator of the motor vehicle that caused someone's death.

You have marked difficulty with the issue of personal responsibility for one's actions. And, given your examples from your own life, of the times you yourself have driven in various impaired conditions, you don't sound like a particularly responsible driver either.

If people don't want to suffer the penalties for DUI or DUI manslaughter, all they have to do to avoid them is not drive drunk. Once you decide to drive while drunk, you are going to be held legally liable for your actions behind the wheel and for any damages and deaths caused by your operation of your motor vehicle under illegal conditions.

All you seem to think about is how to weasel out of a situation you were wrong to have gotten yourself into in the first place. You have no sense of personal responsibility.

I was thinking that this might explain quite a bit when I was driving to class last night.

Weather's nice here - there were many cyclists out after dark - some with lights - some not - some with reflectors - some not ... and I could see them in the street lights as well as in my car's headlights.

I would probably have seen them just by the street lights, but there was no way not to see them since the car's headlights were picking them up even on the blocks with very limited street lighting.

There was even a guy dressed all in black, on a matte dark bike, no reflectors - I could still see him blocks before I caught up with him.

I've had that same experience, ehBeth, when driving at night--I can see cyclists just from the illumination of street lights at least a block or two ahead of me, without any lights on the bike.

Even if fog is so heavy that you can't see beyond the range of your headlights, you must then drive slowly enough so that you can stop abruptly if an object or person or cyclist comes within that range. You have to anticipate things while driving, you have to be aware of your car's stopping distance. I've driven in heavy fog, I move at a snail's pace because I don't want to hit anything that might suddenly appear out of the fog. I do the same when driving in heavy rain or snow, where visibility is limited, and on icy roads where I don't want to skid. Accident avoidance is part of driving responsibly.

Alcohol impairs night vision, depth perception, judgment, concentration, reaction time, etc.--the things which affect driving ability and accident avoidance. Any mistakes a driver makes are likely to be compounded under such conditions.

LOL that is complete nonsense and once more this is from a cyclist with many many thousands of miles cycling at night and driving a car at night in areas with cyclists using the roadways at night.

In my younger days I had skydrive for fun and flown a 300 pound aircraft to two miles high and yet I would never take the risk of being on the roadways on a bike after dark without lights .

A dark bike from street lights at least a block or two ahead indeed let see 500 hundred feet to a thousand feet is your claim!

My what big big eyes you two woman had to be able to see so well in the dark however my eyesight had alway check out to be 20/20 with normal night vision and I am very aware of cyclists on the roadway being one myself yet detecting a dark bike from street lights is not a 500 hundred feet ability of mine and depending on a lot of factors is a small fraction of that distant.

Did the bike even have reflectors still on it, is the bike and the cyclist both wearing bright clothes or dark clothes and in what relationship is the reflectors if any to the car headlights?

If alcohol was not an issue there is little likelihood of anyone would be charge with hitting a bike running dark at night and rightly so.

You need lights at night and the risk of cycling at night can be seen in the fact that roughly half the deaths in cycling happen at night in spite of the fact that most cycling is done during daylight hours.

Second the minimum reflectors sold on cheap bikes are a joke at best.



http://sheldonbrown.com/reflectors.html




Cycle Sense:
Why Reflectors Don't Work
There are optical reasons for all those crashes and deaths
by John Schubert
HTML formatting by Sheldon Brown

The CPSCEntrance AngleFogHeadlight Beam PatternsHuman ErrorLawsLightsObservation AngleVehicle Position


If you go for a drive tonight, you'll see reflectors shining brightly from mailboxes. You'll see reflectorized stop signs. If bike riders are out, you'll see their pedal reflectors . All these reflectors will appear bright, and very easy to avoid.

So here's the seven million dollar question: If all these reflectors are so darn bright and easy to see, how come the bike safety nerds insist you need active lights to be seen at night?

There is a very scientific answer: reflectors work only under very specific conditions. Those conditions happen to prevail in most of the nighttime driving we do, so we get the impression that reflectors work most or all of the time. But reflectors don't work at all if those conditions aren't met, and many well-defined bicycle accident types occur in situations when we can expect reflectors to not work.

Few people understand how easy it is to wander outside the range of conditions in which reflectors will work. But it's astonishingly easy.

Why would a reflector decide to malfunction? And how could it? It doesn't have electrical components to fail, like, say, a British car.

It does, however, have other limitations. Among them:

•It can be anywhere outside the beam of a driver's headlights.
•It can be tilted at an angle ("entrance angle") that severely degrades its optical performance. (If you look at bikes parked on the campus bike rack, you'll see reflectors aimed in all sorts of dysfunctional directions.)
•The driver's eye may be outside the narrow cone of light which the reflector sends back to the light source. (The angle between the light source and the driver's eye is the "observation angle.")
•Fog can completely block the reflector when other lights remain visible. (Howzat? The farther light travels through fog, the more the light gets absorbed-and light from a reflector is making a round trip, twice as far as light from an active light source.)
•The driver may have a burned-out headlight (possibly a lethal problem if it's the left headlight-generally, the right headlight's observation angle is too big for good reflector performance). Or the headlights may be mis-aimed or covered with dirt. Or powered by a Lucas electrical system in the throes of an 8-volt brownout.
•The reflector surface can be abraded, covered with moisture or dust, or otherwise altered in a way that wrecks its optical performance.
This list is surely incomplete, but it makes a point: many factors can prevent a reflector from beaming light at the intended observer. This point is not hypothetical-our nightly accident rate shows that. Roughly once per night in this nation, a person is killed on a bicycle after dark. Many more are injured. Very often, I suspect, these accident victims have Consumer Product Safety Commission approved- and required- reflectors on their bikes. So here's my message to those who say, "These reflector requirements are safe and effective." You've lost all credibility.

To understand how reflectors can fail, you need to learn about fifty cents worth of industrial engineering. The relevant topics are: entrance angle, observation angle, headlight beams, positions on the roadway, the human propensity to make big mistakes, and "other.

So, it's not an ability of yours.

Then other people have abilities superior to yours. Your night vision apparently isn't as good as you think it is.

I have no problem seeing bikes traveling ahead of my car, at night, without rear lights--they are clearly illuminated by the street lights for at least a block or two ahead of my car. And it's not just the reflector that can be seen, the figure of the person on a moving bike can be seen--even wearing dark clothes.

I can also see pedestrians walking on the sidewalks at night or crossing the street at least a block ahead of me, and they have no "lights" at all.

I can also see small animals, like a cat or squirrel, running across the street at night at least a block away. You can see the movement of the animal.

So, no one would be charged with hitting a pedestrian either?

I wouldn't count on not being charged for hitting a bike without lights, even if alcohol was not involved, if the bike was traveling in front of the car. You are supposed to make sure there are no obstacles ahead of your car as you drive. If you can't see clearly what is ahead of your car, at all times, either you probably shouldn't be driving, or certainly going no more than 10 miles an hour, so you can immediately stop if you do see something.

You are aware, aren't you, that when you drive you aren't supposed to hit anything.

Do you hit many things with your car?

Knowing how hard it is to see a bike after dark I personally had gone to overkill for myself.

Beside the good reflectors that came with my not cheap touring bike I have two cheap LED flashers one on me and one on the bike and one strobe light in the rear.

In the front of the bike one white LED flasher and one very very bright battery power head light.

Other then the high power headlight all the four others lights together only cost forty dollars or so.

You can be fairly safety lit for only at a minimum of twenty-five to thirty dollars and at least you should have one cheap rear led flasher for five dollars or so.

Even one cheap LED flasher will allow most drivers to see and become aware of a cyclist in that range of 500 to a thousand feet that Firefly is claiming is all she need is a street light or two to do.

None of those lights on your bike might protect you from a drunk driver who wasn't even attending to the road ahead of him.

My my one wonder with only a few percent of cycling done at night almost half of the total deaths happen at night in cycling with such remarkable abilities to see cyclist being so common with drivers.

With a good reflector and at the right angles to the car headlights you could have the range you are talking about seeing cyclists but with no reflectors or the type sold with cheap bikes you are not going to see cyclists at night at 500 hundred to a thousand feet.

Perhaps however it will protect me from most drivers even those who are not paying the attention to the roads they should be as a bright stroke light is a hard thing to miss indeed at night.

My total chance of dying from a car hitting me at night is a very very small fraction of those cyclists who are depending on people like you with claimed abilities to see them by way of street lights or the car headlights.

Tell you what Firefly if you agree to cycle at least 500 miles a year at night with no lights I will buy you and izzy good bikes in order to do so.