Here's a bizarro world case. How does it make sense to charge a pedestrian with vehicular homicide?

A jaywalker in Atlanta was charged with secondary vehicle homicide after she and her son, who died of his injuries, were hit by a drunk driver. The drunk driver plead guilty and was sentenced to 2 years, of which he served 6 months, and still retains his driver's license even though it was his third DUI/hit-and-run. The pedestrian stood to face a maximum sentence of 3 years, but received probation and community service, and lost on appeal. I can understand charging her with jaywalking, and even child endangerment, but secondary vehicular homicide?

A separate issue is the one transportation advocates have pointed out, which is that there was no legal crossing near the bus stop that the woman (and other residents of the same apartment complex) relied on to get home. The closest one was 500 metres (1/3 mile) away. Were the Atlanta authorities negligent (if not in the legal sense, then in the ordinary sense) in failing to provide a crossing where many people would invariably need to cross the road?

That's... kind of bizarre. There's a higher sentence for jaywalking than for drunk driving?

I can come up with phenomenally stupid things that pedestrians can do, that would validate such charges. Such as walking on a highway. It does not seem though, that this was such a case.

IMO in the US traffic laws pedestrians have way too few rights. Around here, if there is no dedicated crossing within a few meters (i forgot how many exactly, but it has to be something like 5 or 10 meters) pedestrans may cross the street. Highways are excepted, but highways are built in a way, that there simply is no sensible reason to walk there.

Are you sure it's 5 or 10 metres, and not 50 or 100? Because that would make it legal to cross the road just about anywhere except for directly next to, but not on, a pedestrian crossing.

I am not really sure about the number, i am pretty bad at judging distances in meters anyway, so it has little relevance and it is a long time since i have studied for my driving license (where i learned about that).

Back then i did a calculation on a street i know, and came to the result, that it's never a real inconvenience for the pedestrian to go to the next legal place to cross the street. And i don't think there are any blocks in Vienna, where you are not allowed to cross somewhere in the middle of the block. Overall a number not worth to remember, because as driver, i need to look out for children, drunks and other pedestrians, who can't be trusted for some reason, anyway and as predestrian, unless i take a "just because" shortcut, i violate the distance only by a neglegible amount anyway.

I have no idea if thoose rules are actually executed anywhere or if they are dead law. I have not heared about anyone ever getting a fine for crossing the street at an illegal place, and i never have heared of an example of a pedestrian that was crossing illegally being hit by a car.

I've googled it and got the following:

Dedicated crossing points have to be used, unless they are farer away then 25 meters. (i guess i got the 10 m from the corolarry, that you hardly have to make a detour more then 10 meters)
If there is no crossing point within 25 meters, and you are not on the countryside* pedestrians have to cross the street at intersections, unless it's obviously save** to do so at other places. No information is given there, what to do if the intersection is very far away. I would assume the 25 meters apply too in that case, but it was not in the text i found.

* i did not find a good english translation of the term
** I assume that this means it's save even without cooperation of the car drivers. (A true Viennese pedestrian considers crossing the street under that circumstances a god given right anyway)

From what I have seen of central Vienna (I visited briefly in 2002), and what I am given to understand of Atlanta, the two urban environments are very different. Vienna's streets seemed to be fairly narrow, and the traffic not very fast moving. Pedestrians tend to be safer in that kind of environment.

This is what the area where the accident in Atlanta took place looks like. It's pretty sparse, with a wide road and fast-moving traffic. This is pretty typical of arterial roads in the suburban US.

There are a few roads, with similiar size, but they are the exception. Can't say anything about the typical speed of traffic from the picture.

How save it is to cross such a road depends on time dependent circumstances, like how much and what kind of traffic is there and how how visibility is. Under some circumstances it can be criminally neglegent to try to cross such a road with little children, under others it is not. I would consider it dubious, to apply vehicular homicide laws, after all there are other criminally neglegent things to do with children, such as going swimming under bad weather conditions, and it would be daft to use some nautic laws then, rather then a general law for neglegence with minors. I don't know enough about laws to be definite about that though.

Just from the photo, this seems like a natrual place for pedestrian to cross the street. After all there are 2 crossroads there. Drivers should not be too suprised by pedestrians crossing the street. And it is quite likely, there there should be a zebra crossing too.

A street like that is going to have a speed limit of 45 mph (70 kph) at a minimum. There is no way an American city would put a crosswalk on a street like that without also installing a stoplight.

Lately, they've been installing new lights at crosswalks around schools near my work site. They widened the crosswalk and added three sets of flashing lights in either direction on major streets. They have the crossing button to start the lights and signal for a safe crossing, but that only drawbacks I see here are people who either don't push the button because they're just stupid, people who push the button and just step out not waiting for the traffic to stop, the people driving who ignore it, and those going to fast to stop in time. Not a particularly bad idea for heavy crossing areas, but you still have to deal with human error.

I suppose that's why they didn't put in a crossing. They didn't want to stop traffic too frequently. I read that the area was originally built as a cars-only suburb, but in recent years more and more poor people have been moving there. So now there's a substantial carless population without any of the supporting infrastructure.

Do you know of any precedent of charging a pedestrian with vehicular homicide?

Philadelphia has an intersection with such a light on route 1, a major highway. It doesn't change to allow pedestrians to cross except when someone presses the button.

A simple timer fixes that. Start with standard pedestrian signal with both indicators dark. When someone presses the button, the DON'T WALK indicator lights up. If necessary, the system then waits until traffic has been allowed to flow uninterrupted for some minimum amount of time since the last time it was stopped. Once that time has elapsed, the system stops the traffic, then lights up the WALK indicator. Alternately, they can synchronize with the nearest stoplights to allow people to cross when it would cause the minimum disruption in traffic.

No. On first blush, it seems absolutely absurd.

However, there is a theory in criminal law that I'm sure everyone here has at least heard of called accessory liability.

Some crimes (most crimes, if you look at them closely enough) have numerous people whose actions caused the crime to be committed. For instance, a murder victim's decision to walk down a particular alleyway and a particular time, the waiter at the restaurant who was remarkably prompt in returning the victim's change, allowing the victim to leave the restaurant at that particular time, and the victim's daughter, who wrecked the victim's car the week before, causing the victim to walk home from the restaurant instead of driving. Each of these people took actions that, had those actions not occurred, the victim would still be alive today. This is called "but for" causation: but for their actions, the event would not have occurred.

Causation generally is made up in part by "but for" causation, and in part by what is called "proximate" causation. A proximate cause is simply an action that can reasonably be expected to have resulted in a particular outcome. Sometimes something bad happens, and it is not entirely clear who is responsible for it. It is possible for something to have multiple proximate causes, and it is common for something to have multiple "but for" causes.

Accessory liability plays off of that, creating a way to hold other people responsible for a crime, even if they are not the ones who directly committed it. Typically, it requires the person to take some sort of action that promotes (makes more likely) the crime, and that they do it with the state-of-mind required by law to create criminal liability.

With vehicular homicide, it is not always necessary to show that someone intended to cause a death in order to convict them. Showing that they acted with a reckless disregard for a high probability of serious injury or death can be enough. In this case, the prosecutor's theory is no doubt that this woman, in taking her three children across a five-lane highway (highway, not street) on foot, acted with reckless disregard for a high probability of serious injury or death.

It seems unlikely that a jury would fail to be swayed by the emotional impact of finding a woman guilty of murdering her child when she is not a demonstrably monstrous person, but that's what juries are for. Prosecutors have all kinds of factors probing them toward charging people with crimes and seeking convictions, they sometimes overstep, and a jury is supposed to keep them in check.

Who knows? Maybe this prosecutor is pushing this prosecution in order to raise the visibility of the lack of legal crossings in the area. Perhaps public outcry about this action will result in the installation of a stoplight that functions in much the way that AlternateTorg suggests. Certainly such technology already exists, so it's just a matter of actually installing it. Maybe the D.A. is taking the public fall for a greater good.

I'm trying to see the best in people these days. It feels weird, but I think it's the right way to go. Let me know if it starts to scare you.

Or it could simply be a somewhat classist assumption that any mother who attempts to cross such a road with her children must be negligent. The jury was composed of middle-class people who hardly ever rode the bus, who probably thought that any good parent would never have made such an error in judgment because the safety children of obviously comes before any notion of convenience. They wouldn't have considered that a normal, reasonable person who gets tired and has crap to worry about, would, after being expected to walk 2/3 of a mile (1 km) daily to merely cross a road, get thoroughly sick of it and start jaywalking at some point.

The Transport for America article I linked to previously has a map that shows pedestrian fatalities in Atlanta over the last 10 years or so. The road where the accident took place wasn't the worst black spot, but there were a few pedestrian fatalities along that stretch, and who knows how many non-fatal accidents or near-misses. Maybe the authorities, instead of considering the road a hazard, wanted to make an example of someone to deter jaywalkers.
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