This one is from California. Kaitlyn Dunaway, 18, tried to text while she was driving. She ploughed into a mother and toddler, killing the child and seriously injuring the mother. Echoes of the Keisha Bianca Wall case we had here recently.
The article says that Dunaway is the first known person in California to be charged with causing death by texting and driving. Surprisingly, the maximum prison term she is looking at is just one year in a county jail. She admits full responsibility.
Aside from the obvious “rot in hell” sentiments you’d expect from certain quarters of the public, what also surprises me is the belief of the reporter that:
I don’t see what would be accomplished by locking away this young woman for years on end. She made a terrible mistake that she will have to live with every day for the rest of her life.
Let me just say again that the MAXIMUM sentence is ONE YEAR in a county jail. I’m not quite sure where the reporter gets the higly emotive “years on end” from.
But my biggest question is: why is it different for her?
Would it matter if it were a man? The reporter, Tammerlin Drummond, is a woman – as is the accused. You could easily apply the “I don’t see what would be accomplished…” line to anyone and any crime. Does it really matter that it is a woman who is involved?
I suspect that to some people, it does.
The article goes on to mention “[scaring] sense into people”. I commented on that in the previous story. We need to wake up to the fact that the only way of scaring sense into people is to enforce serious penalties on those who transgress, not to mollycoddle them with tragedies, however poignant they might be.
Sad stories do not work.
America is a million miles behind the UK on this, and we’re pretty crap on enforcing it ourselves. And yet enforcement is so easy. Every day I glance in my rearview mirror and see people who are obviously texting (or doing something that is equally distracting down by their groins). Surely the police could do this in unmarked cars?