Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Christopher Dempsey,
intent to cause such serious injury that death was likely and the attacker didn’t care if the victim lived or died.
Isn’t this exactly what happens in the case of someone speeding? Undertaking dangerous moves?
What Graeme said. The injury cannot be unintentional. If you speed down a residential street while children are playing in the road, and you aim at them and kill one, that would likely be murder because you intended to cause injury that you should reasonably have known could cause death, and obviously didn't care if death resulted.
If you speed down the same street with no children playing and you hit and kill a child who runs out in front of you there's no intent to cause injury so it cannot be murder. The speeding might well be an aggravating factor for sentencing for dangerous driving (if the speed was manifestly excessive), but it does not amount to intent to cause injury. What it could reasonably be is manslaughter, but what you are proposing is effectively making driving perfectly within the law but for a moment's inattention into a lack of care equivalent to discharging a firearm randomly into the air, as an example. -
Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to FletcherB,
surely firing a gun multiple times through a toilet door at a human is so likely to cause death as to constitute murder?
In New Zealand, yes. In South Africa, not necessarily. NZ does not accept an automatic right to use firearms in self defence in the absence of an absolutely clear mortal threat. South Africa, being South Africa, may very well (I don't know for sure) allow for that right.
There are states in the US (Texas springs to mind) where it is an absolute right to use lethal force towards any person who is on your property at night. No requirement to challenge the "intruder", no requirement to establish a threat, just an unquestioned right to shoot first, shoot again, shoot some more, then call the cops and get them to find out who you just turned into a bloody Swiss cheese. This has seen students seeking help after a car breakdown being killed, and there's no legal recourse available. I think the only impediment is shooting someone who identifies themselves as a law enforcement officer, but given the attitudes of some Texans towards federal law enforcement I wouldn't even assume that that much is certain.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Christopher Dempsey,
I would argue for a shift in criminal liability from ‘carelessness causing death’ (or whatever the charge is) when a car/truck hits a cyclist or pedestrian to ‘murder’
Murder is a big jump. Massive. Murder requires intent to kill or, failing that, intent to cause such serious injury that death was likely and the attacker didn't care if the victim lived or died. Murder is so far beyond reasonable that conviction would be almost impossible because juries would baulk at effectively imposing a life sentence for even a moment's inattention; a government that passed such a law would certainly not provide judges the wiggle room to impose a lesser sentence. Manslaughter, maybe, but murder just wouldn't pass the test of what's fair consequence for the action.
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Supporting the suggestion discussed here already, optometrists are calling for cyclists to use ankle and knee reflective bands because it’s more obviously a person than a static vest.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Lilith __,
But you’re saying that anyone who qualified before the current testing regime is a bad driver. That’s just nonsense, and that’s what we want you to show some evidence for.
Show me where I said that. Please. A direct quote. You want to talk about misconstruing someone's words, you've damned well found a doozy and now you'd better put up some proof.
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Right, evidence.
This one where a significant association between poor parental driving habits and the driving habits of their newly-licensed adolescents was observed.
The reports on how much stricter testing has become are numerous, but a couple are here and here. Academic research on the immediate and on-going effect that the introduction of the graduated driver licensing scheme had on crash rates amongst young drivers compared to prior is here.
It’s still too soon to tell what effect the latest changes have had, but when failing to check mirrors consistently before changing lanes (second link in paragraph above) will see you fail, that’s a huge jump from what’s been tested previously. And making that a habit that’s sufficiently ingrained to survive a 45-minute-long test means it’s probably a habit that will be with the driver for life. Also comment from a driving instructor here that he’s seen people come for professional tuition after three fails at the new restricted test, “By then it’s quite hard to get rid of bad habits they’ve picked up, like driving with one hand.”
I haven’t just made this shit up. I’ve paid attention to years of debates about how to try and reduce our youth road toll.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Danielle,
I'll die too, one day. My point is that there's a huge focus on getting new drivers ready to be drivers, including a significant increase in the focus on their adherence to "polite" driving behaviour, but it's going to be decades before everyone who wasn't subjected to the same level of scrutiny is off the roads. And until that happens, the bad attitudes and impolite behaviour will continue. If people are taking that as some kind of a wish for "the oldies" to hurry up and die, that's their lookout.
I've advocated in this forum more than once for mandatory theory retesting with every licence renewal as a way of ensuring that all those who went through earlier schemes actually know the rules. I'd like it even better if there was a practical test with every renewal, but then people start bleating about costs and about practicalities.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Stewart,
Your reactions are pretty far out there, Stewart. Mortally offended seemed an appropriate phrase. You've all got hung up on who crashes more, using that as a yardstick for who's better at being courteous and following conventions such as proper use of indicators. Your response to my cornflake pack quip said a lot about being touchy, even though you admit that it was incredibly easy for you to get your licence.
I fall into the same group of drivers who underwent negligible testing, if you hadn't been paying attention. I'm only an argument from exception because I then got trained to get a class 2 driver's licence through the Fire Service and got hammered on the finer points by someone who taught people how to drive fire appliances as urgent traffic. That, plus some of the serious ignorance about traffic law that I encountered when marking the theory section of driver competitions, just confirmed for me that what passed for testing when I was a teenager wasn't anything close to sufficient to ensure I was actually good about sharing the road and letting others know what I was doing. -
Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Lilith __,
FFS. Best and best-behaved are not the same thing. This whole discussion came about through discourse about drivers who don't share the road nicely with others. Somehow that has now become about crash statistics and whether older drivers are better at sharing the road than young drivers purely because they crash less on a per-capita basis.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Stewart,
“driving licence testing standards have improved over time”
Over the last decade, pretty much. Before that, it was a joke. For my generation it was pass a 30-question multiple-guess scratch quiz (only 20 possible layouts, which could all be bought from BP and then handed around your friends with twink to hide the scratched panels) to get your learner, wait six months, do a drive of somewhere less than 15 minutes to get your restricted (proving that you could follow the speed limit, indicate, and hopefully carry out at least one of a hill start, a parallel park, and a three-point-turn), wait 9-18 months and get your full. Not much before that came into play it wasn’t even that hard, and as you’ve observed it was much easier still in the not-too-distant past. And it was a retired traffic cop for me. By the time I was getting my licence, there was no such thing as a traffic cop.
As for literally millions, yes, literally millions. Somewhere north of three million people in this country (ETA: 3.2m in 2010) hold a driver’s licence, and the vast majority got them less recently than within the last 10 years.
None of you are disagreeing with me that testing has got better, but you’re all mortally offended that I’m daring to point out that all of the people who went through the earlier variations of testing could get away with being very average drivers at the time in terms of behaviour and have since been largely ignored. How dare I point out something that I thought was a self-evident fact: if you didn’t have to learn proper behaviour in order to get your licence, and didn’t get taught properly, you likely carry on those bad behaviours to this day. Most people in this country learn to drive from family and friends, and that’s been the case since forever. That means they learn the bad habits of their instructors, and pass on those bad habits to those they instruct. Unless the testing is sufficient to catch and penalise those bad habits, the bad habits remain. It’s not rocket science.