10 years in prison is possible.
Seems pretty light considering they basically killed a little girl. The fact that they dropped the manslaughter charges kind of upsets me too because the girl’s death was directly caused by the bus monitor’s actions. Or I guess lack of action and incompetence, but still.
Manslaughter wasn’t “dropped.” She was found not guilty of manslaughter, and guilty of child endangerment.
Regardless, if she was texting and driving and hit a pedestrian you bet their ass they would find her guilty of that. The circumstances may be different but the underlying cause is essentially the same thing.
“I made a mistake, but you guys are trying to put me away for 10 to 20 years—on a mistake,”
A mistake?
A mistake is when you hit reply all to an email to talk shit about your boss. A mistake is when you push a door clearly marked pull. My son not wearing the wrist strap on his VR controller and breaking the TV was a mistake.
A girl dying because you couldn’t be bothered to put your goddamned phone down and do your fucking job is not a mistake.
Mistakes don’t result in the death or serious harm of another person.
Mistakes don’t result in the death or serious harm of another person.
They frequently do, actually.
That’s funny, because when I’ve advocated making driving a strict-liability activity, the usual response is that we shouldn’t “ruin people’s lives” over a mistake that killed somebody.
It’s one thing when something unavoidable happens like a kid darting out from behind a truck and not being able to stop in time. It’s another thing if someone is willfully not paying attention and careens into a crosswalk full of children. So I would both agree and disagree with your sentiment depending on the circumstances.
I’m thinking of one case of a high school student driving so fast on his way to school that he couldn’t stop for a school bus, and instead steered around the side of it, and killed a 12-year-old student waiting for the bus. There definitely were people in social media saying that we shouldn’t ruin the young man’s whole life over a mistake.
On the other hand, I’d agree with the example of drivers hitting people walking in the roadway on a limited-access highway at night as not at all a fault. The whole point of limited access is to reduce the number of things that a driver needs to anticipate. But a kid running out from behind a parked vehicle? That happens in places where kids live, and if one is driving in such places, it’s totally one’s fault for not driving slowly enough to react to a kid doing natural kid things.
It’s all fucked, but if you read on you’ll see that it is possible that she was put in a position where she may have been required her not to pay attention to the kid - by that I mean her employer required her to use her cell… Which would distract her. For the whole bus ride? Definitely doesn’t sound like it…but caused her to have distractions, absolutely.
It’s mostly her fault, but don’t excuse management for her conflicting job duties. They should share the sentencing - everyone who has a say in the affected company policies. That’d fix the problem and future problems. We’ll probably stick it all on her as a person failure though.
Reading between the lines in this one, I think she’s being thrown under the bus for our societal guilt. The prosecution emphasized “six years of training,” but that’s so obviously bogus… Medical doctors are only in school for four, so that’s clearly not referring to a professional certification, but six years of (probably recycled) on-the-job training sessions by the bus company, which is what? Probably not much, because transportation is a huge, huge cost for school systems, and they go with the low bidders for contracts. It’s an expensive business to run, so the contractors cut costs. How much did this woman earn? Not much I’ll wager. The bus company didn’t even provide her with a company phone, and didn’t bother to install proper restraints in the bus itself.
So here’s this low-paid, probably not highly-trained, young woman who loaded up a girl in a wheelchair with restraints she just had to trust because she’s not allowed to touch them, because in six years of training, she hasn’t been trained on them. Besides, the parents/siblings ought to know best, right? The bus doesn’t have proper equipment, but what’s she going to do, refuse to let the child on? It’d make a scene, embarrass the child, annoy the driver and the parents, probably leading to a complaint that could cost her job.
Besides, this was undoubtedly not the first time. In six years, she’d loaded up how many kids in wheelchairs onto buses with broken or inadequate equipment, and it’s been fine. We all tend to think of our vehicles as a safety cocoon. Strap the kid in, and it’s a temporarily solved problem. No more worrying about what they’re up to for the duration of the trip, a mental reprieve. So, yeah, this woman made a mistake, but one that every driving parent I’ve ever met makes on the regular. And it’s one of those psychological quirks of humans that we come down like a ton of manure on people who were unlucky enough to suffer consequences for dangerous mistakes we’ve all skated on. Related to the Just World Hypothesis, probably.
So this woman made a mistake, an understandable one if you put yourself in her shoes, and she’s taking the fall for meager school funding, poorly regulated school transportation, and our collective guilt, too.
Complacency kills.
A reminder that cops can’t be sued for the same negligence. Also a reminder: punch up, not down
Her job was to make sure the girl was ok. The girl wasn’t strapped in correctly and then slowly slide down because she couldn’t make herself upright. Terrible…
