My skull after a 2008 “accident”
Interesting story in today’s Wilkes-Barre Citizens Voice. In the wake of the fatal hit-and-run of a 5-year-old boy, an assistant district attorney decries how current Pennsylvania laws actually encourage drunks to flee the scene when they strike someone.
That is a fact, and one that state legislators including Sen. Larry Farnese have tried in vain to remedy.
Drunk drivers who kill face a mandatory minimum prison sentence of three years. Those who drive away and get caught after alcohol is out of their system normally can only be charged with fleeing the scene – a crime that carries a one-year minimum jail term.
The spotlight has been placed on the loophole locally following several recent cases in which drivers – believed to have been drinking alcohol – fled the scene of crashes in Wilkes-Barre City, leaving the victims on the road to die.
“Our opinion is there still remains an incentive to flee if you had been drinking prior to the accident,” Luzerne County First Assistant District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce said recently. “In order to correct that problem we feel the mandatory minimum for the hit-and-run should not only be equal, but higher, so the incentive would be to stay.”
I’ll be writing about this more in-depth this week for NewsWorks (and Jalopnik). But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the stupidity that appeared in the comments section of the Wilkes-Barre story:
Yep, “Tom Sawyer” thinks fleeing the scene of a crime is merely an “accident.” Like I said, more later this week.