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The death of Elizabeth Harris, 29 and mother of three, and the traffic ticket handed the truck driver — for running a red — reminded me of the saddest story I ever heard on the job.
It was February 2001. Lisa Gannon, then 27, sat in a rocking chair in a small, upstairs apartment in Renfrew, a survivor. Seven months earlier, she had been involved in a harrowing crash just outside town, on a clear summer morning. She was being driven to hospital in Ottawa to give birth to a full-term baby, already named Jessica.
Her four-year-old, Joshua, was in the back seat. As they headed down Hwy. 17, a dumptruck coming from a right angle slid through a stop sign, its bumper clipping the length of their vehicle. Joshua, the light of her life, was fatally injured. Lisa had a severe arm wound and was trapped in the vehicle. The unborn baby would not survive.
Tearfully, she told us the whole story, including the decision to donate Joshua’s organs. She showed us the “memory box” the hospital sent her home with. There was a little dress in it, a snippet of Jessica’s hair and inky prints made from her wrinkly hands and feet. At the time, I was a young father: our own boy was five, so it was excruciating to look at, hold. Grizzled photographer Lynn Ball was with me, though I could barely make eye contact with him. It was a crushing thing to bear witness to.
But there was something else to add to the profound sense of injustice.
The driver was charged under the Highway Traffic Act — not the Criminal Code — and told, in a plea deal, that he could walk away with a $250 fine. When Gannon heard that news — her life now shattered — she wouldn’t stand for it and appealed through the media. Someone was listening. The charges were upgraded to dangerous driving causing death, a Criminal Code offence. She had won, in her eyes, a small victory.
Maybe the same will happen in the Harris case, as her family has suggested. Did we not see a similar thing happen in the case of Andy Nevin, 39, the father who was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in June on Leitrim Road? After the Nevin family loudly protested, charges were upgraded from simply “leaving the scene” to something considerably more serious.
The Harris case does point to the legal dilemma of how laws should be written, and applied, to really capture the offence committed.
I asked lawyer Solomon Friedman for a brief refresher on when driving errors become a crime rather than a ticket.
The courts have often held, he said, that a momentary lapse of attention at the wheel — and don’t we all have them? — does not make the motorist a criminal. The Criminal Code, he added, is there to punish “morally blameworthy conduct,” which is fancy legal talk to say this: a normally safe driving motorist who makes an honest mistake but breaks the law (even kills someone in the act) is not as blameworthy as a career reckless driver who is speeding, or impaired, and wilfully ignores stop signs or red lights (only to kill someone) in the exercise of his own folly.
However, we can’t lay charges based solely on the consequence: the conduct, legally, matters.
“In other words,” said Friedman, “it would be wrong to look backwards from the fact of a fatality and assume that the conduct that caused it was morally blameworthy.”
The bar for criminal conduct on the road is set that much higher. For drivers, it requires a “marked departure”, not just a departure, from the standard of care expected behind the wheel.
So the accused, Gordon Sarles, 64, of Richmond Hill, might be a great truck driver who had one terrible moment, with no intention of disobeying the red light, no plan to hurt anyone. We shall see. This is why courts exist.
Any driving is inherently dangerous, Friedman points out, but he certainly understands the family’s frustration at seeing “a ticket and fine” as appropriate justice for the death of a wife and young mother.
“There’s no question this can be very frustrating for victims and their families, who see the terrible consequences and think that, automatically, an awful event should attract criminal liability. That simply isn’t the case.”
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
It was February 2001. Lisa Gannon, then 27, sat in a rocking chair in a small, upstairs apartment in Renfrew, a survivor. Seven months earlier, she had been involved in a harrowing crash just outside town, on a clear summer morning. She was being driven to hospital in Ottawa to give birth to a full-term baby, already named Jessica.
Her four-year-old, Joshua, was in the back seat. As they headed down Hwy. 17, a dumptruck coming from a right angle slid through a stop sign, its bumper clipping the length of their vehicle. Joshua, the light of her life, was fatally injured. Lisa had a severe arm wound and was trapped in the vehicle. The unborn baby would not survive.
Tearfully, she told us the whole story, including the decision to donate Joshua’s organs. She showed us the “memory box” the hospital sent her home with. There was a little dress in it, a snippet of Jessica’s hair and inky prints made from her wrinkly hands and feet. At the time, I was a young father: our own boy was five, so it was excruciating to look at, hold. Grizzled photographer Lynn Ball was with me, though I could barely make eye contact with him. It was a crushing thing to bear witness to.
But there was something else to add to the profound sense of injustice.
The driver was charged under the Highway Traffic Act — not the Criminal Code — and told, in a plea deal, that he could walk away with a $250 fine. When Gannon heard that news — her life now shattered — she wouldn’t stand for it and appealed through the media. Someone was listening. The charges were upgraded to dangerous driving causing death, a Criminal Code offence. She had won, in her eyes, a small victory.
Maybe the same will happen in the Harris case, as her family has suggested. Did we not see a similar thing happen in the case of Andy Nevin, 39, the father who was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in June on Leitrim Road? After the Nevin family loudly protested, charges were upgraded from simply “leaving the scene” to something considerably more serious.
The Harris case does point to the legal dilemma of how laws should be written, and applied, to really capture the offence committed.
I asked lawyer Solomon Friedman for a brief refresher on when driving errors become a crime rather than a ticket.
The courts have often held, he said, that a momentary lapse of attention at the wheel — and don’t we all have them? — does not make the motorist a criminal. The Criminal Code, he added, is there to punish “morally blameworthy conduct,” which is fancy legal talk to say this: a normally safe driving motorist who makes an honest mistake but breaks the law (even kills someone in the act) is not as blameworthy as a career reckless driver who is speeding, or impaired, and wilfully ignores stop signs or red lights (only to kill someone) in the exercise of his own folly.
However, we can’t lay charges based solely on the consequence: the conduct, legally, matters.
“In other words,” said Friedman, “it would be wrong to look backwards from the fact of a fatality and assume that the conduct that caused it was morally blameworthy.”
The bar for criminal conduct on the road is set that much higher. For drivers, it requires a “marked departure”, not just a departure, from the standard of care expected behind the wheel.
So the accused, Gordon Sarles, 64, of Richmond Hill, might be a great truck driver who had one terrible moment, with no intention of disobeying the red light, no plan to hurt anyone. We shall see. This is why courts exist.
Any driving is inherently dangerous, Friedman points out, but he certainly understands the family’s frustration at seeing “a ticket and fine” as appropriate justice for the death of a wife and young mother.
“There’s no question this can be very frustrating for victims and their families, who see the terrible consequences and think that, automatically, an awful event should attract criminal liability. That simply isn’t the case.”
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
