- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Darryl Anderson was drunk behind the wheel of his Audi SUV, had his accelerator pressed to the floor and was barreling toward a car ahead of him when he snapped a photo of his speedometer. The picture showed a car in the foreground, a collision warning light on his dashboard and a speed of 141 mph (227 kph).
An instant later, he slammed into the car in the photo. The driver, Shalorna Warner, was not seriously injured but her 8-month-old son and her sister were killed instantly, authorities said. Evidence showed Anderson never braked.
Anderson, 38, was sentenced Tuesday to 17 years in prison for the May 31 crash in northern England that killed little Zackary Blades and Karlene Warner. Anderson pleaded guilty last week in Durham Crown Court to two counts of causing death by dangerous driving.
Bad drivers need harsher punishments if you ask me.
17 years is a seriously life-altering prison sentence sentence.
Quite frankly, this flavor of irresponsibility can be corrected in just a few years time, you just need a justice system that’s interested in correction rather than punishment.
Kinda hard to accomplish when you have people cheering from the sidelines for more punishment…
I get it, but also when I think about if that happened to my sister, let alone my child, no amount of time would be enough. 2 years for ripping two people out of your life feels like a pittance. How do you separate the emotion from the practicality?
With all due respect, the justice system shouldn’t exist for you to experience vengeance. It’s easy to get angry and to wish harm against people who would hurt our loved ones, but at scale we just end up with a punitive justice system that begets even more violence and misery.
If a person can be reformed after committing a profound injustice to the point where we can trust that they won’t repeat their crimes, why would we want their sentence to be lengthy and cruel when it could instead be compassionate and effective?
Forgiveness is a powerful thing. If you can’t even think of forgiving this hypothetical transgression you’ve come up with, how can you ever hope to have a positive influence on this world that might actually protect others from the kind of tragedy you’ve described?
Imagine having your children killed - probably hard if you don’t have children and the reading your comment.
I anything ,the justice system should be more punishing for such cases. How can you even mention forgiveness for drunk driving,showing off,killing people and then asking for it with such a worryingly easiness?
Forgiveness for what,for being a blatant sociopath? Really? If I were that lady I would have preferred enjoying the rest of my life with my children as opposed to forgiving a murderer and knowing he might do it again,cause it’s easy to forgive and “Forgiveness is a powerful thing”. This is not a case for forgiveness,but harsher punishment.
Again: you’re asking for forgiveness for a drunk driving murderer of people and children.
This is just an appeal to emotion. There’s absolutely no reason to care about this. I care about real solutions to real problems. While having one of my children killed by some irresponsible person would be horrible and life-altering, and I would want consequences for the person responsible, I would not want their life ruined. I wouldn’t wish suffering upon them. I am not a cruel person.
I would want whatever solution would offer the best chances of protecting others from the same tragedy I have had to bear, and I know for a fact that ruining the life of the person who wronged me will never accomplish that.
You sound like a cruel and vindictive person. You care more about personally feeling a sense of retribution (for a hypothetical crime that nobody has committed against you or anyone you know), and you’ve already worked yourself up to the point of fantasizing about another person’s torment. That speaks a lot for your state of mind…
In every situation in life, you have the choice to follow the path of reason, or the path of emotion. You have not chosen the path of reason.
So, death sentence? Eye for an eye?
No,not death sentence,but i noticed people here are worryingly apologetic for murder. It is murder,not in the 1st degree off,but still murder.
25 years with no parole and that’s that. I’m sorry,I just can’t find excuses for drunk driving murders like some people do. It’s my belief system,not a standard.
Thought terminator detected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_entitled_to_my_opinion
Do you base all your thought system on what the internet says? Poor kid…
Some people are just that irresponsible. Also the human brain is notoriously bad at risk assessment, so some people truly don’t realize how likely they are to cause suffering and death when they do shit like this. Harsh punishments won’t change that because this guy probably didn’t think he was gonna accidentally murder 2 people that night
Right,let’s release all murderers on purely the fact they didn’t think they were going to kill someone. Jeez and I thought Lemmy would be a better place…
How do you know when a person is reformed versus playing the part to get out earlier? Is there a risk of the system being abused by those who commit a crime knowing that they can get out in a couple years’ time?
I’m sorry but I’m not sure I see the connection here. How does forgiveness prevent such tragedies?
Not vengeance but justice. 2 years in prison then off you go is not justice. Now two years and 15 years paying support to the family you have wronged can be justice.
But just two years till you’re good is not how it’s supposed to work. There needs to be consequences otherwise there is no difference between somone going into rehab voluntarily for two years and somone killing two people and then being forced to go to rehab.
Which is why we don’t come up with our own punishments.
People shouldn’t be locked in cages just because of someone’s emotions.
I don’t know that emotion is so easily divorced from justice. How do you define what a just punishment is for a crime? Or does the magnitude of the crime not matter?
We learn over and over again from our various texts-of-wisdom, be it fables or scripture or novels or movies, that revenge is a primitive response to problems. It’s the moral of so many stories, right?
Yet we organize society to satisfy these immature desires. Punishment, for the most part, is neither deterrent nor corrective, and a paltry form of redress.
Do you want justice? Start with redress. You can’t fix the problem of a dead child but the victims need proper support, to alleviate all the other issues caused by the crime. In Canada the prison system is called “corrections” but it mostly fails at that… rehabilitation requires an evidence-based system to succeed, and ours is built on punishment, an emotional response.
If you want deterrence, well that requires eliminating poverty and supplying real education, backed by proactive and robust mental health services.
I define justice as the best possible outcome of a bad situation.
So the crime committed and the effect on the victims, if any, doesn’t affect the sentencing?
Uh, sure it does, in the sense that if someone is unable to be rehabilitated, they should be kept away from the public? Not sure what you’re asking except maybe “can I please just have a little revenge?”
I’m confused on how you quantify rehabilitation. How do you know someone has changed?
And yeah I guess I’m genuinely having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that first degree murder and shoplifting could result in the same sentence.
17 years is harsh but fair. Anything beyond that is just punitive.
Americans are in a very weird bubble when it comes to punishment/correction compared to most of the developed world and they don’t seem to notice it.
Insane punishments, death penalty, imprisoning drug users, imprisoning sex workers, private prisons, normalized prison violence/sex violence. It’s bonkers.
Wouldn’t be a Lemmy post if it weren’t for someone shitting on America or Americans even when the story has nothing to do with America.
Punishments in the US tend to be excessive though and people in the US somehow normalized it.
As an American I completely agree. People lose sight of just how much time the amount of years actually can be, and just want to feel better about punishing bad people.
Most people who do something like this will live with the guilt for their entire lives. It will always come up in job interviews, it will hurt their social situations. Nightmares forever. But we just have to pile even more shit on so that the rest of us can ride the high horse.
And before anyone shows up, no, getting a longer or shorter prison sentence does nothing for the victim. They’re already in as bad of a spot as they could be.
Which has precisely zero to do with the submission.
I mean, 17 years for a car accident, drunk or not, is completely draconian. Murderers and child rapists regularly get lesser sentences, and their crimes were malicious not negligent.
There’s no benefit to society to lock anyone up that long for something that can be corrected with a compassionate justice system. If we can release them with confidence that they won’t make the same reckless decisions again, is there any point to locking them up for that long other than to make them suffer?
It was a response to a comment asking for harsher punishment. And that sort of comment tends to pop up in most discussions involving somewhat reasonable punishments being mentioned.
Ironic considering in the USA this person would likely have a much more linent sentence for this specific crime