Woman who stopped for ducks faces life in prison

[Coop D'etat]

It doesn't matter if the motorcycle driver was at fault in the accident. If the guy's family was suing her, that would matter because it would be be contributory negligence. But this isn't a tort case where contributory negligence would be important. The motorcyclist could be 80% or 90% responsible for the accident and it wouldn't matter in terms of whether she was guilty of criminal negligence causing death. All that requires is that she was criminally negligent and that a death result from the negligence.

The question is whether her actions were legally negligent, i.e. does something or omits to do a duty which demonstrates wanton and reckless disregard for the lives and safety of other persons. What we are looking at here is whether a reasonable person would expect her actions could cause a dangerous accident.

I would think that the key difference between this and the Beatty, Anderson and Vermette cases is that this was a planned and deliberate action. A choice was made to create a hazard, rather than unconscious actions in the case of Beatty and Anderson and an accident in Vermette. That gets us closer to the "wanton or reckless disregard for the consequences" of her actions standard to find criminal negligence. Hard to say if it does get us all the way there though. Reckless disregard requires morally blameworthy conduct (Tutton), which, as the cases note is a pretty high standard, higher than civil negligence. You'd have to decide if her conduct was "heedless of consequences, headlong, irresponsible and a complete disregard for the consequences of one’s action." Its not enough to just show that she failed to take the precautions a prudent person would make, but that she actually recognized the risk and ran it anyway, or that she should have recognized the risk. But the purely voluntary nature of her actions works against her, a lot easier to find the requisite mens rea here than in Beatty.

Also, were looking for the degree of marked departure of actions to find criminal negligence under Canadian law. While blood alcohol was a factor in Anderson, the action was running a red light as a lapse in judgement, it wasn't a deliberately chosen act. This makes a great deal of difference in the mens rea requirements the court has set to find criminal (rather than civil) negligence. Now, perhaps they could find criminal negligence due to choosing to drive impaired, but there wasn't sufficient evidence of impairment.

As for sentencing, the law is written to apply to a wide range of situations. It doesn't have a minimum sentence unless a firearm is involved. It would be extremely doubtful that this case, if found guilty, would be given a sentence like a murder conviction.

[Geminon]

In the cases cited, I don't argue that the accused should have not been punished, only that the Crown failed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. There's that pesky 'reasonable' thing again. In the case of the first driver, he supposed he fell asleep or passed out. There was no evidence one way or the other. My wife suffered from syncope for a number of months, five years ago - sudden, unexplained losses of consciousness. You're awake, suddenly you're not. Bang. I walked in the door from work one night to find her passed out on the floor and she had no idea why or how long she'd been out. I'm not saying the guy wasn't negligent, you just can not prove criminal negligence.
In the drunk driver case, he apparently did not blow over the limit. His blood alcohol was over the limit an hour later. Two very different things. If he had just eaten fatty food and had a triple of scotch and hopped in the car, his blood alcohol at the time of the collision may have been below the legal limit and only the passage of that hour caused his blood alcohol to cross the legal limit. I don't know, and neither does anyone here on the board.

My, potentially faulty, understanding of the case in Montreal is that after she stopped her vehicle and got out, the woman moved against the flow of traffic. So the motorcyclist was coming around a bend, then saw some lady standing in the roadway where the shoulder looks maybe 30cm wide and is distracted by that. In that moment of distraction, he is unable to successfully avoid the collision.

It doesn't matter if she was stopped for 20 seconds or 20 minutes if the traffic conditions and other events caused the motorcyclist to be distracted enough to hit her car. If he had been going 13 to 20 km/h slower, would he have been able to avoid the collision? Maybe, but just maybe. We here have no idea what he could have seen, where he could have gone or what other options he had. Truthfully, in the eyes of the law, it doesn't matter anyway. The court found that his possible negligence was offset by her culpable negligence. Her actions were unreasonable and broached the level necessary to be found criminally negligent.

Does any of this mean I think she should spend the rest of her life in jail? No, it does not. I haven't weighed in on punishment, because she hasn't been sentenced yet. At that point, I might decide to argue about appropriate punishment. I'm a veterinary technician. I love animals. I also love not causing more harm than good. She was trying to prevent the ducklings from meeting a messy end, and that is a noble thought. However, the way she went about it was remarkably unwise, and the courts have found it to have been criminally so.

[Simon_Jester]

Define "drunk". He blew 0.20 an hour after the accident, without having left the scene. By law, he was drunk. The opinion of the officer there was that despite his intake, he wasn't too impaired.

This information is in plain English in the link I sent, which is not that many pages to begin with. The argument the defense laid was that just because he drove drunk doesn't mean he was impaired (running a red light notwithstanding) and that he ran a red light because "he was thinking about something else", not because he was drunk, and the Crown couldn't prove otherwise, apparently, thus there was reasonable doubt.

Terralthra, I apologize. Initially I did not review the case document myself; later I found myself relying on others' descriptions. And, frankly, I was deterred, expecting that like most case summaries I've read, this one would be longer and more arcane than it really is.

However, one of my old points remains, as does one of my new points.

The old point is, by the standards of evidence of the day, there was doubt as to whether the driver was impaired by the influence of alcohol, then that would create doubt as to whether he committed a negligent act. The negligence comes not from the fact that there is alcohol in your blood, but from whether the alcohol impairs you... and whether driving at that level was a "marked departure from the norm."

So in theory, what the prosecution (Crown) has to prove is that the driver was so impaired by his drinking that his decision to drive and his running of the red light constituted "a marked departure from the norm" of what an ordinary or reasonable person might do.

Here, the judge basically ruled that the Crown had failed to prove that- in part, I assume, because there was eyewitness testimony indicating that he was not so seriously impaired. So the judge saw the drunk driving in and of itself as less of a departure than you or I would. Likewise, the judge apparently decided that while running a red light was an improper action, it was not outside the boundaries of what a normal person might do out of honest error- and frankly, that part of his decision I agree with, because a lot of people run red lights by accident. It's not hard to do, nor does it require an extremely irresponsible or stupid person to do so.

So having considered (1) the drunk driving and (2) the running of the red light, the judge did not consider the defendant's behavior in either case "willful" or a "marked departure from the norm." I am inclined to agree with his decision in (2): not every person who runs a red light is criminally negligent. I do not agree with him in (1) but can imagine some reasons that might have seemed logical to him why he decided that drunk driving was not in and of itself criminal negligence.

In modern law, of course, we have pretty much stopped even listening to drunks who claim they "weren't significantly impaired" while driving. And I support our decision to stop listening to that argument. We also consider drunk driving a much more serious "departure from the norm" in general, and therefore consider it very negligent.

But that ties into my next point.

One new point springs to my eye from reading the document: the case was tried in the 1980s. Thirty years ago, laws and attitudes regarding drunk driving were more lax than they are today. This may have colored the judge's decision, and for that matter those of the appeals court, in ways I'm not sure you've taken into account.