We don’t need new laws to protect drivers in those situations. Drivers who can demonstrate they were exercising due care are already pretty much covered under existing law.
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Cool. Got it. The entire justice system is out to get us all. We’re all fucked. Trust no one. Happy?
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It quacks like a duck, so hey.
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In properly working countries, vagueness is a fully sufficient reason for striking down a law.
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All? No. Mostly just the brown and the poor.
But they’ll expand their aim eventually, once they run short of targets.
Fucked? At the moment, yes. And “all” means all; globally. But the situation is not yet irretrievable.
Happy? Not particularly.
Trust no one? Hell no; folks need to work together if they’re going to pull this out of the fire.
But don’t trust the cops, and don’t rely on the courts.
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The absolute best thing you could possibly say about this law is that is a pointless waste of paper and legislator’s time. If we take it to not at all move the bar towards a driver’s ability to kill protesters and get away with it then it does absolutely nothing. If we take it to not even be a statement that we are, as a society, too critical of drivers who kill protesters then I don’t even know what it is.
I don’t think lawmakers wanted to encourage murder. I think they wanted to frighten protesters. The alternative seems to be thinking that the bill was the product of a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters and that the congress is committed to passing every syntactically correct thing those monkeys type, regardless of its content.
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I think that’s putting the requirements for legislative drafting too high.
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As has been mentioned, the original article is highly misleading. There’s no suggestion that the proposed laws would apply to criminal cases. In addition, due care is a well-established standard in civil cases in the US. Suffice to say that no court could apply a due care standard to a case that involves reckless disregard for life or malice aforethought. In an age when we really need to commit to facts, this is disheartening.
I’d rather say we should be committed to reality than to facts. Just because something is a fact doesn’t mean it can’t be used to deceive.
Does this law have any legal effect at all? If no, it shouldn’t be a law. If yes, what effect could that possibly be other than giving someone a break for killing someone else with their car? If we want to use the word “murder” to mean “action for which there has been a criminal conviction of murder” then obviously this law will never apply to a murder. But when most people say “murder” they mean something more in the neighborhood of “wrongful killing”. And, yeah, this law could help someone get away with one of those, unless, as mentioned before, it does nothing at all.
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