The 17 year old son of a wealthy Los Angeles entrepreneur admitted Friday to vehicular manslaughter in connection with a high-speed crash that left a woman dead earlier this year, and could receive probation under the terms of the arrangement. The teen had been "racing" with a female friend and swerving in and out of traffic before the fatal wreck. The Lamborghini was traveling at 106 miles per hour when it struck Munoz, prosecutors said. Police said the force of the crash nearly split Munoz's vehicle in half. https://news.yahoo.com/son-l-multimillionaire-admits-fatal-181120261.html
Even if tried as an adult, the maximum penalty for vehicular manslaughter under California law is six years in custody. That's such BS. Prosecutors also confirmed the teen has been cited twice before for speeding in Beverly Hills, including in October 2020 when police stopped him driving 72 miles per hour on city streets. After the second violation three weeks later, the teen’s Lamborghini was impounded and his provisional driver’s license — which requires an adult to be in the car with him at all times — was suspended, prosecutors said. That in itself should make him get the max sentence, and 6 years simply isn't enough.
Moving violations aren't enforced or punished enough. Killing someone with a car is easy to get away with.
So true. DUIs and reckless driving like street racing, or going 20 miles or more above the speed limits should have far stiffer penalties. This rich kid is a prime example of someone whose daddy pays his fines and he goes out and does it again and again. You hear the same stories with DUIs, rich or not. They just keep driving drunk over and over again, putting everyone at risk on the roads. They shouldn't even get a second chance to do it again, whether they kill or injure anyone or not.
Yup, over 10k people die from drunk driving every year but because nobody can score political points by going after it, nobody will ever give a crap (unless a super famous person gets killed by a drunk driver maybe?)
They might score more political points than they realize. More people than not don't drink and drive. More people than not would feel safer without drunks on the road. You also have huge organizations against drunk driving which would support them, as well as families who have lost loved ones, or suffered injuries from some drink behind the wheel. It's so easy to make the choice to drink at home, get a designated driver, or catch a cab. I feel sorry for the kids who ride in the cars with dumbass parents who leave a party or barbeque after drinking all afternoon or night, and then drive home drunk. Those kids are at the mercy of irresponsible, stupid, and selfish parents.
Moving vehicles are deadly weapons. I think the punishment for killing someone due to DUI or in this case street racing should be 25 to life. It's not an accident that you decided to drink or race on a public roadway, you consciously made these life threatening decision. I think in this case, deciding to drive 106 MPH racing on a highway and killing someone is equivalent to discharging a gun in a public space and killing someone.
This is one of those things that always feels extremely unfair. Normally the idiot breaking the rules seems to have a much better chance of walking away from the accident than the innocent person who gets hit.
My thoughts exactly. Boys will be boys... Good old boy network is alive and thriving. Money + networking (shared deviant acts) = success! I had a buddy who's grandfather was a County Judge for over 50 years, so his family had a lot of pull. My buddy constantly got DUIs and got out of them. The only way he stopped is the advent of Uber. The irony is he was a truck driver for Budweiser. ************* OTOH, liberal states have lax penalties across the board. My ex-GF's brother hit and killed a man drunk driving in Indiana in the 90's. He got out of jail on parole after 4 years. But on the flip side, we have stupid strict penalties for minor infractions in conservative states. 'Tough on Crime!' is a political tag.
Six years in prison is adequate. I think people toss around these super long sentences pretty cavalierly, especially when one is a person unlikely to ever face the punishment -- like me. But doing 6 years (or even 3 plus parole) would eff up your life. If I did 6 years, by the time I got out my kids would have all grown up and moved out, my earning potential would be half of what it is now, who knows if I'd still have a wife but she'd have had to figure out how to replace my income and raise our kids by herself, my parents might be dead by then, the dog would definitely be dead, the house would have had to have been sold. Most people would be pretty sorry they did whatever they did after what we'd call a short prison stint. Making it longer doesn't make a person more sorry nor more deterred. I think we need to get off this train where committing a crime means you should die in prison. I do think probation or even 9 months in juvenile detention is pretty damn light. But that lightness is largely due to the luck of his age. He's a juvenile and the district attorney apparently has taken a policy of not charging minors as adults. Which I can't really disagree with, given how that latitude can be used to perpetuate racism in the justice system. He'll get sentenced in August, so hopefully someone will bump this thread once we know what the actual sentence is.