I agree pgabriel that failing to render aid should be the same as manslaughter, but that doesn't apply here under several scenarios. If the girl were wearing dark clothes at night, it IS possible that the driver didn't see her, and then hit an unknown object. When he went back to investigate, emergency vehicles were already at the scene, so aid was already being rendered. The important question is when did the driver realize he might had hit a human being?
the points about the girl walking the wrong way are decent points to make about her being negligent, but that also serves to destablize the defendants argument that he just hit something. if you are going down the highway and some is not facing you and lets say they were wearing dark clothes and it was at night and the girl was hispanic, meaning she probably had dark hair, then maybe i can see that you didn't know what you hit. but if you are driving and someone is facing you then you can see their face and their eyes with your lights. if you are that unaware of what is going when you are driving to not notice eyes and a face before you hit them then you are either lying or you are being even more negligent than you stated in the first place. i dunno how big this girl was either, but she had to be around 100 lbs. and if you hit something that big at night you are gonna hear it and be like "WTF did i just hit???" and probably get out and check your car. sorry, but this is sentence is bs...however you can't compare it to the other 2 cases where people hit people with their car and had different sentences because those were obviously different. one more thing...how often do you guys think their are cases like this for white people where the sentence is completely inadequate for the crime and is not reported or is not a major story?
why should they be the same? if you don't render aid then that is different than killing or hurting someone in the accident.
I mean the person who hit the victim. Maybe failing to render aid applies to anyone involved including witnesses, I don't know, but the guy was charged with failing to render aid also. I just assume under the law if you hit someone you are responsible for seeing that person gets emergancy help if they need it which is rendering aid. If you don't render aid, and they die due to an accident which is your fault, what's the difference.
you've got it right in the 2nd paragraph. he was negligent by hitting her then he compounded that by not rendering aid. if he rendered aid he still would have been negligent.
