If he “deserves” 110 years in jail for this, then an awful lot of people should be doing an awful lot of jail time for crashes where they didn’t even get charged with anything.

Plea bargaining is shockingly unjust - it’s one of the greatest failings of the US judicial system by the standards of the rest of the world (and it has some competition*). It’s unjust not only because it can lean to insane sentences, but also because it results in wild disparities of sentence for identical crimes,…

And yet, consider the case of Dealio Lockhart. Killed 3 people and seriously injured 4 others in Los Angeles while street racing on the 5. 22 years sentence.

Yeah, this seems like a situation where he didn’t want to hit the Eject button and definitely crash the proverbial plane. Things started to get a bit hairy and he tried to keep things under control, not wanting to exercise the nuclear option of the runaway truck ramp, which would be a definite crash. When it became…

Some context for those of you not from Colorado, who don’t know the circumstances of what happened beyond what you’re reading in this article.

Holy shit, child rapists, murderers and other far more horrible people get far less time than this.

You’re ignoring his third choice, which was by far the best option: pointing the truck off the road and risking rolling it. He rejected it over the *possibility* that it might roll, and instead chose an option that was *certain* to cause injury and likely to cause death.

You tell me who wouldnt be shocked/irrational after all that? If you think you would know how you would act or what acting normally would even be after such a thing you have watched far too much tv or listened to too many podcasts.

AND the theater shooter deserves more than the minimum, so let's evaluate the crime and determine the punishment there instead of putting an arbitrary minimum that can add up quickly like this when that is not really what is intended.

Yes, all. There should be no place for that kind of inflexibility in a justice system.

Yeah, but there is a reason that Lady Justice carries scales as well as a sword. You’re supposed to be punished on the fuck up and causes, not the emotions provoked by it. He fucked up. There is no doubt he should have had better judgement, but his fuck up was thinking his brakes had more left in them than they did.…

Throwing this out there: do we think he’d have gotten the same “indifference” charge if his last name was “Smith” or something other than “Aguilera-Mederos”?

Maybe it was a mandatory brake check stop, before the downhill section? There might have been evidence that he just went through the motions checking his brakes, and had he actually done what was required it would have revealed the problem.

Not sure if you are familiar with it, but in Canada there was the case of the Humboldt Broncos bus crash. Sixteen dead, 13 injured, most of them young. The truck driver in that instance - who was more neglectful than this guy, since it appeared as though it was due to a lack of attention on his part - got 8 years. The…

I don’t think #4 is really relevant when even those families apparently agree that 110 years isn’t warranted.

It’s possible that he either couldn’t enter the truck ramp or didn’t notice until too late. It’s tough to make decisions once panic sets in - i highly doubt that “he chose to hit dozens of people.” In any case, speculation is rarely helpful. And we tend to make the worst assumptions for people who are less like us.

Mandatory minimum laws are obscene in all instances.

It’s hard to chose between if I rear end that semi with my semi I’m likely to die vs if I choose to hit those smaller vehicles I’m much less likely to die, but I’m not so sure they won’t.  And choosing to die because you deserve death, and choosing to die because you’re brakes failed are also factors.  And having to…

He does have some responsibility here.  but on the closing his eyes part, there is a point in time where there are no good outcomes (the trolley problem) if a, b, and c, are all terrible, maybe having any of those images also flashed in your brain is not going to be great either.

This feels like a place where a governor should step in and commute the sentence to fix the immediate issue, then longer term lets work on the law, minimum sentences have a number of issues associated with them