[Discuss Thrower]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

Genuinely curious how folks would view a less 'icky' but more tragic fact pattern.

A lot of us drank in High School, right? Many of us more than we should have. And at 15 yrs old many of us had access to a car for permit driving, etc... So if the parents are out of town, our buddies come over and we get lit on Boone's farm. Then I get in the car for a fast food run, blow a light and kill a little girl in a car accident.

Your distinctions are pretty clear here - one was technically an accident, but legally there are a lot of 'voluntary' acts that went into it. You're almost certainly still going to be subject to a juvenile system because again - as a society we recognize that at that age you just don't have the cognitive development to make as fully formed of a decision as you'll make as an adult; basic human physiology at work there. But you've also killed someone.

I think most people would be more inclined to call that a 'tragic accident' and allow the kid another shot under that fact pattern. Not all, maybe not most. But I don't think the guy goes undrafted in that situation. And while the key distinction is that the molestation required an overt, intentional act at the time it was done - the drunk driving did as well. And in both circumstances we subject a person to juvenile penalties because we recognize that the judgment that went into both of those decisions was from a person who simply isn't mature enough to exercise adult decision-making.

And I'll admit my own hypocrisy here in that I've not really been impacted by either kinds of situations in my life and I'd be more inclined to get behind the car accident kid in the Cardinals organization myself. But I do think I'm engaging in some logical inconsistency there.

Wouldn't a drunk driving analogue to Heimlich's situation be as follows:

1) You were drunk.
2) You drive a vehicle that matches a witness' description of one which was driving erratically and caused another driver to fatally crash in a place not watched by cameras.
3) You were apprehended in the vicinity of the crash though not currently driving the vehicle, the vehicle showed signs of being in operation recently, had a BAC which suggests you were drunk at the time of the crash of the other car as well as being defined as an impaired driver at the time of the crash.

?