Convicted Driver Quotes

Exactly one month after he was convicted, when the lights were dimmed and the detention officers made a final sweep of the catwalk, Peter reached down and tugged off his right sock. He turned on his side in the lower bunk, so that he was facing the wall. He fed the sock into his mouth, stuffing it as far back as it would go. When it got hard to breathe, he fell into a dream. He was still eighteen, but it was the first day of kindergarten. He was carrying his backpack and his Superman lunch box. The orange school bus pulled up and, with a sigh, split open its gaping jaws. Peter climbed the steps and faced the back of the bus, but this time, he was the only student on it. He walked down the aisle to the very end, near the emergency exit. He put his lunch box down beside him and glanced out the rear window. It was so bright he thought the sun itself must be chasing them down the highway. 'Almost there,' a voice said, and Peter turned around to look at the driver. But just as there had been no passengers, there was no one at the wheel. Here was the amazing thing: in his dream, Peter wasn't scared. He knew, somehow, that he was headed exactly where he'd wanted to go.

And in Florida, adults with clean driving records and poor credit scores paid an average of $1,552 more than the same drivers with excellent credit and a drunk driving conviction.

A system of justice does not need to pursue retribution. If the purpose of drug sentencing is to prevent harm, all we need to do is decide what to do with people who pose a genuine risk to society or cause tangible harm. There are perfectly rational ways of doing this; in fact, most societies already pursue such policies with respect to alcohol: we leave people free to drink and get inebriated, but set limits on where and when. In general, we prosecute drunk drivers, not inebriated pedestrians. In this sense, the justice system is in many respects a battleground between moral ideas and evidence concerning how to most effectively promote both individual and societal interests, liberty, health, happiness and wellbeing. Severely compromising this system, insofar as it serves to further these ideals, is our vacillation or obsession with moral responsibility, which is, in the broadest sense, an attempt to isolate the subjective element of human choice, an exercise that all too readily deteriorates into blaming and scapegoating without providing effective solutions to the actual problem. The problem with the question of moral responsibility is that it is inherently subjective and involves conjecture about an individuals’ state of mind, awareness and ability to act that can rarely if ever be proved. Thus it involves precisely the same type of conjecture that characterizes superstitious notions of possession and the influence of the devil and provides no effective means of managing conduct: the individual convicted for an offence or crime considered morally wrong is convicted based on a series of hypotheses and probabilities and not necessarily because he or she is actually morally wrong. The fairness and effectiveness of a system of justice based on such hypotheses is highly questionable particularly as a basis for preventing or reducing drug use related harm. For example, with respect to drugs, the system quite obviously fails as a deterrent and the system is not organised to ‘reform’ the offender much less to ensure that he or she has ‘learned a lesson’; moreover, the offender does not get an opportunity to make amends or even have a conversation with the alleged victim. In the case of retributive justice, the justice system is effectively mopping up after the fact. In other words, as far as deterrence is concerned, the entire exercise of justice becomes an exercise based on faith, rather than one based on evidence.

carefully placed questions put you in the driver’s seat of the conversation. “Being an asker allows you control of situations that statement-makers rarely achieve,” Hewitt notes. “An alert questioner can judge when someone grows uneasy. But don’t stop. Just change directions. . . . Once you learn how to guide a conversation, you have also learned how to control it.”3 Questions can be casual conversation starters providing a simple, friendly way to get the ball rolling in a discussion, like it did for me with the witch in Wisconsin.

In his book Dying of Whiteness, Metzl told of the case of a forty-one-year-old white taxi driver who was suffering from an inflamed liver that threatened the man’s life. Because the Tennessee legislature had neither taken up the Affordable Care Act nor expanded Medicaid coverage, the man was not able to get the expensive, lifesaving treatment that would have been available to him had he lived just across the border in Kentucky. As he approached death, he stood by the conviction that he did not want the government involved. “No way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens,” the man told Metzl. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die.” And sadly, so he would.

Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955. Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the Montgomery Fair department store. Her feet are swollen, her shoulders ache. She sits in the first row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus fills with riders. Until the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger. The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self. The word is “No.” The driver threatens to have her arrested. “You may do that,” says Rosa Parks. A police officer arrives. He asks Parks why she won’t move. “Why do you all push us around?” she answers simply. “I don’t know,” he says. “But the law is the law, and you’re under arrest.” On the afternoon of her trial and conviction for disorderly conduct, the Montgomery Improvement Association holds a rally for Parks at the Holt Street Baptist Church, in the poorest section of town. Five thousand gather to support Parks’s lonely act of courage. They squeeze inside the church until its pews can hold no more. The rest wait patiently outside, listening through loudspeakers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he tells them. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November.” He praises Parks’s bravery and hugs her. She stands silently, her mere presence enough to galvanize the crowd. The association launches a citywide bus boycott that lasts 381 days. The people trudge miles to work. They carpool with strangers. They change the course of American history.

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright. This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. I considered the elision of the broader historical and political context of the Palestinian struggle in most conversations regarding Hamas. Whether condemnation or support, it felt to me, many of the views I faced on Palestinian armed resistance were unburdened by moral angst or ambiguity. There was often a certainty or a conviction about resistance that was too easily forthcoming. I have struggled to find such. I have struggled to find such certainty in my own study of Hamas, even as I remain unwavering in my condemnation of targeting civilians, on either side.

Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.

The scientists who tell us that dogs are simple creatures have never owned sled dog teams. They have never tried to organize twelve minds and forty-eight canine legs into a unit that moves forward with conviction. The physical differences in dogs are sometimes the least of the musher’s worries when matching up a team. He must consider the dogs’ personality quirks and varying degrees of dedication. When a well-trained team glides quietly down the trail, spectators may think the sport looks easy, but I guarantee that the driver of that team has put in his time.

In just one example of many, Rosa Parks’s quiet but resolute refusal to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus at exactly the right moment coalesced into forces that propelled the civil rights movement. As Parks recalls, “When [the bus driver] saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ ”1 Contrary to popular belief, her courageous “no” did not grow out of a particularly assertive tendency or personality in general. In fact, when she was made a secretary to the president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP she explained, “I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no.”2 Rather, her decision on the bus grew out of a deep conviction about what deliberate choice she wanted to make in that moment. When the bus driver ordered her out of her seat, she said, “I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”3 She did not know how her decision would spark a movement with reverberations around the world. But she did know her own mind. She knew, even as she was being arrested, that “it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind.”4 Avoiding that humiliation was worth the risk of incarceration. Indeed, to her, it was essential. It is true that we are (hopefully) unlikely to find ourselves facing a situation like the one faced by Rosa Parks. Yet we can be inspired by her. We can think of her when we need the courage to dare to say no. We can remember her strength of conviction when we need to stand our ground in the face of social pressure to capitulate to the nonessential.

In Richmond, for instance, free blacks petitioned the city council to repeal the city’s repressive Black Code, and in New York City there was the stunning behavior of Elizabeth Jennings. On a Sunday morning in 1854 she was pulled out of a horse-drawn trolley car and wrestled to the ground by a white conductor and driver who sought to keep her from sitting in the white section. With the same conviction and audacity shown by the free blacks of Richmond, Jennings took her case to court. Her victory there broke the back of segregation on public conveyances in New York.

3. Getting in the Driver’s Seat: The Columbo Tactic. 4. Columbo Step Two: The Burden of Proof 5. Step Three: Using Columbo to Lead the Way 6. Perfecting Columbo.

Prayer is my half of an ongoing conversation between my God and me. ~ Donna Fawcett         Why Worry When We Can Pray?     “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” (Matthew 6:27)     The hill in the distance looked daunting. “You want to climb that?” I stopped walking to re-lace my shoes.   Helen giggled. “Yes, of course. I do it almost every day. The dogs love it.” Her two dogs ran ahead, eager to get going.   “Well, I suppose. But I’m not sure if I’ll make it.” I shifted my water bottle to my hip. The hill loomed ahead, a 5 kilometre walk upwards. I wasn’t a stranger to a good hike; I loved to tromp through the woods and along the trails. But a walk straight up a steep hill was not my usual repertoire.   To pass the time and keep my mind off the pain in my calves, we talked. Enjoying a good chat is one of my favourite things to do in combination with a walk. Helen explained how she normally walks alone and she agreed that having a partner makes the upwards strain that much easier. She shared with me a story of how she had been walking the same road the day before and suffered from blasts of dust from cars that raced by with no consideration for her and her dogs. Her frustration was compounded by the heat. She threw her arms up in irritation as cars sped past. “Why are you not slowing down? Have you no consideration?” she called after them. But as her anger and indignation rose, she felt convicted in her spirit. Why worry when you could pray? So as the next car came into vision, instead of complaining and getting agitated waiting for the dust to swirl around her, she chose to pray instead. “Dear Lord, please make this driver slow down.” As she watched the vehicle approach, it slowed to such a degree that she expected the driver to pull over and ask directions. Instead he gave a wave and continued on.   “Thank You, Jesus!” Helen exclaimed. As each car came into view, Helen prayed to God and He came through every time. The walk became enjoyable and a real testament to the fact that God cares about our every need.   As Helen finished her story, a farm vehicle, large and spewing dust all around came over the hill. “Let’s pray!” Helen enthusiastically challenged. We prayed and the truck passed without a flicker of dust. “God

Seeing All Work as Holy This simple theological conviction that all work is holy is a necessary correction to a worldview that splits work into two categories: sacred and secular. According to many, the “holy” work is supposed to be exclusively that which relates to God, the church, missions, or humanitarian endeavors. And, of course, this work is holy. But it’s not the only holy work. The work of artists, builders, teachers, parents, entrepreneurs, and bus drivers is on the same level. We collectively join to make the world a better place, each of us doing our part. To see all work as holy is a spiritual practice that pushes back on a spiritual elitism that obscures God’s good vision for all creation.

A task force of the American Bar Association described the bleak reality facing someone convicted of a petty drug offense this way: [The] offender may be sentenced to a term of probation, community service, and court costs. Unbeknownst to this offender, and perhaps any other actor in the sentencing process, as a result of his conviction he may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal educational assistance. His driver’s license may be automatically suspended, and he may no longer qualify for certain employment and professional licenses. If he is convicted of another crime he may be subject to imprisonment as a repeat offender. He will not be permitted to enlist in the military, or possess a firearm, or obtain a federal security clearance. If a citizen, he may lose the right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable.

special dedication and tribute goes out to Jyoti Singh. She was brutally beaten, gang-raped, tortured, and killed. All of this occurred while Ms. Singh was traveling with her male friend on a bus. Jyoti had an iron rod rammed into her vagina. Her intestines were pulled out of her body and she was thrown off of a moving bus. The incident occurred in Munirka (a neighborhood in South West Delhi, India) on December 16, 2012. Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, Akshay Thakur, Ram Singh (the bus driver), and Mohammed Afroz were convicted. The “juvenile”, Mohammed Afroz, was the rapist who shoved an iron rod inside of her vagina. Since he was 17 years old and six months old at the time of the crime, he was NOT TRIED AS AN ADULT. He was given a maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment in a “reform facility” due to the Juvenile Justice Act. He is now a cook at a hotel in South India. Why does he get to be pampered while Jyoti suffered such a cruel fate?

A special dedication and tribute goes out to Jyoti Singh. She was brutally beaten, gang-raped, tortured, and killed. All of this occurred while Ms. Singh was traveling with her male friend on a bus. Jyoti had an iron rod rammed into her vagina. Her intestines were pulled out of her body and she was thrown off of a moving bus. The incident occurred in Munirka (a neighborhood in South West Delhi, India) on December 16, 2012. Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, Akshay Thakur, Ram Singh (the bus driver), and Mohammed Afroz were convicted. The “juvenile”, Mohammed Afroz, was the rapist who shoved an iron rod inside of her vagina. Since he was 17 years old and six months old at the time of the crime, he was NOT TRIED AS AN ADULT. He was given a maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment in a “reform facility” due to the Juvenile Justice Act. He is now a cook at a hotel in South India. Why does he get to be pampered while Jyoti suffered such a cruel fate?

Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

Sasha sleeps as Richard and his companions goof around, play fighting. Sleeps as Richard’s cousin Lloyd bounds up and down the aisle flirting with a girl up front. Sleeps as Richard surreptitiously flicks a lighter and touches it to the hem of that gauzy white skirt. Wait. In a moment, Sasha will wake inside a ball of flame and begin to scream. In a moment, everything will be set in motion. Taken by ambulance to a San Francisco burn unit, Sasha will spend the next three and a half weeks undergoing multiple surgeries to treat second- and third-degree burns running from calf to thigh. Arrested at school the following day, Richard will be charged with two felonies, each with a hate-crime clause that will add time to his sentence if he is convicted. Citing the severity of the crime, the district attorney will charge him as an adult, stripping him of the protections normally given to juveniles. Before the week is out, he will be facing the possibility of life imprisonment. But none of that has happened yet. For now, both teenagers are just taking the bus home from school. Surely it’s not too late to stop things from going wrong. There must be some way to wake Sasha. Divert Richard. Get the driver to stop the bus. There must be something you can do.

In Lidar, a group of men had a fight in the car park of a pub.  When two of them got in a car and started to drive off, a third leant in the window of the car and the fight continued.  They drove off with him half in the window and at some point he fell off and suffered injuries from which he died.  The jury were directed in terms of recklessness and the driver was convicted of manslaughter.  The CA upheld the conviction, possibly relying on Lord Mackay’s reference in Adomako to it being “perfectly appropriate” to use the word reckless.  A driver owes a duty to other road users, and his recklessness in driving with someone hanging on to the car would be covered by the term gross negligence.  A finding of gross negligence manslaughter would have therefore been possible, so it is the rules from Adomako that are important to know. The requirements for gross negligence manslaughter

Canadian driver jailed for deaths caused by stopping for ducks 168 words OTTAWA (Reuters) - A Canadian woman was sentenced to 90 days in jail on Thursday for causing two deaths in 2010 when she stopped her car on a Quebec highway to help a group of ducklings crossing the road. Emma Czornobaj had been convicted in June of two counts each of criminal negligence and dangerous driving causing death. According to media reports on Thursday, Czornobaj stopped her car abruptly in the passing lane of a highway south of Montreal when she saw the ducklings. The motorcycle behind Czornobaj's car then crashed into her vehicle, killing the 50-year-old man driving the motorcycle and his 16-year-old daughter. "I just wanted to pick all these ducklings up and put them in my car," Czornobaj had testified during her trial. "I know it was a mistake." The jail time will be served on the weekends. Czornobaj was also sentenced to 240 hours of community service, probation and banned from driving for 10 years. Prosecutors had sought a nine-month jail sentence.

Remember Carlin’s observation about your views of your fellow motorists. Your first response was likely to be, “As a matter of fact, I have noticed that about other drivers.” But after a moment’s reflection, you grasp Carlin’s point: Since you adjust your speed to what you consider appropriate to the prevailing road conditions, anyone driving more slowly must be driving too slowly, and anyone driving faster must be driving too quickly. The conviction that you see things as they truly are and those who see things differently are therefore getting something wrong is inevitable—at least as an initial reflexive response.