A Question of Law/You Be the Judge
This is a take-off on two series that have been found in Readers Digest and the New Yorker (I believe). We have several lawyers and barristers from around the world. Each country and state or province have their own laws. And all of us have our own judgements. Let this thread bring up questions regarding legal matters that make one ponder a bit. Let it be understood here that the opinions expressed are not legally binding, nor should be used in a real court. Okay?
Here is my scenario.
An 80-year-old man, perfect health for one his age, is taking a pleasant day trip, enjoying the warm day. Having lunch at a local cafe. Just out of town, he gets behind a logging truck that is hauling some oversized logs. The logging lorry makes a right turn onto another highway. The 80-year-old continues on straight. Suddenly, oversized logs swipe the vehicle the 80-year-old is driving, causing him to go into a ditch. He dies at the scene. The coroner rules the death was caused by multiple traumatic injuries. The truck continues on. The police eventually locate it in a town twenty miles away. It appears the truck driver was not aware of even causing the crash.
What could the lorry driver be charged with in your area? Could the trucking company or logging company also be sued for damages?
Understand parties involved are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Here is my scenario.
An 80-year-old man, perfect health for one his age, is taking a pleasant day trip, enjoying the warm day. Having lunch at a local cafe. Just out of town, he gets behind a logging truck that is hauling some oversized logs. The logging lorry makes a right turn onto another highway. The 80-year-old continues on straight. Suddenly, oversized logs swipe the vehicle the 80-year-old is driving, causing him to go into a ditch. He dies at the scene. The coroner rules the death was caused by multiple traumatic injuries. The truck continues on. The police eventually locate it in a town twenty miles away. It appears the truck driver was not aware of even causing the crash.
What could the lorry driver be charged with in your area? Could the trucking company or logging company also be sued for damages?
Understand parties involved are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Comments
Another law says logging trucks cannot be longer than 75 feet when loaded. See law.
Logging trucks carry heavy loads. I can think a log swiping a hood of a car may not have been readily felt by the driver of the truck, The impact may have been absorbed by the logs, or the structure of the truck or obscured by the movement. But it does seem he was not aware of his surroundings.
I have no way of knowing if the 80-year-old was tailgating.
In some of these cases, the driver had no action against them.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/01/09/trucks-do-not-have-cyclist-obscuring-blindspots-shows-truck-driver-who-cycles/?sh=6f6e18d54420
I'm not a lawyer but unless there is evidence that the logging driver did something to cause the accident, I think it is possible that the logging lorry driver wouldn't be charged. If the older guy swiped the logging lorry and the logging lorry driver genuinely wasn't aware of it, I'm not sure what he could be charged with.
There is a fairly recent update of the British Highway Code called H1:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/introduction
Whether this changes what would happen in a British court of the accident between the old driver and the logging vehicle, I'm not sure. I think it would be tough to prove unless there was other evidence of poor driving, but I don't know.
Civil action could be affected by how close the car was. It could be argued that the car driver should have realised the danger of the overhanging logs. Personally I like to keep well back if I think a load might be a bit dodgy
Having said that the Lorry driver and owner are still liable because of the illegal load .
I have assumed overhanging at the rear. Here in the UK, if it overhangs by more than a metre, signage is required of some kind, depending on the length of the overhang big it overhangs by more than three metres the police must be notified.
Regardless of all that, there are only two ways a following driver can be caught by the load. One is when the vehicle ahead turns the overhang swings out across the road and the following driver runs into it. (I wouldn’t call this the load swiping the driver.) The other possibility is that as the truck starts to turn, the following driver starts to overtake it, and is caught by the overhang as it swings out. That fits the description of the load swiping the vehicle. It can only happen, though, if the following vehicle has started to pass the end of the load. (It would also be quite possible that a glancing blow, enough to cause the car to swerve off the road, would not be felt by the truck driver.)
I was just remembering a scenario of a few weeks back. I was driving to a t-junction and slowed because a lorry was behaving strangely. It suddenly reversed and swung right into the road where I was. If I had not been aware and cautious, it would have swung into where I would have been waiting.
I would hope that if I had been at the junction that the lorry driver would have looked or seen me, however it all happened so quickly that I'm not sure.
In my scenario I'm sure that there would have been legal trouble if he'd hit me as I was clearly following the usual rules of the road and he was doing a strange manoeuvre. If he didn't see me, I'm reasonably sure there would have been a charge of dangerous driving because he should have.
The second is less clear. If the turning has some kind of slip road arrangement then there’s nothing inherently wrong about beginning to pull past it. This is where the length of the overhang and questions of signage start to matter. It’s difficult to see in those circumstances what the truck driver should do to mitigate the risk. Possibly they could ignore the slip road and just drive up to the junction and make the turn.
It's weird to me that you think that because I'm not seeing anyone defending the driver. I see some talking about the size of logs (which I admit I didn't take much notice of when reading the short description) and others trying to work out what might have happened in the accident.
I was attempting as a non-lawyer to address this point
Which isn't defending the logging driver or blaming the older driver but simply thinking about the possibilities of what might happen in my jurisdiction.
A criminal charge would initially depend on the evidence and the likelihood of conviction. At court, I guess any conviction would depend on the kinds of details which are not described by you.
In Ontario we have a modified no-fault auto insurance system. You claim statutory benefits from your own insurer. You may sue for pain and suffering but this is subject to a statutory deductible of $40,000 for awards under $138,000 so it is usually inadvisable. Plus the loser pays the winner's litigation costs.
It's quite difficult to see how even a very long lorry could swipe the car behind unless the corner required the driver to go out into the middle of the road so as to get round the corner into the side road. If that was the case, the vehicle behind might get hit if it had been trying to overtake or if it had cut inside between the back of the lorry and the nearside verge. That's the cyclist issue that's been referred to, but it's difficult to see any non-dangerous reason why a motorist could be doing that.
In England and Wales which is the jurisdiction I'm in, vehicles drive on the left. So a right turn is a more complex movement.
There's generally a presumption here that it's a driver's responsibility not to run into the vehicle in front. So liability rests on the driver behind unless there's some extra ingredient, e.g. that the driver in front didn't signal or does something that's odd or dangerous.
It sounds as though the 80 year old might have started to overtake the lorry before it completed the turn, in which case, responsibility rests on him to complete the manoeuvre safely, or if he can't, to wait and not make it.
However, as several shipmates have pointed out, there aren't enough relevant facts. The story has been padded out with irrelevant ones, it's a pleasant day, it's warm, he's had a nice lunch in a café etc. That's all the sort of guff that journalists add to insert human interest and to try to slew the story in a feely direction. None of it should be material unless there was poor visibility, adverse road conditions, or he'd had alcohol with his lunch.
The story rather reads as though there were no witnesses or only people who realised what had happened afterwards.
Drivers here are expected to keep far enough behind the vehicle in front to be able to stop if the vehicle in front does an emergency stop. There are regularly admonishments about this, the braking distances involved and on parts of the motorway network, signs and arrows painted on the road designed to get across this message.
If this were just a matter of twisted metal and insurance claims, I think that would decide the matter. It's the unfortunate fact that he was killed that might constitute a reason to make something more of it. It is, though, very difficult to see how the lorry driver might have caused death by dangerous or careless driving unless there was something significantly wrong about the way he/she conducted the turn, or unless the vehicle was overloaded AND that caused the accident.
As has been point out, failure to report an accident is an offence here, but it would be difficult to make an issue of that if unless it wasn't believable when the driver claimed he/she hadn't realised someone/thing had hit the logs.
Many years ago, I encountered a case where a young driver, test recently passed etc hit and killed an elderly pedestrian who had unexpected stepped straight off the pavement in front of him without looking, in circumstances where no driver however experienced could have avoided hitting him. It would have been easy to say 'young drivers, driving too fast, only just taken their test etc etc etc. kills poor old man, send them to prison, take away their licence for life etc etc etc.' He was clearly very shaken by what had happened and always would be. It was also clear that it was not his fault and the police did not prosecute. In my opinion they were right not to. I don't think there's any circumstances under which somebody ending up dead somehow makes something criminal if what had happened wouldn't otherwise have been criminal.
The gutter-press doesn't accept this, but sometimes, things just happen and they are sad.
In this situation, I almost wonder if the elderly pedestrian may have wanted to commit suicide, from the way he stepped off the curb. Yes, such an incident would definitely scar any driver who would have hit the pedestrian, I would think.
Around here when I am on the University campus, I always have to keep an extra eye out for pedestrians who will march right out into the road as if they own it without thought to traffic conditions. Yes, pedestrians have the right a way, but they still have to use caution when stepping off the curb.
So the only way I can make sense of the "oversize logs swiping the vehicle and putting him in the ditch" is if the lorry turning right was in a filter lane, and as he turned right from the filter lane, the "oversize" logs swung in to the regular lane to the left of it, and that's where the guy was.
Not because he was "making an overtaking maneuver" but because the lorry couldn't turn whilst staying in its lane. It's not an "overtaking maneuver" if you're just proceeding in your lane, and the vehicle ahead of you has moved in to the filter lane and stopped / slowed.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/22/judge-throws-out-case-against-uk-climate-activist-trudi-warner-sign-jurors-rights
The background is that in England and Wales there are fairly severe punishments for jury tampering. Outsiders are not supposed to identify jurors or seek to (directly) influence their decision. Jurors are not supposed to talk to anyone about the current case they are on and are not to discuss how a decision was made in the locked jury room. The warning are stark and in my experience ex-jurors are usually extremely circumspect about what they say to anyone.
Anyway, in this case, an environmental campaigner held up a sign outside court. It was reminding jurors of an ancient law that allows a jury to find a not-guilty verdict on their conscience (for example the jury might think that the law was inappropriate). A law that is illustrated in marble in the middle of the court building, but which strangely jurors are not reminded of in court.
The state prosecutors sort to prosecute for contempt. A judge said that there had been no effort to intimidate or even directly talk to jurors and couldn't be contempt.
I'd be interested to hear whether in your jurisdictions it would ever happen that someone faced prosecution for accurately describing the law in public.