Judges don’t care much if you kill an innocent driver in Minnesota now. They give you probation and let you drive on.
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We currently don’t do much to punish all the close calls resulting from these unsafe or reckless behaviors. To make the roads safer, that would be the place to start.
Once someone has a severe accident and almost dies themselves, that probably does a lot to change there behavior without the help further legal consequence.
Seems like waiting for a ■■■■■ or reckless driver to have a serious accident or kill someone before doing anything about it is what people want to do.
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U.S. ‘Justice’ system is now a JOKE.
Look at the recent outcome in the Uvaldi TX school shooting matter.
I knew which way that one was gonna go, a month ago.
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That’s an interesting story to look in to. Should someone serve time for being a coward?
You guys are so silly what you worry about. Minnesota is now 39th in literacy and Mississippi is 9th. And you worry about drivers not being punished?
In the godfather they said the snake rots from the head down so we have our work cut out for us with the deck stacked against us. As my divinity student neighbor told me though, it was hard but not Impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The camels are lining up.
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The seat belt load limiter likely contributed to the death of the male passenger in the not at fault vehicle in that head on distracted driving crash. The female driver survived. Should the vehicle maker be sued for selling a product with a significantly altered safety system that is concealed to customers?
The at fault vehicle was a 1994 Ranger which does not have load limiters nor depowered airbags.
The driver suffered mouth, jaw and brain injuries. 1994 Ford Ranger does not have a driver’s airbag.
The passenger was not wearing a seatbelt. I doubt the 2001 Chevrolet Impala has load-limiting seatbelts.
Crash data:
Incident Display - MSP Crash Updates
This fatal crash involved an unbelted/unrestrained occupant.
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Aw, Nevada, quit spoiling this with actual facts!
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Thanks for finding that out. Looks like the airbag was an option in 1994, so it either didn’t deploy or didn’t have it. Cars of the time had to have some kind of automatic seat belt if not equipped with a driver side high power airbag. Did this not apply to trucks?
The no seat belt airbag requirement after 1997 is a 100 pound person at 25 MPH, or something close to that. It obviously wasn’t strong enough for the passenger in this crash. In the IIHS crash test it looks like the 2000 Impala does have a load limiter, and it appears to not have a pretensioner.
Now would be a great time for you to do a little research on your own… Remember when you were back in school and asked the teacher how to spell a word and s/he said there is the dictionary, go look it up…
Granted, if you do not know how to spell the word in the first place, it becomes a more involved search… I leaned to use the Thesaurus and look for words that meant the same thing and the word I did not know how to spell would often be listed underneath…
So, as “Teach” would say, “Go look it up…” 
Duckduckgo now includes tons of search results which include pages that don’t include the words searched for. Nearly all the results on this topic are about the coming requirement for all vehicles to have seat belt monitoring for the rear seats, and automatic braking by 2027. They also promote new pages with recent content and don’t promote the rankings of older documents. It’s hard to search for this stuff.
I believe the standard is fmvss-208. It mentions requirements for “passenger cars”. I believe multipurpose passenger vehicles would be SUVs, and they must comply to S4.2.2, which refers to S4.1.2.3, requiring that they have a lap and shoulder belt with a no seat belt warning.
Driver’s airbag was not an option available on the 1994 Ford Ranger. 1995 was the first year a driver’s airbag was required on light trucks.
The passenger was not wearing the seatbelt.
There you go again… with actual facts.
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Crazy how your actions which result in a death is a probation punishment. 180 days in jail but 170 stayed. Punishment should also include 5 yr ban on having a cellphone.
I do believe there is far too much leniency given to survivors that cause traffic collisions but there is also a thing called contributory negligence. If you fail to use a primary safety device and die as a result, then you share in the fault. Then they start arguing about whether or not you might have survived if you had been properly restrained…
You can’t judge the entire system by a few wacky judges. They are everywhere, even Nebraska. There was one Minnesota judge recently that over-turned a guilty verdict by a jury. She didn’t agree with it for some reason, contrary to evidence.
At any rate when folks go off on seat belts I just think back to my own experience. Now I don’t even open my garage door without my belt on so I use them. But back in 1968 my VW did not have belts. When I was T ■■■■■, I only had about half of my seat left. Just had a sore leg for a while. Not sure what kind of internal damage would have been done with a seat belt on. The girl I was with broke her arm hitting the armrest so again a seatbelt would not have mattered. It was the only significant accident I’ve ever had in two million miles. When I got my replacement car, th3 first thing I did was had belts put in.
Just sayin is all, my lived experience. The odds are in favor of belts but don’t be so sure of yourselves.
I saw some things online about their 1992 or 1994 Ranger having an airbag. They must have been mistaken.
Which is why the airbags in US vehicles through 1997 were powerful enough to protect people who didn’t wear seat belts. That was actually the original purpose of mandating them at the time, when seat belt use was so low. They ended this requirement in 1998 because a lot of people were being injured or killed by airbags in minor accidents.
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…or blast the passenger through the windshield if the unrestrained person got between the airbag and windshield.
If we let the cowards off who trump up claims of ■■■■ spurs to get out of military service, how could we convict this poor guy at Uvalde.
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Maybe you weren’t old enough o4 too old to remember. My bil was number one and git off for a hearing problem. I was number 5 and didn’t get out but had four years of deferments. My room mates got off with high numbers. Wife’s cousin was rotc and didn’t get off but got his college paid. Retired as a general. Lots of people got off or didn’t just depending and things were winding down then. Each draft board was different and had different quotas. Kids that were a year or two younger than me had a much different experience.
Why don’t you tell the whole story instead of bomb throwing? Oh, and a lot of us refuse to buy or read the Minneapolis star and tribune anymore because of their absolute poor reporting. Now let’s see your real definition of coward and we can do the compare and contrast with babbling fools.