Cars Are Weapons

A Hennepin County jury found Derrick Thompson guilty on Friday not just of criminal vehicular homicide, but also of third degree murder. Thompson killed five young women two years ago with his rented SUV, after exceeding 110 mph on Interstate 35W in South Minneapolis, then leaving the highway at about 95 mph, running a red light off the ramp, and smashing into the car carrying the young women, who had been preparing for the wedding of a friend the next day.

At the trial, Thompson's attorney argued in his closing statement that if Thompson had been driving the car (which the lawyer did not concede), the driver's actions were merely reckless and did not indicate the required depraved indifference to human life required for a murder conviction.

This seems obviously absurd to me, since traveling over 100 mph on an urban highway and almost 100 on a ramp and then running a red light on a city street on a summer evening clearly requires depraved indifference to any human life, including your own. However, the attorney was not far wrong in his estimation of what a jury might think of his argument.

According to today's coverage of the trial outcome in the Star Tribune,

...data from the Fourth Judicial District [shows] there have only been three convictions for third-degree murder involving a car crash in Hennepin County in the last decade, and only once did the conviction come from a jury.

And I'll bet alcohol or drugs were used by the driver in all three of those cases... neither was involved in Thompson's case. Juries (and even judges) just don't want to convict unimpaired drivers of heinous behavior. They don't see it as heinous.

The Hennepin County prosecutor's office had offered Thompson a plea deal late last year: five counts of criminal vehicular manslaughter with a sentence of 32 to 38 years, which would have meant he got out in 21 to 25 years with good behavior. Now he's been convicted of 10 counts of manslaughter and five of third-degree murder.

Seems like Thompson made a bad bet on going to trial. The assumption of motornormativity on his part or his lawyer's part didn't pay off for once.

Running a red light at almost any speed, but definitely if above the speed limit, should automatically equal depraved indifference to human life. The burden should be on the driver/offender to show it isn’t.

Cars are weapons, and society should start treating them as such.