Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Guilty or Not Guilty??

Saw this in the local paper the other day, happend a couple years ago, jury trial last week:

-30 year old mother crosses center line of country backroad, hits another car head on....her 6 year old boy is killed the other driver injured but not life threatening.

-accident about noon

-witness on the seen says she takes 3 unopened beers out of the car and hides them in the woods, tells her not to call 911

-3 state troopers respond to the seen. They interview her and release her. They do not smell alcohol, detect slurred speech or any other sign of DUI.

-The son is still alive at the time and life flight to hospital. Her husband/his father picks her up and takes her to the hospital to be with son. Says she drank several beers in his truck on the way to the hospital because she was a wreck. They divorced right after the wreck.

-On tip from witness at the scene they take her blood at the hospital 4 hours after the wreck and it is .11

She testifies at trial and says she does not remember before or after the wreck due to shock but had been drinking heavily the night before.

Whether she's guilty or not, she's a worthless POS.

This.

But she will be found not guilty. No way to prove she was intoxicated at the time of the crash.

Dink

"knowing" someone is guilty, and "proving" someone is guilty are way different things.

She'll get what's coming to her.

Too bad about an innocent kid getting killed though.

Nobody buys just 3 Beers. A Tall Boy or two maybe but other than this it would be a 6 pack or more. Three individual Beers would cost almost as much as a 6 pack so it makes no sense to only buy three when you can get 6 for the same price.

I think she probably had three in her system. A regular heavy Drinker could be able to hide only three Beers in their system, especially if they are obese and have a heavy body weight. But that does not mean they are not impaired.

Like it, or not (and I don't), I'll say she'll be found not guilty.

Well, the verdict is already in, and they found her guilty. Recommended a sentence of 9.5 years.


I was quite shocked by the verdict, and wanted to see if you all would see the evidence the same way. Her attorney is an idiot for letting her testify.

IMO the evidence was just not there. A blood test 4 hours later is useless especially when the prosecution can't account for what happened in the mean time, and they can't. Also, there is no clear motive for the boy's father to lie.

Also IMO the request not to call 911, probably shouldn't have come in, because the prejudicial effect outweighs any probative value.

Most importantly, if 3 trained state police couldn't detect a DUI, that is a tremendous hurdle to overcome.

Tragic situation, verdict doesn't seem quite right though.

Found her guilty of what?

On those scant facts, I don’t see any way to prove beyond a reasonable doubt a crime where .08 DUI is a necessary element of the offense, even if we assume that the jury thought the defendant was lying through her teeth. This does not mean that she cannot be convicted of some form of criminally negligent homicide based on other facts. There also may be some culpability for some crimes under applicable state law based on the attempt to deny medical care.

-unintentional manslaughter (based on DUI) and DUI. A minor charge for the injury to the other driver, based on the DUI.

Without the DUI, she would have walked on everything.

Dunno. We have trial by juries rather than trials by Internet or newspaper for a reason. We really don't know what the jury really heard, or the credibility value ascribed therefrom, from reading such reports, only what a writer thought the jury heard and knew.