CRASH AND KILLER WALKS FREE
Gounardes wants to make it easier to lock up reckless drivers
COURIER LIFE, AUG. 16-22, 2019 3
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
A Brooklyn state senator wants to make
it easier to put reckless drivers behind
bars after police released the teenage
motorist who they say killed a cyclist after
blowing through a red light in Midwood
Sunday.
“I’m concerned about cases like this
that have extreme reckless behavior
where the law clearly has a gap in coverage,”
said State Sen. Andrew Gounardes
(D–Midwood).
The state legislator vowed to work
with safe-street advocates and legal experts
to craft new, tougher laws against
drivers involved in fatal motor-vehicle
collisions, such as the 18-year-old motorist
who ran a red light on Coney Island
Avenue at Avenue L on Aug. 11, T-boning
an SUV, which then slammed into Park
Slope cyclist Jose Alzorriz, killing him.
Offi cers took the teen driver into custody
at the scene, only to cut him loose
without pressing charges or issuing
any citations, demonstrating what Gounardes
described as an arbitrary legal
distinction between killing people with
a car versus virtually any other means.
“If he was walking down the avenue
and throwing knives across the street
and he hit someone and killed someone
he’d be charged with manslaughter or
homicide — how is this any different?”
Gounardes asked.
Experts claim that current laws are
vague when describing the burden of
proof for reckless manslaughter and
criminally negligent homicide — the
two felony charges most commonly associated
with fatal motor-vehicle collisions
— which make getting those
charges to stick a crapshoot.
And for every trial that ends in acquittal,
the job of securing a conviction
becomes harder and harder, according
to one transit advocate.
“District attorneys will say that
case precedent makes it very diffi cult to
bring manslaughter charges and reckless
driving criminal charges because
of precedent that requires them to prove
that a driver’s behavior grossly deviated
from what a normal person would do,”
said Marco Conner, deputy director at
Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy
group promoting safe streets.
To prove that a driver acted recklessly
in a fatal collision, judges commonly
require prosecutors provide evidence
of two moving violations — such
as speeding, running a red, failure to
yield, etc. This unoffi cial mandate is
known informally as “the rule of two,”
but the axiom is not found in any legal
code, and rulings remain unpredictable
and subjective as a result, according to
Conner.
“Part of the reason judges came up
with that rule of two is so that there was
too much subjectivity in the statutes —
what does ‘gross deviation’ mean,” he
said.
Gounardes said that one possible solution
could be to codify that unoffi cial
rule to help provide prosecutors with
clear guidelines when it comes to securing
reckless manslaughter convictions.
He will also consider expanding the
defi nition of vehicular manslaughter,
a felony charge that typically requires
prosecutors prove that a driver was intoxicated
at the time of a crash.
District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and
his predecessor Ken Thompson have
previously brought second-degree manslaughter
charges against car-borne
killers, such as Dorothy Bruns — the
Staten Island motorist who struck and
killed two children in 2018 — and Marlon
Sewell, who killed 30-year-old Victoria
Nicodemus amid a collision in Fort
Greene in 2015.
But those cases relied on external factors
beyond moving violations — Bruns’
doctor had told her not to drive for
health reasons and prosecutors claimed
that Sewell knowingly drove a hunk of
junk, which spewed noxious fumes into
the cab that made him light-headed during
the crash, DNAInfo reported .
And neither case ended in conviction.
Bruns committed suicide ahead of
her trial, while Sewell’s case ended in
a mistrial after a juror was overheard
stating “I’m not sending a black man to
jail,” and prosecutors have not been able
to retry the case due to scheduling diffi
culties caused by Sewell’s attorney, according
to a spokesman for Gonzalez.
But just because Gonzalez did not
immediately seek an indictment doesn’t
mean he’s prohibited from doing so following
the conclusion of a thorough investigation,
and a spokesman for the district
attorney said his boss will not rush
into court unprepared to accommodate
the whims of social media pundits.
“Those who understand criminal
justice know that prosecutors should
not bring charges at the speed of Twitter
and viral posts, but should rather bring
them after thorough and complete investigations
when the evidence and the
law allow,” said Oren Yaniv.