Long-time readers know this blog was started for bicycle safety, and that I had to quit when the constant stream of fatal or life-changing wrecks overwhelmed me and I had to quit covering it for my own health. Well I never stopped being an advocate for traffic safety.
I’m sending a letter to my state rep about amending the traffic and criminal laws, so that hit-and-run with injury has the included offense of assault with a deadly weapon. The logic is if you hit someone with a vehicle hard enough to cause injury you as a driver will hear it if nothing else, and if you then leave the injured person you did it intentionally. The leaving, maybe not the hitting, but the hitting is harder to prove intent. Making leaving after prima facie demonstrating intent makes proving intent to hit moot. Regardless of intending to hit if you leave after that is intent. There’s no way to not know you hit something, if that something was a person and you leave you meant to leave making it an assault, and since between 35K and 40K people die from motor vehicles every year in the US there is very little to prove about motor vehicles being deadly weapons.
Find your state rep, and start pushing this. That’s the post.
Witch on a Bicycle 