In January 2010, a sixteen-year-old driver here in Connecticut was driving on Interstate 84 at 8:30 on a Saturday morning and collided with a school bus. A student on the bus died, and the teen driver has been charged with negligent homicide. Obviously, this situation is a terrible tragedy for the victim’s family as well as the driver and his family.
Last week, a lawyer who represents the teen driver filed a motion in court to take advantage of a recent amendment to Connecticut’s juvenile court laws. This law allows a case to be transferred from Superior Court, where all cases involving adults are handled, to juvenile court. The penalties and the standards for both motor vehicle violations and more serious offenses such as negligent homicide are the same in juvenile court as in Superior Court; the difference is that juvenile court proceedings are shielded from public view; in other words, court sessions and files are not public or open to the news media. A case gets transferred to juvenile court only if a judge makes a determination that the defendant youth and the community would be “better served” by having the case heard in juvenile court.
A news article about the case and the transfer can be found at http://www.courant.com/news/Connecticut/chi-Hartford-school-bus-crash-0803-20100802,0,6885678.story .
As noted elsewhere on this blog, I served on a statewide Task Force in 2008 that rewrote Connecticut’s teen driver laws and made a set of long-term recommendations. One of the Task Force’s specific recommendations was that the juvenile courts and juvenile laws not undermine the teen driver laws by providing more lenient penalties or process. I confess that I was unaware that our legislature had amended the juvenile court law earlier this year, or that its doing so might open up teen driver cases to take advantage.
Yesterday, I wrote a letter to the editor about the recent court motion, stating in part:
While we can understand the teen driver’s attorney strategic desire to shield his client, our new teen driving laws and the critical, statewide cause of safer teen driving will be better served if the issue of whether a sixteen-year-old driver triggered a fatal accident is presented publicly in court, using the same standards as apply to adults.
I truly understand the pain that the teen driver and his family are going through. I’ve been there. But I firmly believe two things: First, driving is an adult activity, and it is simply a perversion of the nature of driving for anyone to suggest that teen driving violations should be handled in a juvenile court. If teens want to drive, and if parents want to allow their teens to drive, then they need to accept from Day One that teen drivers should be held to adult standards, including in the court system. Second, as hard as it may be for this particular teen driver’s family to understand, the best thing that can come out of this tragedy is for this matter to be heard in open court, so that teen drivers and their parents will get a better appreciation of the risks and potential consequences of teen driving.
