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Old 04-27-2007, 10:23 PM   #4 (permalink)
The_Dunedan
Junkie
 
The two deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. However, it does deserve mention that Mrs. Bush does not hold elected office as Kennedy does and, moreover, did not gain and retain that office despite having killed someone. Moreover, Kennedy made the decision to abandon his victim to die, while Mrs. Bush's accident seems to have been precisely that: an accident through and through. An idiotic accident, true; but I know people who have done even dumber things than that and not realized it until the act was completed: fortunately, neither they nor anyone else were killed by such things.* Accidentally killing someone in a car wreck is bad, yes: but knowingly abandoning an unconscious, injured individual in a sinking car and not reporting the accident is manslaughter at least by any standard, and the attempt to cover up the act could (in some jurasdictions) support a Murder-3 charge.

*Just how easy it is for 17-year-olds to do really stupid things in cars by accident is illustrated by a friend from High School who destroyed his first car a few weeks after he got it. In our town, there was a hill, at the bottom of which was a railroad track. The track had a raised bed; for obvious reasons, this was known to locals as the "ski jump." About three weeks after my friend got his first car he (who had moved to town about a year before) was headed down that hill with his girlfriend, and forgot about the railroad track at the bottom of the hill. The hill wasn't very steep, so he didn't ram the car into the railroad-bed...instead, he hit the bump at about 40 or so, and pancaked the landing, which destroyed the suspension on his old Chevvy. He told the cops, his parents, and me that he simply never saw the railbed and had forgotten it was there; "blanked out" was the phrase he used. Granted, it's not the same as running a stop-sign and killing someone, but it does illustrate how easy it is for someone to be distracted or "blanked" and miss something that -should- be glaringly obvious.
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