Texting While Driving Deemed Not "Reckless" by Gwinnett County District Attorney
On Tuesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that vehicular homicide charges against Lori Reineke, a Gwinnett County woman who hit and killed a pedestrian last October, had been reduced from a first-degree felony to a second-degree misdemeanor.
Police had originally charged Reineke with first-degree vehicular homicide due to reckless driving because she had been texting behind the wheel when she struck and killed James Eaton III.
There were mitigating factors in Reineke's favor: it had been dark and rainy that night, and Reineke's light had been green at the time, so Eaton was not supposed to have been in the crosswalk. That said, there was clear evidence that Reineke had been exchanging text messages at the time of the incident. Therefore, police maintained that Reineke hit Eaton not because of poor visibility, but because she was distracted.
However, after reviewing the case, District Attorney Danny Porter said that there were no "reckless driving" factors present at the time of the accident, so there was no way to charge Reineke for more than a misdemeanor.
The question, then--and this is particuarly interesting to me as a Gwinnett County car accident lawyer--seems to have been: Is text messaging while driving reckless?
To anyone whose loved one has been killed by a driver who was text messaging behind the wheel at the time, this is an absolute no-brainer. It's also no secret that texting has been shown to impair people's ability to drive safely: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that using a phone while driving, hand-held or not, delays a driver's reaction time as much as having a blood alcohol concentration of .08 percent. In this light, one might say that texting behind the wheel is the very dictionary definition of reckless: "heedless of danger or consequences; careless."
Nonetheless, text messaging has been in the traffic law lexicon for such a relatively short amount of time that it seems to have escaped the "reckless" definition for now. In other words, texting behind the wheel doesn't fit into the mold of what in the past was considered the criteria for "recklessness," e.g. exceeding the speed limit or driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Of course, texting behind the wheel became illegal in Georgia mere days before this determination. This law would not have affected Reineke's case anyway, since it wasn't effective at the time of the incident, but it certainly came into being for a reason. So it will be interesting to see how the legal definition and view of text messaging evolves in the foreseeable future.
If you or a loved one have been seriously injured or killed as the result of a distracted driver, you have the right to fair compensation. With Gwinnett County offices in Atlanta and Duluth, Ga., the Law Offices of P. Charles Scholle, P.C.'s compassionate Georgia automobile accident attorneys are ready to help you recoup your losses and get on with your life. To learn more, contact us for a free consultation.
