You can commit many crimes while driving. Technically, any time you exceed the speed limit by just one mile per hour, you are breaking the law. However, most cops will not pull you over and ticket you for such a minor infraction.
You can do much more terrible things while behind the wheel, though. For instance, you might commit vehicular manslaughter. You should know about the serious legal implications of vehicular manslaughter. We will talk about them in the following article.
What Does Vehicular Manslaughter Mean?
The term vehicular manslaughter means a driver committed negligent or illegal actions while behind the wheel of a vehicle, and they killed someone or caused their death They can do so when driving a commercial vehicle or a personal one.
If you drive under alcohol’s influence, and you accidentally kill someone, the police will likely try to pin a vehicular manslaughter charge on you. If you smoke marijuana before driving and kill someone, you may get the same charge.
If you drive recklessly or carelessly, that is vehicular manslaughter as well. Any time you violate traffic laws and kill someone with your vehicle, you can expect this charge. If you drive in a grossly negligent manner, the legal system will more than likely say you committed this crime, and the court system will try to charge you appropriately.
What About Depraved Indifference?
You may also have an additional charge that goes along with vehicular manslaughter. The police and prosecutors call this charge depraved indifference.
If you drive recklessly, and you kill someone, you may get the vehicular manslaughter charge on its own. However, maybe you violate the law in an incredibly egregious way.
For instance, maybe you drive ninety-miles-per-hour in a school zone, and you run down a child. You did not plan to kill them, presumably. However, you not only violated the law, but you did so in a way that made someone’s death or serious injury highly likely.
You may face the combination of depraved indifference and vehicular manslaughter in that kind of a situation. You might also get those same charges if you drink 15 beers and then drive. You’re not just acting recklessly. You’re acting recklessly in a way that shows you care nothing about societal conventions or laws.
First and Second- Degree Murder and Vehicular Manslaughter
You may also want to know the difference between vehicular manslaughter, first-degree murder, and second-degree murder. With manslaughter, you killed someone, but you didn’t plan it beforehand, or at all. You acted recklessly and killed them, but you didn’t spend any time planning it or thinking about it.
If the police charge you with second-degree murder, that means you meant to kill someone, but you didn’t plan it out beforehand. Instead, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision.
With first-degree murder, you not only planned the murder, but then you carried it out. As you might expect, you will usually get more jail time for either first or second-degree murder versus manslaughter. That remains true with vehicular manslaughter in most instances.
However, you can still get plenty of jail time if you commit vehicular manslaughter versus those other two charges. Just because you didn’t plan to kill someone in advance, and you didn’t decide to kill someone because you had the opportunity, that doesn’t mean you didn’t still take a life.
The Law Will Look at Your Case Harshly if You Don’t Take a Plea Deal
Let’s say you kill someone while driving recklessly, and the police catch you. The district attorney knows it’s a high-profile case, and they want to make an example out of you by getting you behind bars as quickly as possible.
They may offer you a plea deal, particularly if it’s your first offense. For instance, they might say that if you plead guilty, you can get jail time for second-degree vehicular manslaughter rather than first degree.
If you get a lawyer and fight the charges, that will often anger the district attorney, or whatever other prosecutor you’re facing. They may feel you should accept your culpability, and that you’re not repentant if you don’t.
If you take the case to trial, then the legal system will usually go after you and try to give you the worst charges and the maximum amount of jail time. That’s why, if you’re facing these charges, you’d better think very carefully about taking a plea deal if the court offers you one.
How Much Jail Time Can You Get for Vehicular Manslaughter?
Different districts around the country will have their own number of months or years that they might make you serve after any kind of criminal conviction. Various factors might come into play, like whether it’s your first offense, whether you seem contrite afterward, etc.
However, for the most part, you might get a few years for vehicular manslaughter if you stayed at the scene, you didn’t drink alcohol before driving, you didn’t speed, etc. In other words, if you killed someone with your car unintentionally, but you are apologetic and didn’t act recklessly leading up to the accident, then you’ll likely get the minimum.
However, if you drove drunk and killed someone unintentionally, or you exceeded the speed limit by quite a bit when you killed them, you might get as much as 15 years in those cases. It’s still not as much as you’d probably get for something like first-degree murder.
What About if You Kill Multiple People While Driving?
If you kill multiple people, that makes yours a much worse case. Perhaps you hit another car with four people in it, and you kill all of them. In that instance, you might get a double-digit penalty for each victim.
Again, other factors will come into play, but if you killed several people, then you’re going to face severe penalties, even if you never committed a crime prior to the accident. A mistake that bad requires that you pay a steep price.
