Don't text and drive
Virtually everyone has seen it at some point … and many have done it: sending a text message (or reading an e-mail through a mobile phone) while driving a vehicle.
It doesn’t take an attorney or judge to figure out the consequences of such an action. Reading and typing messages through a phone require several seconds of visual concentration on the phone … which automatically means that those seconds are being spent focused on something other than the road and the vehicles driving on it, or pedestrians walking nearby and crossing the road.
This past spring, a 24-year-old man took it one step further, when he admitted to text-messaging his girlfriend while operating a Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) train seconds before a train accident that left more than 60 people injured. Aiden Quinn has entered a plea of not guilty in Suffolk Superior Court, but faces up to three years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine if found guilty of “gross negligence by a person in control of a train” … a little-known statute that rarely, if ever, has been brought into play in Massachusetts courts. Two of the victims brought individual civil lawsuits against Quinn and the MBTA.
Continue Reading...