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Online Forum Speeding Boast Leads To Conviction
Meshach writes "In Canada, a nineteen-year-old man has lost his driving license for six months and is facing one year of probation after the police arrested him for dangerous driving as a result of a post on an online message board. The tip apparently came from an uninvolved American who called the Canadian authorities after he saw the post bragging about how fast the man went."
What evidence was there, other than the bloggers post, that an offence had occurred?
How could the police charge him without it?
He admitted it himself. Admitting your crimes on the internet are no different than admitting them in real life. There also were pictures and videos of his crime.
Same laws apply to Internet as real life. It would be pretty stupid to go tell police that. Well, they can read the internet too.
There you go
I'm not sure why that's posted on a spoof site, in my experience it's quite fucking true! BMWs seem pretty common and run of the mill in the UK now and I don't really encounter many that are driven badly above the norm for most cars, One series seem common as muck and I even saw one with one of those learner signs on the top of it the other day which made me chuckle.
Most Audi drivers on the other hand, there's generally two types, there's the middle England Daily Mail reading wife who drives one because her husband bought her it and she thinks it makes her cool but actually scares the living shit out of her to drive so she sticks to 30mph on safe 60mph roads, and then there's the dickhead, who drives 60mph on safe 30mph roads, overtaking on blind corners down country lanes because he thinks the national speed limit sign means "Drive as fast as you fucking can at a minimum of 60mph down every part of this road", when in reality it means something along the lines of "Drive whatever speed is safe for the section of the road you are on, upto 60mph on safe open straight parts with good visibility".
But then it's also no suprise that on the 25 mile commute each way a day I do, that the cars I see in bushes are also nearly always Audis, driven by both types of driver- the dickhead who lost control, and the middle England Daily Mail reading wife who did a 90 degree turn off the side of the road into a ditch because a tractor was coming the other way on the other side of the road towards her at 10mph and that made her panic.
Still, it could be worse, at least they're not the annoying Nissan Micra and Fiat 500 drivers that seem to exist solely to slow the flow of traffic down to something like 5mph on every stretch of road possible whilst still managing to drift across the other side of the road because turning the wheel to navigate a 2 mile long 10 degree turn is just too much for them!
Except that the speed he stated was 1.0000000033c, and that means he went back in time, at least for some observers.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Why shouldn't it swing both ways? Doesn't the policeman have to make sure that there's actually a dead person?
You are not the first to have made that mistake. All that has to be proven is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond any shadow of a doubt. While hard proof of a dead person (such as identifiable remains) would obviously give you "beyond any shadow of a doubt", it's quite possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt without such proof, as Hans Reiser's trial demonstrated.
IOW, the police only need good reason to believe that there's a dead person.
You wouldn't automatically be charged, but you'd probably be arrested or at the very least invited to the police station for questioning. The police would probably examine your claim, compare it with missing persons reports, and decide whether you're telling the truth or just being a nuisance (in which case, you might get a warning or be charged with wasting police time).
The article has a link to the actual forum post, which is worth a read if you're under the impression that the only proof the police had was a confession. In fact, the driver mentions the location and date of his crime, plus the fact that there were witnesses. There's more than enough information there for the police to conduct an investigation.
In the end, the guy pleaded guilty not just on the internet but in a court of law.
His bragging alone would not have secured a conviction. There was also evidence that on the same car forum the man was claiming that he was smoking pot and driving on a different occasion. This however, could not be confirmed and charges were not pursued.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/08/10/facebook-speeding-conviction658.html#ixzz0wIDKdH3a
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
In this case it was enough. This prompted the local police to investigate when someone directed them to the forum post. They found witnesses to the event in the area where he committed the crime, and the guy ended up pleading guilty as a result.
The story doesn't claim that he was found guilty on his confession alone, but it was enough to get him convicted of a crime.
Statements made online are neither the equivalent of testifying in court nor expected to be 100% TRUE. If the only "evidence" the cops had was his online statement, they had no evidence at all.
Do bear in mind the following, tiny fact:
A 19-year-old man from a Toronto suburb has pleaded guilty to careless driving
Doesn't matter if they had "evidence" or not, if the judge accepted the plea, the case is closed.
There is a difference between speeding as in being over the legal speed limit, and speeding as in driving too fast for your abilities.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yes, since the summary was somewhat lacking:
Ref: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/845967--speeding-boast-online-costs-19-year-old-his-licence
You are wrong. "A car" in itself is no more dangerous than a fork on its own.
The "danger" of speed increases in proportion to the increase in speed. How, you say?
1) Less reaction time when something unexpected happens - blow a tire, new pothole, sudden curve, animal in the road, child in the road, broken down car in the road...
2) F=ma. When your car, traveling at a given velocity, suddenly and rapid decelerates due to impacting something, that Force is transmitted into you, the fame of your car, and the object you've hit. The higher your speed (velocity), the higher your deceleration (negative acceleration) when you come to a stop due to slamming into something. Therefore, the force involved in the crash is directly proportional to the speed at which you strike an object. More speed = more force, given the same car.
3) Increased braking distance - meaning the time it takes you to *safely* stop and not kill yourself or someone else is greater the faster you are going.
Speed, in and of itself, is dangerous. There are conditions where "60m/h" is a generally safe speed. There are conditions were "20m/h" is generally a safe speed. But no matter how you look at that, the higher speed is "more dangerous" in a given circumstance than the lower speed.