January 25, 2008
Source Quote: (Source)
TUCSON, Arizona (AP) -- A judge sentenced a woman to nearly the maximum prison term for negligent homicide after hearing a recorded jail conversation in which she made light of the bicyclist she killed.
Melissa Arrington, 27, was convicted two months ago of negligent homicide and two counts of aggravated DUI in connection with the December 2006 death of Paul L'Ecuyer.
She could have gotten as few as four years behind bars, but Superior Court Judge Michael Cruikshank sentenced her Tuesday to 10½ years -- one year shy of the maximum.
Cruikshank said he found a telephone conversation between Arrington and an unknown male friend, a week after L'Ecuyer was killed, to be "breathtaking in its inhumanity."
During the conversation, the man told Arrington that an acquaintance believed she should get a medal and a parade because she had "taken out" a "tree hugger, a bicyclist, a Frenchman and a gay guy all in one shot."
Arrington laughed. When the man said he knew it was a terrible thing to say, she responded, "No, it's not."
Assistant Public Defender Michael Rosenbluth told the judge his client has never been "cold, callous or flippant" about L'Ecuyer's death and has always felt remorseful.
Arrington said words couldn't express how she feels, and that once she's out of prison, she hopes to share her story with Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
L'Ecuyer, 45, was riding his bike the night of December 1, 2006 when Arrington swerved off the road, hit him and then continued for 800 feet before stopping, according to Deputy Pima County Attorney Jonathan Mosher.
Arrington's blood-alcohol content was .156 percent, nearly double Arizona's .08 legal limit. She had been driving on a suspended license for a prior DUI.
This might be my tree-hugging ex-cyclist hippie bias showing, but fuck these people. I’ve never understood the sheer invective people level towards cyclists. It’s nauseating and frustrating. I can’t count the number of times people have honked at me, screamed at me, called me names, and threw shit at me just because I was on a bike and dared to ride in the street. You know, where you’re supposed to ride. It annoyed the hell out of me, but I dealt with it. When you’re on a bike in L.A., you’re eye-to-eye with an understanding that one wrong move will get you mowed down by one of the Stepford Wives of Southern California, and I’m sure that it’s the same in other places as well. So you do your best to be a conscientious cyclist, and you end up being way too accommodating to people who are utter assholes to you for no good reason other than the fact that you’re a very minor obstacle. Sometimes you become a scapegoat for their anger at traffic. Maybe they channel their hatred of a driver that cut them off and aim it right at you. And it sucks.
But as a cyclist, you accept this and deal with it.
There are even stories where the dirty fucking hippie population and the cyclist population clash, like a bad dating show. Except this story involved an angry environmentalist strung chains across a rural road after bikers sped through on their Harleys one season and “disturbed the local ecosystem”. The guy was clotheslined by a chain at about 20-30 mph and died. From what I hear, the environmentalist wasn’t even remorseful.
What a dick.
It’s when someone’s hatred crosses that boundary and they start championing the fact that an innocent person died that I start to get really pissed off. I’ve read countless stories about cyclists being plowed over by drivers, even stories where a drunk driver sped down a bike path and killed a guy. It seems like our culture has an intrinsic hatred for cyclists – maybe it’s the idea of them, maybe it’s our culture’s hippie-hate manifesting itself once again, but either way, it’s sickening.
It’s doubly worse when some intolerant piece of shit throws in homophobia and ethnocentrism, and the offending party doesn’t even bat an eye. I know that I’ve mocked the deaths of people before, such as Jerry Falwell, Reagan, et al – but these were powerful, influential people who actively contributed to really fucked-up things in society. They were not some random guy on a fucking bike.
The woman should have had the book thrown at her due to DWUS (Driving While Utterly Shithoused) and killing a guy, but she nearly got what could amount to a slap on the hand. Personally, I’m glad the judge took their comments into account and sentenced her accordingly.
Posted by Jake at January 25, 2008 07:19 AM
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