Three years ago, a group of Jarheads Motorcycle Club members were struck by a truck, killing seven of them. Yesterday the man who killed them was acquitted of all charges by a jury of his peers. [The NYT wrongly describes the Jarheads MC as a group of "ex-Marines," which is wrong. They were former Marines. "Ex-Marine" generally refers to someone who was discharged other than honorably.]
It sounds like witness statements differed so substantially that there was room for reasonable doubt, which is the legal standard for acquittal. However, there was also a substantial assist from the judge:
A report from the National Transportation Safety Board released in December 2020 found that on the day of the crash, Mr. Zhukovskyy had been “impaired by several drugs,” including heroin, fentanyl and cocaine. He was working for Westfield Transport, a trucking company, at the time and was driving to Albany, N.Y., and Gorham, according to court records.
Mr. Zhukovskyy also had a suspended license in Connecticut, which should have led the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Massachusetts to revoke his license, the report said....
Last week, Judge Peter H. Bornstein of Superior Court dismissed eight charges that were related to Mr. Zhukovskyy’s drug and alcohol intake at the time of the crash, saying in court that “there is simply insufficient evidence from which a jury can find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was impaired to a degree.”
If the jury found that he was driving while impaired, then the other counts would have been easy to convict upon. Since they were ordered not to consider that, and had only widely different witness statements to go upon, this result followed.
2 comments:
Was not a full drug panel run upon his arrest after the crash? From what did the NTSB make this conclusion? This seems... questionable.
Looking for information I read this-
https://www.masslive.com/police-fire/2022/08/volodymyr-zhukovskyy-trial-for-west-springfield-man-accused-of-killing-7-motorcyclists-resumes-monday.html
" Zhukovskyy had told police he had taken heroin and cocaine during the morning of the crash, but the prosecution was unable to produce sufficient evidence that he was impaired at the time of the crash more than 10 hours later."
?????!!!!! Certainly this warrants getting blood testing done, which should have settled the question. Incredible.
"The average human’s perception reaction time is only 1.5 or 1.6 seconds, according to Girardi."
I'm sorry, what? Average human reaction time is under half a second. Here is a site saying it's 0.284s- https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics
That trooper seems like a rather un-expert witness.
There may have been other contributors or circumstances that helped this event happen, but it seems beyond belief that the truck driver bore no responsibility at all. All the motorcycles veered over the centerline at together, like flocking birds? Really?
Yeah, I just don't get it. You told the police you took heroin and alcohol; the NTSB found you were also high on fentanyl; witnesses say you crossed the center line and plowed into the club formation; and you walk on all charges. Even in the absence of a blood test, you'd think that driving on a suspended license while having confessed to both drug and alcohol abuse that morning would get you some kind of something.
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