Utah Law Talk

Just before midnight, one of our clients, Joseph, was driving his minivan down the street in Salt Lake. As he approached an intersection, he saw that he had a green light. Unfortunately, another driver in an SUV, who was sending a text message on her cell phone, was planning to go through the same intersection. Because the other driver was distracted, she did not see that her light was red and smashed into the driver’s side door of Joseph’s door, causing him head and neck injuries. A pedestrian who was waiting to cross the street, saw the whole event unfolding and ran to get out of the way of the now out-of-control cars. Sadly, because of the momentum of Joseph’s van, which was now spinning, the pedestrian was unable to get out of the way and suffered serious back injuries.

It seems we are seeing more and more accidents caused by drivers using cell phones. At first, it was the distraction of taking a call. Now, it’s much worse because of the amount of attention that reading or sending a text message takes. To read a message on a cell phone requires you to take your eyes of the road and focus on the tiny words on the phone’s small screen. To compose a message, you have to actually look at the keyboard or number keys. Either way, reading or sending a message on a cell phone is incredibly distracting. The police who spoke regarding this particular accident advised motorists to actually pull off the road if they want to read or answer a text message. This is the safe way to go. It also makes good common sense.

Right now, there are laws in a large number of Utah cities that ban hand-held cell phone use. Interestingly, however, there are no laws that make it illegal to read or write a text message while driving. But, there are laws that prohibit driving while being distracted. This means that you can still be ticketed and fined for careless driving if your phone use impairs your driving ability. The law defines careless driving as “committing a moving violation, other than speeding, while distracted by use of a hand-held cell phone or other activities not related to driving.”

From a legal standpoint, even though the woman who caused the crash may not have broken any laws banning texting while driving, she clearly was driving while being distracted. And she certainly caused a whole lot of outrage in the community. When this story was on KSL.com, it received over 330 comments. Most of these were from outraged citizens angry at this woman for causing what should have been a completely preventable crash. Unfortunately for this woman, it is the community at large that will sit in judgment of her should this case ever have to go to trial.

Published by: Ron Kramer

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Personal Injury, text messaging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.