Posted on 07/08/2005 6:14:56 AM PDT by Pharmboy
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - A woman who was forbidden from driving after pleading guilty in a fatal crash was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for violating probation when she took her children to school. To avoid jail time, Sonia Ortiz, 25, had accepted a plea deal in August for her involvement in a 2003 crash that killed West Palm Beach Police Officer Thomas Morash.
Ortiz, who did not have a license, pulled out in front of Morash, who was on a motorcycle, according to a Florida Highway Patrol report. She was charged with driving without a valid driver's license causing death.
She was arrested again April 15 after a Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy saw her driving alone after dropping off her children at their elementary school.
Ortiz said in court Thursday that she had no other way of getting the four children to school.
Circuit Judge Jorge Labarga said she would continue to flout the law and drive.
"It's now my duty to protect society," Labarga said.
I'm sorry but this woman's rights ended where her endangerment of others began. No such right can be wrested out of the general provisions of the constitution.
Jeez, the number of people who believe that it is a privelege to operate a vehicle on the roadways is staggering. No wonder they politicians can steal our rights so easily. Hell, most people don't even know they have them to start with!
I will not rehash my argument AGAIN. Please read more of my posts on this thread.
Don't play stupid. You have no absolute right to do anything, I never said it, and you know it.
You would have people believe that simply not possessing a license endangers others and that is crap. I know people whit a license who shouldn't have one an dpeople who don't have one who drive very well/
You can drive a car around on your private property all day long if you want to; have it at. Give the keys to your kid and let him do it, too. No one will stop you.
Access to the PUBLIC roads and permission to DRIVE on them is regulated (licensed) to protect the PUBLIC. It is a privilege.
But let's follow your line of logic for a moment and presume it is a right. Along with all of our rights come the RESPONSIBILITY to excercise them with care, so that they do not impinged on the rights of others. SOCIETY has determined that is it the responsibility of individuals to demonstrate an ability to exercise the proper operation of a motor vehicle before being allowed acces to public roads.
This woman chose to exercise her rights in an irresponsible manner and is facing the consequences of her choice. Boo hooo. Actions have consequences. Heaven forbid.
Elsewhere on the thread it mentioned the creation of children. Parenting your children is a NATURAL right; however, if one abuses the children, neglects the children, refuses to carefully fulfill the responsibilties that accompany the right to have children, they will lose the right to parent them.
You see a danger in confusing rights with privileges. I do, too, but in a different way. Everytime we slap the term "right" onto something, we empower the government to enforce our ability to exercise that right, and to protect it.
Like the folks that claim medical care is a right. Medical care is a service, a privilege, not a RIGHT. But because enough folks have bought into the lie that it's a right, we now have the federal government stepping in to enforce it's delivery, while stealing from our pockets to pay for it.
Tread carefully, my friend. You seem to be suggesting that rights do not come without responsibilities, and freedoms are somehow free, when this is distinctly NOT the case. It's actually this line of careless thinking and course of action that INCREASES the reach of the government and leads to an erosion of our freedoms, because the nanny-staters impose more laws to "protect us" from folks who aren't responsible in the first place.
Speaking of playing stupid, you'll recall I asked you to cite where her right to travel by car was enumerated not allowed for by general provision. So far, you haven't.
I have NEVER even suggested that rights come without responsibility. Where did you get that?
ALL of our rights are NATURAL rights. Have you not read any of our founding fathers' papers? It is a PRIVELEDGE if a service or object is provided to an individual by the government at the expense of others and can be withdrawn without consulting the courts at all. (Or maybe you would argue that we have to ask the Supreme Court before Congress can ditch welfare?)
The roads are for ALL PEOPLE to use. I pay for the roads and the roads are for public use. I do not ask that others pay for anything that would benefit me personally.
The government does not provide me with a car or insurance or upkeep on the car.
Equating free travel on public roads with medicare is a strawman argument because the two are not equiable.
Was it a "privelege" to travel public roads before there were motorized vehicles? Certainly not!
I have also never argued that any right is inviolate. I have simply stated (over and over and over) that if the government wants to deny your right to drive (just as they can deny your right to vote if you are in prison or yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theather, etc.) the the government must show COMPELLING EVIDENCE that it is necessary to deny that right. Our society is based on mobility. It is practically impossible in most places to not have a car and access to the public roads. To deny a pregnant (at the time of the first offense) woman the right to drive to the doctor and to take her children to school and to get groceries and to drive to a better job would put an undue burden on her.
Do you think she would have gotten such harsh sentences if she had had the money to hire a GOOD lawyer to defend her in court? Others have cavalierly dismissed this as "Well, she accepted the terms, so she has to live with them!" Jeez, how cold hearted can you get? Does anyone think that the overworked, underpaid, barely competent public defender did more than cut the easiest deal he could? Do you think that she REALLY got a fair trial with her public defender against a prosecutor with a grudge who has probably publicly sworn to put her in jail for 10 to 20 years and an unlimited budget? Or do you think she thought, "I am so screwed. I had better take this deal because it is the best I can get with this idiod PD." Remember this is West Palm Beach, and it is probably the same prosecutor going after Rush. Fairness and justice is not in his interest.
I tend to think the latter.
Are you being deliberately dense? Are you going to stupidly argue that if the Constitution doesn't SPECIFICALLY enumerate a right that it doesn't exist when I have shown you that the Constitutions says just the opposite?
Please report to the prison camp for fitting of your chains. You don't even know what rights you have to be stolen.
She CHOSE to not get a license.
She CHOSE to conceive several children out of wedlock with an obviously unstable and unsupportive man, whose subsequent abandonment left her in an untenable predicament.
She CHOSE to drive illegally.
She CHOSE to pull out of the street infront of the motorcycle.
She CHOSE to accept the plea bargain.
She CHOSE to violate the plea bargain.
She is now facing the culmination of a number of poor choices; changing any one of these would have changed her fate.
Actions have consequences.
Who do I feel sorry for?
Her CHILDREN, and the family of the motorcyclist who died. They didn't have a CHOICE.
Funny, I thought you were. You keep calling the officer's death an accident, as if no one caused it.
I don't think the issue in me being dense. I think you need to have the last word out of some childish element in your character. Go ahead.
Did she INTEND to cause his death?
I feel sorry for this country because there are so many people who don't know their rights.
Word.
You do not have a right to kill a person. If this lady had not been driving illegally she would not have killed this motorcyclist. You may not feel a person on a motorcycle has the same rights as a car driver but the law says different. Just because someone is riding a motorcycle does not mean he is less of a person. This lady has NO respect for the law and is going where others like her go, to prison where they can not destroy more lives.
The fact she is only going to jail for seven years for ending another persons life speaks volumes.
She has the rest of her life to contemplate her actions, the dead person is still dead.
A probation deal with any conditions in a death case speaks even more mercy. A sentence that I suspect was signed off by the dead person's family given FL's victim rights laws. (prosecutors are obligated to speak to the victims and victims or their survivors have the right to be heard in court at sentencing)
She was INTENTIONALLY on the road without a license. She did not prove the minimum qualification to drive on the roads with other people, she just drove. Since she intentionally drove without a license, she accepted the consequences of her intentional actions.
TWICE.
So we have jumped from the right to drive to mean that you have the right to kill.
I give up. There are too many people comfortable in their chains to even entertain the thought of freedom.
No, which is why she was not charged with murder.
If I throw a bowling ball off an overpass, with the sole intent of seeing it bust open on the highway below, and it instead falls through the windshield of a moving car that I didn't see coming, and kills the driver---that's not an accident. Whatever my intent was, I caused the death by my own reckless action, which a responsible person should have been able to predict MIGHT be a possible consequence of that action.
And I don't think it would be a just or appropriate punishment in that case for the judge to sentence me to a physics class, so I'd know better in future.
Say the kids were quadruplets, she was a virgin till raped at 18, being a good Christian she didn't have an abortion. As a single mom raising 4 kids she was trying her best to raise her kids. / more irrelevant speculation
As it turned out, the children were not all school age, making all the speculation even more irrelevant.
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