The night of Sunday, June 8, 77-year-old Dorothy Dobbins just wanted to walk her dog. The retired lawyer was also the former lead attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Nashville Family Law Unit and helped found Nashville’s first domestic violence center. Tragically, despite crossing the street at a marked crosswalk in Nashville’s Germantown neighborhood, 24-year-old country singer Conner Smith killed her with his truck. No one, including Smith’s attorney, denies that Smith killed Dobbins. Still, the state only decided to charge him with a misdemeanor, Fox 17 Nashville reports.
“The Metro Nashville Police Department said Smith showed no signs of impairment or distracted driving at the time of the crash,” WSMV adds.
It’s been more than a month since the fatal collision, and up until now, it looked like Smith might escape any accountability at all. Too many states treat road deaths as completely unavoidable accidents that no one could have possibly prevented. Still, at best, Smith’s misdemeanor charge of ‘Failure to Yield the Right of Way Resulting in Death’ feels like a slap on the wrist.
In Tennessee, that failure to yield charge is a Class A misdemeanor that carries a sentence of up to 11 months and 29 days, a $2,500 fine, or both. So it’s possible Smith may have to pay a nominal fine and spend a few weekends in jail. According to the state of Tennessee, that’s no worse than any other Class A misdemeanor, a category which also includes simple assault, theft of less than $1,000, and simple marijuana possession.
Road safety rules continue to overlook pedestrians and cyclists
If there’s any good news to be had, here, it’s that Dobbins’ dog Angel reportedly survived the crash uninjured and is currently staying with a neighbor.
Unfortunately for all of us, Tennessee isn’t the only state that apparently cares less about people’s safety if they aren’t in a car. It’s a national problem that’s also increasingly unique to the U.S.: While other developed countries continue to get safer, the U.S. is the only one where the roads are getting more dangerous. As National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a board meeting last year, “By raw numbers, the U.S. has more motor-vehicle deaths than any other developed country. We also have the highest death rate.”
Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration took one of the first steps toward maybe sort of almost doing something about the number of people drivers kill in the streets every year, proposing a new rule that would require pedestrian safety testing on new vehicles. Sadly, the new Secretary of Transportation seems more obsessed with reminding people he’s too scared to ride New York’s subway.
What’s especially frustrating is that, while we do need better laws that make cars safer, we also need better road design. Yet efforts to make the roads safer for people who aren’t in cars — like attempts to install protected bike lanes or pedestrian safety infrastructure – are almost immediately met with fierce resistance. Until we actually do something about how dangerous our roads are, drivers are just going to keep killing people like Dorothy Dobbins.