Understanding Legal TermsUnderstanding Legal Terms

Accidentally killing someone with your car is a truly terrifying ordeal, unless you have no remorse about the situation whatsoever. Most people, however, feel absolutely awful that their poor driving or careless drinking led them to this point. You may be hearing several terms thrown about by your lawyer and the prosecution: homicide, vehicular homicide, vehicular manslaughter. All of these seem to be the same thing to you, so how does a criminal attorney, such as Kaiser Law Group, tell the difference? The answer is fairly simple-- it has to do with the severity of your crime and your propensity to commit it again.

Explaining the Differences

All of these terms refer to the crime you committed when you killed someone. The more specific the term, the more specific the crime and the suggested punishment by law. For example, manslaughter means you ran someone down or accidentally killed them and there is not enough burden of proof to show that you did it intentionally. The other related crimes are:

• Vehicular Manslaughter-- a one-time event where someone in the car with you or someone else on the road was killed because of your actions or inability to control your vehicle
• Homicide-- bad old-fashioned murder. It was planned or someone else planned it and you followed through. The deceased was going to die at your hands, regardless of the method, motive and/or means.
• Vehicular Homicide-- you absolutely planned to kill the deceased, and you planned to use your vehicle as the weapon. You purposely pointed your vehicle at the target in the road or at another obstacle while driving and smacked into him/her/it head on with the intent to kill.

When drugs or alcohol were involved, it becomes much more difficult to prove that you killed the deceased intentionally. You are more likely to receive a lighter sentence of some type of manslaughter because you were under the influence. You will get traffic tickets for OWI/DUI as well.

How Your Attorney Gets You a Reduced Sentence

Manslaughter, by far, is the least of these sentences. Despite the fact that you will still have to serve some jail time because your accident ended a life, many attorneys can convince a judge it was a poor choice in judgement, and you will not repeat your crime. If the judge chooses to believe you and your attorney, you will get a reduced sentence and be convicted of something less heinous than murder.