My sister got hit by a truck the other day. People don’t always believe me when I tell them that. They start to laugh until they realize there’s no joke involved; it really happened.
She was crossing the street from her parking garage in the Haymarket—in the crosswalk no less—when a truck crossed the intersection and literally ran her over in the middle of the road.
The aftermath of the accident is still on-going. Her ankle was crushed, requiring multiple surgeries to correct the damage. As the mother of a very active two-year-old, her expected recovery time—during which she is on crutches—is a huge inconvenience. She has not yet been able to return to work and even getting up to go the bathroom is a struggle.
And the worst part about it is it never should have happened. The driver that hit her should have never been on the road, as he was driving on a suspended license.
To make matters worse, he had already been cited for driving on a suspended license less than a month before the incident with my sister. Yet the man was still driving, and obviously not doing a very good job of it.
Now I realize there’s only so much that can be done in a situation like this. It’s impossible to monitor every person that is on the road—the only way to discover is a driver’s license is suspended is if they have a run-in with the police. I accept that.
However, what I do not accept is that after getting his license suspended and getting caught violating that court order, he then proceeded to ignore the rules again and continued driving, resulting in his hitting a pedestrian. He walked away from that accident with a mere traffic ticket. For all we know, he’s driving on the roads right now.
How is that okay? How is there not something in place that would deter a driver from violating a court ordered suspension?
While there are penalties for driving on a suspended license in Nebraska they are not that significant. According the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles website, being cited for driving with a suspended license can lead to an increase in the length of the suspension and could lead to being imprisoned for up to five years.
How is suspending the license for a longer period a deterrent? People choosing to drive on a suspended license are obviously not taking the original judgment seriously. Do you think that because their license is now suspended for a year instead of the original six months they are going to suddenly realize they should not be on the road?
I want to see harsher penalties for drivers that ignore license suspensions. I want to see automatic jail sentences for any violation of a court-ordered suspension. Driving is a privilege, not a right, and if someone has done something serious enough to revoke that privilege, they should not get multiple chances to violate that ruling before they encounter a major consequence for their actions.
Maybe, just maybe, if there were harsher penalties for being caught driving on a suspended license, that man would not have chosen to do so, and my sister would not be bed-ridden right now, with three screws and a metal plate in her leg.