Re: Auto accident versus collision; I was wrong

On 2025-03-19 11:45 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

The law is entirely semantics. Perhaps ordinary people (who don't watch
fictional lawyers on tv and become legal experts like me) don't
appreciate this, but a state legislature that employs professionals who
are specifically experts in legal language and statutory construction
fail to grasp the consequence of a semantic change?
 In this video, Steve Lehto discusses the unintended consequence of
substituting "collision" for "accident" when Hawaii amended a law. Years
ago, I was one of those people who stopped using the word "accident",
influenced by others who wanted newspaper reporters and others in the
media to stop reporting such incidents as "accidents" because the reader
or listener would assume that the incident was unavoidable.
 But that's not what "accident" means. Neither in dictionary definitions
nor statutory language has it meant "unavoidable" in which there is no
fault to find. Instead, it means that the party at fault for the
incident had not committed an intentional act.
 "Accident", therefore, means "without intent" not "without fault".
 To the uninformed reader or listener, as "crash" or "collision" is just
a factual statement without finding of fault and without proving intent,
"unavoidable" isn't incorrectly assumed.
 Lehto went off on a bit of an incorrect tangent about why people were
pushing for the word "accident" not to be used.
 There are unintended consequences of changing statutory language because
"feelings". Here's an example:
 In Honolulu, Five-Oh was chasing another motorist without lights and
sirens. The driver of the vehicle being chased flipped the vehicle.
People inside the vehicle were seriously injured.
 The cop driving was charged with a felony based on colliding with the
vehicle being chased, because language in the statute had been changed
from "accident" to "collision". Now, the state may have been able to
prove that the cop was at fault for causing an accident because of the
unsafe manner of pursuit and that conduct during pursuit was criminally
negligent or reckless. But was the cop at fault for causing a collision?
 If in fact the vehicles had not collided, then the change in statutory
language prevents charges in which an accident occurred that was not the
result of a collision.
 Oops.
 Here's the video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FATTJtvXbeU

When I was driving school buses, I found that my employers never used the word "accident". If someone hit something while driving their bus, even if it was the merest scratch, it was never an accident: it was *always* a collision. (I'm sure this would have been true if a person were hit, although I don't recall anyone ever hitting a person while I worked there.) I feel sure this was their way of making us take responsibility for what had happened. We didn't get to say anything that implied that whatever happened couldn't be helped in some way. Even if we weren't at fault, I think they expected that we could have done something to prevent or minimize the event. Drivers were always taken off the road for a day or two and made to have a retraining session with another driver after a collision.
I can't really find fault with that approach. Language DOES matter and calling a collision what it was is the right thing to do. You can always add an adjective like "unavoidable" if that applies. Calling everything an accident is dishonest since most "accidents" involved some actions that made the accident more likely, even if there was no intent involved. For example, if I'm yapping on a cell phone - or in an animated conversation with my passengers - I am contributing to the likelihood of an accident even if I very much don't want to have one. Anything that distracts me as a driver may contribute to a collision whether it is talking or driving drunk or on too little sleep.
--
Rhino