Penang Bridge crash: What justice entails
COMMENT | When my father showed me the eight-second video clip of the Penang Bridge fatal car crash, he told me something daunting.
“You see, in life, you can do absolutely nothing wrong, follow the rules to its letter, and still be met with an unfortunate incident like this,” he said
This is what a tragedy is: where the victim’s life has perished without fault, and we search for a sense of fairness that will never come.
Every tragedy like this takes away too much from us.
A man as young as the victim doesn’t deserve to die—he had so much to live for. We know that an innocent death in this country is one death too many, and we must make sure incidents like that do not happen again.
Since the accident, many people have been calling for “justice”.
Some even want the safety standards of the bridge, and all other infrastructure and buildings to be re-examined and reviewed.
Most, however, have called for the heaviest punishment available to be imposed on the Vios driver, to the proportion of anger of the people...
BOTH racing. BOTH drank alcohol. One took weed. Remains to be seen if he was the only one. The conversation we should be having here is ROAD SAFETY. About driving under influence and speeding way above the speed limit in the wee hours of the morning. It wasnt the fault of the car manufacturer, bridge design, the Wira, the kapcai... etc. It is about two youngsters who thought youth gave the immortality and traffic rules were meant to be broken.
James Chai, the root problem is poor education when it comes to road rules not the "scourge of drug addicts", a very disturbing picture you are trying to paint with your views. When your parents don't follow road rules, why should you? Why blame drugs and especially marijuana when it is still remains inconclusive that in the US that it does causes accidents as most cases involve people who have other medications and/or alcohol in their system. There is no proper enforcement of speeding in Malaysia. Be like Australia and have a demerit system for speeding. Three or four speeding offences a year means your license is taken away for at least six months. If you drink and drive, instant suspension. In Thailand, where some 14,000 people die on the roads, the main problem is speed and alcohol. Thai police and army would rather have people on marijuana during Songkran than alcohol and that is why Thailand is on a path of decriminalisation and legalisation. A better solution would be to have the driver assessed by a mental health professional to see why he is abusing drugs and alcohol in the first place, if he is indeed doing so. Sometimes, people make mistakes but consequences vary greatly. Remember, worldwide, the stats are 1 in 4 people will suffer from mental illness sometime during their lives and addressing this in the Malaysian mental health system is a much more efficient and humane solution. Don't label people drunks or drug addicts, define them according to their situation. A judge does not judge but rehabilitates.
James...smoking some weed does not make the boy a "drug addict".
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