Drunken Pilots Not Guilty?
The defense attorney says that “the pilots should not be convicted because they were not really operating the plane at the time in question.”
Er...I don’t think this case would be a slippery slope to a Minority Report police state of predicting crime. They were 6 minutes from takeoff. You can reasonably conclude that they were going to fly the plane. This isn’t a murder trial, there’s no “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “plausible alternate theories.” A “they would have chickened out and stepped off the flight on their own” defense isn’t going to cut it. Should the justice system be castrated because an airline employee had the foresight to act on it before they took off? Or should she have waited until they had started the engines and began operating the jet without the tow vehicle before speaking up, to make sure there could be a conviction? Do they get rewarded because that sharp employee had more concern for the passengers than whether or not they were technically driving the vehicle?
Posted Thursday June 9, 2005 in Just Plain Weird by Derek Jones
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