A few years ago a young state prosecutor from Florida who was hired solely to try staged accident cases was a guest speaker at a Coalition board meeting. She started her talk by saying that the term “staged accident” was a contradiction. An accident by definition cannot be staged. She refused to use the term and admonished those who did. She’s correct, and the term has been banished from my lexicon ever since.
I recalled her admonishment this week when I read about current legislation in Maryland that would strike the word “accident” in state statutes dealing with automobiles and insurance, and replace it with “crash.”
The sponsors of this bill reason that “accident” implies an event over which one has no control, such as an accident of birth. Driving drunk or in very bad weather or on roads with faulty design can lead to car crashes, but people do have some control over those situations. Certainly setting up two vehicles to smash into each other as a means to make a profit is no accident. For our purposes, I think we should lose “accident” and go with “crash” as well. We wish the sponsors of this bill much luck in making this change in law.
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