Case Story: Leniency for a Teenage Driver Charged with Reckless Driving

Whenever a teenager leaves the house with car keys in hand, they get the same lecture from their “overprotective” parents:

Don’t drink and drive.

If you are tired, pull over and rest.

Don’t text while you drive.

Don’t drive too fast.

Kids roll their eyes and say they know, but parents give this advice for good reason: car accidents kill about 40,000 people annually. And while many of these deaths are accidental, some are not. And the difference between the two is usually pretty easy to identify and understand.

The easy ones are the ones parents warn about—drinking, texting, and speeding. But what about when things are less clear cut? When the teenager wasn’t drunk, wasn’t texting, and wasn’t excessively speeding, but still had a fatal accident.

What then? 

That’s what this case is about.

Our client was a 19-year-old who did just about everything that he was supposed to do. Despite this, he fell asleep at the wheel, drifted into the other lane, and caused a head-on collision that severely injured him and his passenger and killed the other driver. 

The state charged him criminally for the crash. He retained our firm and we got to work. Our defense was simple: our client made a mistake, and he should be held to account, but it shouldn’t ruin his life. After a hard-fought negotiation, that’s exactly the result we got.

Here’s how.

The Charge

Our client and his friend, both teenagers from South Dakota, traveled to North Dakota to attend a small-town barn dance. The two took the friend’s car and the friend drove. At the dance, the friend drank to excess and became too drunk to drive. Noticing this, our client did the right thing and took the friend’s keys away.

At the end of the night, the two tried to stay in the town where the dance had occurred, but there was nowhere to sleep. Given this, our client—sober at the time—drove to Fargo and tried to rent a hotel room for the night. The reason was that it was late, and our client didn’t want to drive a car that wasn’t his all the way back to South Dakota in the middle of the night.

When they arrived in Fargo, our client tried to rent a hotel room, but he couldn’t. The reason? The front desk worker told him he was too young; he was 19 years old and the youngest they’d rent to was 25 years old.

This put the two in a pickle. 

The friend was still far too drunk to drive, and our client was tired and didn’t want to drive several more hours in the middle of the night. At the same time, without a hotel room, our client did not know what to do with the friend’s car.

Park it somewhere? Sit in it while running?

He wasn’t sure.

And so he tried to drive home. Not because he wanted to; because he felt like he had no other choice. 

Tragically, this turned out to be a fatal mistake.

About an hour into the drive from Fargo back to South Dakota, our client fell asleep while driving, crossed the median, and crashed into a car driven by another man. All three people in the crash were hurt; our client and his friend needed surgery, but recovered. The man driving the other car did not. 

He died at the scene.

After investigating the crash, police charged our client criminally for reckless driving. We immediately researched the criminal code and began poking holes in the state’s theory of guilt.

The Legal Fight

The question was simple: was this an accident, or did our client do something that pushed it into the criminal realm?

After much research, we concluded that it was a close call.

On the one hand, our client did many things right that night. He took his friend’s keys away when he noticed he was too drunk to drive. He became the sober driver even though the car wasn’t his. He tried to stay in Fargo because he knew it was late and he was tired.

On the other hand, he drove knowing he was tired. And according to the highway patrol, he was also speeding at the time of the crash.

In this situation, where there are good and bad facts on both sides of the ledger, we prepared for trial, which led to settlement negotiations with the state. As the saying goes, “if you want peace, prepare for war.” We made clear the good things our client did, admitted to the questionable things he did, and argued about the things we didn’t think the evidence proved.

In the end, we agreed on some things and not others. The fight focused on two things:

1. Does falling asleep while driving constitute a criminal act?

2. Was our client traveling as fast as the highway patrol claimed at the time of the crash?

To answer these questions, we settled the case but left the sentence up to the judge. Basically we agreed to plead guilty to reckless driving, but we did not agree to the punishment the state thought appropriate.

So the case became a question for the judge: what punishment should our client receive for his role in the crash?

We said the conviction was enough. The state disagreed. It was up to the judge to decide.

The Decision

To help, both sides submitted briefs to the court, which is just a fancy way of saying we wrote to the judge and explained why we each wanted the sentence we were asking for.

We also gave oral arguments to the judge on the day of sentencing, again explaining the case and our position on the appropriate sentence.

Our recommendation was to find our client guilty of reckless driving, but to serve no jail time and for the judge to give him an opportunity to have the conviction eventually removed from his record.

The reason was straightforward: he made a mistake, and the mistake was driving when he was too tired. But he also did lots of things right before that happened. And so the court should give him a chance to prove that this was an aberration from his normal behavior. 

That this crash was not the man he really was.

And if he could show that for some time, then he shouldn’t have the conviction on his record for good. We put it this way at sentencing: he deserved a temporary scarlet letter, not a permanent one.

Additionally, we disproved the high patrol’s claim that our client was speeding at the time of the crash. We did so by hiring a nationally-known accident reconstruction expert, who successfully discredited the state’s report that our client was speeding. 

This was yet another thing our client “did right” before the crash.

The state, to its credit, agreed that there should be no jail time, but it disagreed that the court should one day wipe the conviction away. The other driver’s death was permanent, they argued, so the conviction should be too.

The judge sided with us. 

But he did so in a thoughtful, reasoned way.

He told our client his decision to drive while tired was a bad one, even though it was at least somewhat understandable given the hotel issues in Fargo. He also credited our client with the other good decisions he made that night. 

Ultimately, he thought it was fair to punish our client some, but give him an opportunity for redemption.

The Takeaway

There’s an old adage that says true character is the way you act when nobody is watching. That adage saved our client from jail and a permanent criminal record.

Neither our client nor his friend ever thought they’d get in a crash the night they went to that barn dance. But before they did, our client repeatedly made the right, mature decision when nobody was watching.

He took away the keys of a drunk friend. He served as a sober driver. He tried to get a hotel room when tired. He didn’t speed while driving.

Ultimately, it wasn’t enough, but these things made it clear to the judge that this was a good kid involved in a bad situation.

And but for this, it’s unlikely the judge would have shown him the mercy he did.

He truly earned his chance at redemption.