Law is too lenient on careless drivers who kill

Law is too lenient on careless drivers who kill
EDITOR:
Why is it you can kill someone with a car and only get six months or less in prison, but if you shoot or stab someone you're looking at least two years for assault with a deadly weapon? Shouldn't the same law go for a car, too? When you go through driving school they tell you a car is a deadly weapon, that you can kill someone, including yourself, at any time. So that means there is no difference between the three of them, but the time you do is different. Why?
I never gave it much thought until I read an article in the Aug. 28 local section about Tim Albu's sentence being cut. First I thought it was because he was a police officer, until I did some checking and found out some people don't even get jail time for killing someone with a car. So the message this sends out is that if you want to kill someone, do it with a car and make it look like an accident. That way you only do up to six months, not years. Aggravated assault carries more time than killing someone with a car. That is not fair.
Albu took the life of a very good friend of mine, Delbert (Hoss) Lambert, not to mention someone's husband, son, father, and nephew. I don't think 23-year-old kids should be able to be police officers unless they can tell the difference between emergency and non-emergency calls. If Albu did know the difference, we would still have Delbert (Hoss) with us physically and not just in our hearts and memory. Albu should also should have been charged with speeding, since it was a non-emergency, and with going left of center, along with the other two charges.
Let someone kill a good friend of theirs and the cops will go nuts, but they have a different law to follow. They do what they want cause they know there isn't an attorney around who will take the case unless you pay big bucks, which a lot of people don't have.
So can someone tell me what we can do to change this?
PATRICIA BLUE
Warren
U.S. has no history of starting wars, and it shouldn't start one now
EDITOR:
During the last Presidential election I cast my vote with majority of the voters, for Al Gore. My reasons were many but looking back through history I just couldn't see where the Republican Party had done much for the working class. I thought of the 40-hour week, unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicare. Then of the gains workers received through their unions, such as vacation time (the United States is still at the bottom), health insurance, pensions plans, etc. All of these were opposed by the Republicans and big business.
However, due to the voting fiasco in Florida, the electoral college and the Supreme Court decision George W. Bush was declared president.
At that time I thought, OK, even though business is good, unemployment low and the stock market at record levels maybe we will all be a lot better off when we don't have to worry about Bill and Monica. There was also the promise of assistance on prescription drugs which are really out of this world.
So I said, we will wait a year or more and if everyone is better off then I will say I voted for the wrong person.
Now, we are on the verge of going to war with Iraq and even though there is not much doubt that we would win, no one knows what the cost might be -- not only in dollars but in lives of the military as well as women and children in Iraq.
Never in our history have we started a war, and it doesn't seem as though we should now. If we go to war with Iraq, what nation will be the next to develop weapons of mass destruction that needs to be destroyed first?
WINSTON SWAN
Hubbard