RECKLESS DISREGARD
CORPORATE GREED, GOVERNMENT INDIFFERENCE, AND THE
KENTUCKY SCHOOL BUS CRASH
James S. Kunen 1994
May 14, 1988
"Would you try to think of these deaths in particular as not an elimination but an emancipation? Think of the death of these not as a destruction but a deliverance. Think of the death of these not as a losing but as a gaining. Not an ending but a beginning. Not a going away but an arriving. Not a parting but a meeting.
(said by Rev. Waggoner)
page 88, paragraph 5
Why should the chance result of an evil act determine one's culpability, rather than the evil of the act itself?
page 91, paragraph 2, lines 4,5
Maybe the emphasis on result stems from the idea that, since we cannot look into the heart of the doer, the best way to measure the evil therein is to weigh the deed: The true nature of the act reveals itself--comes out--in the outcome.
page 91, paragraph 2, lines 8-12
...if our loved ones had the choice to come back or not, they wouldn't want to come, because where they are is wonderful and beautiful and peaceful. They wouldn't want to come back.'
(said by Lee Williams, husband of a victim to Janet Kytta, wife of a victim)
page 94, paragraph 5, lines 2-4
Mahoney got on I-71 north, in the direction of Burlington and Kim Frederick (ex-girlfriend). Perhaps he changed his mind, because four miles north of Carrollton, he cut across the grass median and headed south. He may have pulled into the abandoned truck-weighing station ten miles south of Carrollton, perhaps to relive himself; he'd had a lot to drink.
The weigh station, five miles south of the accident site, occupied a dark siding parallel to the highway, very much like a rest area. The entrance and exit lacked directional signs, Mahoney may have become confused, reversed himself and reentered the highway in the wrong direction.
At that point, the north-and southbound lanes of I-71 were widely divided by a sixty foot-foot grass median. Each two-lane, own-way gray macadam roadway, with its dashed white line down the middle looked remarkably like the two-lane, two-way roadway of Route 227, the road that led from I-71 to Mahoney's home. Maybe Mahoney lost track of where he was and believed he was on route 227. He kept carefully to the right of the center line. He did not speed. He did not weave. It was as though he were playing a video game, guiding a dot of phosphor on an electron screen: Follow the line. Keep to the right. All the way home.
He made it 1,717 feet north of mile marker 40.
page 210, paragraphs 1-4
Boehly (a nineteen-year NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] veteran who was director of NHTSA's National Center for Statistics Analysis) testified that in the prior year, 1987, 150 individuals were killed in crashes involving school buses.*
page 219, paragraph 3, lines 1,2
*NHTSA's Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) relies on forms filled out by police departments. The FARS "school bus-related accident" category is based on vehicle function, not vehicle type: Accidents involving vans used to transport students to or from school or school-related activities are counted; accidents involving school buses owned and operated by church groups, camps and so forth are not. The National Safety Council defines its "school bus accident" category in a similar way. Therefore, the Carrollton "church bus" accident does not show up in most school bus accident statistics.
page 219, footnote
It was the task of the judicial system to take the horror on Interstate 71 and reduce it to cases that could be duly processed and disposed of. As usual, the primary agent of this transformation was a generous dose of time. One Christmas had come and gone, and another was approaching--merchants' banners proclaiming "JOY! JOY! JOY! lined the street outside the Carroll Country Courthouse--before the six-week trial of The Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Larry Wayne Mahoney ground toward its inevitably unsatisfying conclusion in December 1989.
Perfect justice was never among the possible outcomes. "There's no balancing the books," Janey Fair observed, as the jury deliberated. "He can't go to prison for twenty-seven lifetimes." But Mahoney, who was out on $270,000 bail--his family and neighbors had pledged their homes as collateral--did face the real possibility of being put behind bars for most of the rest of his life, since he faced twenty-seven counts of murder.
The jury, however, could consider lesser degrees of homicide, the least grave of which was reckless homicide, for which the sentencing range was one to five years. Under Kentucky law, Mahoney would be guilty of reckless homicide if the jury found that he had unintentionally caused the death and he 1) grossly deviated from reasonable conduct, and 2) created a substantial and unjustifiable risk of killing someone, but failed to perceive that he was creating that risk. He would be guilty of the more serious offense of manslaughter in the second degree (five to ten years) if he 3) was aware of the risk he was creating and consciously disregarded it. The three elements--grossly unreasonable conduct, substantial unjustifiable risk, and conscious disregard--together constituted "wantonness." (It was no defense to a charge of wanton conduct that he was too intoxicated to be aware of the risk, unless his intoxication came about involuntarily.) If he prosecution proved a fourth element, namely that the wanton conduct was engaged in "under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life," Mahoney would be guilty of murder (twenty years to life).
A juror who listened very closely to the judge's instructions might have noticed that a reckless homicide was transformed into a second-degree manslaughter solely by the presence of conscious disregard, but that conscious disregard did not actually have to be present if the defendant was drunk; and that a manslaughterer who was already reckless enough to endanger people's lives became a murderer only if he exhibited "extreme indifference" to human life. Since laymen are unaccustomed to making such evanescent distinctions, as a practical matter the six men and six women of the jury would simply have to decide unanimously whether Mahoney had acted badly, very badly, or extremely badly--which was, no doubt, what the law was trying to say.
page 256, paragraph 1-3 and page 257, paragraph 1
As it happened, the jury had two benchmarks with which to take the measure of Mahoney's offense. Just three weeks after the bus wreck, Mahoney's distant cousin, Makayla Mahoney--a cheerful, bright-eyed four-year girl--had been killed by a drunk truck driver who jumped the curb and crushed her as she walked on a Carrollton sidewalk on a Saturday afternoon. Jeffrey Gill, twenty-eight, who had no prior drunk driving convictions, had a BAC of .28 and joined Larry Mahoney as the first killer drunk drivers to be indicted for murder in the history of Carroll County. Judge Satterwhite, who was now presiding over Mahoney's trial, had accepted Gill's plea of guilty to reckless homicide and ultimately sentenced him to five years probation.
On the other end of the spectrum jurors could fine the case of Sam Chowning, a veritable poster boy for extreme indifference to human life. Early on a Friday evening in July 1989, Chowning, twenty-four, who by his own account had consumed at least twenty beers and nine joints of marijuana over the course of the day, was driving a stolen pickup at 80 mph down a Carroll County road when he crossed the centerline and plowed over the top of an oncoming Honda Accord, decapitating a minister and his wife and killing their sixteen-year-old daughter. The family had been on their way to church.
The arresting officers had asked Chowning, "Did you know you'd had too many beers to drive?"
If one can believe the police report, Chowning, whose license had been suspended as a result of two prior drunk driving convictions, replied, "Hell, yes. But did I give a shit? No."
"Did you consider you might hit another vehicle?"
"I never considered it," Chowning said, "but it happened."
Chowning pled guilty to three counts of murder. Just a few weeks before Mahoney's trial got under way, Satterwhite sentenced Chowning to sixty years, with no parole possible for twenty-seven.
After deliberating eleven hours, the jury convicted Mahoney of second-degree manslaughter, effectively deciding that his actions were worse than Gill's but not as bad as Chowning's. In the end--after all the legal wrangling, the seventeen days of heartwrenching and often grotesquely graphic testimony of 124 witnesses, the nearly two hundred exhibits--it may have been Mahoney's evident anguish that led the jury to tender him a degree of mercy. Three times, while listening to witnesses' accounts of terror amid the flames, he had broken down and wept. The jurors may have agreed with defense attorney Summers that Mahoney would be paying forever, in prison and out. They recommended a sentence of sixteen years,* which under Kentucky law could not be increased by the judge. Mahoney could be considered for parole after eight.
page 259, paragraphs 5,6 & page 260
*Mahoney was given concurrent ten-year sentences (the maximum) on each of twenty-seven counts of second-degree manslaughter; concurrent sixteen-year sentences of each of twelve counts of first-degree assault (for which the maximum was twenty years) on the seriously injured survivors; and concurrent five-year sentences on each of twenty-seven counts of wanton endangerment, regarding the occupants of cars he barely missed and bus passengers who escaped serious injury. All the sentences were to run concurrently with another.
page 260, footnote
A huge gray tower rises ominously over the portal of a granite fortress set down on the fields of LaGrange, Kentucky. Chiseled in stark relief on this tower is one word: REFORMATORY. Here, a dozen miles from the spot where he crashed into the school bus, Larry Mahoney is being re-formed.
Before he was sent to the medium-security prison, Mahoney was, to all appearances, racked by remorse for what he had done and filled with compassion for his victims. ("If I could trade my life right now to bring every one of them back," he said, snapping his fingers, "I'd do it just that quick.") He had come to believe that he'd survived the crash for a reason, and he lived for the day when he could fulfill that purpose, whatever it might be--perhaps to lecture school children about drunk driving, "if that's what God wants me to do." But after a few years behind the walls, Mahoney has acquired an inmate's exquisite sense of grievance: Each prisoner compares his crime and his time to all the other's and finds that he's been shafted, he's the victim.
Mahoney's beef is that, thanks to a state law that went into effect in July 1986, prisoners in for specified violent crimes have to serve half their sentences--instead of Kentucky's usual one fifth--before becoming eligible for parole. He was convicted of, among other things, first-degree assault, for which he was sentenced to sixteen years, in 1989. Mahoney doesn't believe the legislators had drunk driving offenses in mind when they put Assault One on the list, but on the list it is. As a result, he has to serve the same minimum eight years as an ax murderer sentenced to forty years for a crime committed before July 1986, and he doesn't think that's fair.
Mahoney will come up for parole--and be turned down for parole--on July 20, 1997. Working very much in the public eye, the parole board will look at the gravity of his offense, listen to victim-impact statements from crash survivors and the families of the dead, and stamp his papers REJECTED. Then, unless he incurs a major infraction, with credit for good time he will be released no later than October 8, 2000.
Meanwhile, as model prisoner Mahoney resides in an honor dorm in a one-man, 6' X 9' room with a door to which he has a key. His narrow window looks out on a field, a guard box, and another penitentiary. On pictures are allowed on the white cinder block walls, but on top of his own thirteen-inch color TV--he likes to watch Andy Griffin and The Beverly Hillbillies--he keeps a photo of the woman he never quite made it up to see on the night of May 14, 1988, Kim Frederick; she still visits him. He has earned his high school equivalency diploma and is learning carpentry. He works as a clerk from 8:00 to 11:30 in the morning. Three days a week he lifts weights for an hour and a half. He's gained forty pounds of muscle, and his still quiet, almost girlish voice now comes out of a bull-necked, mammoth-shouldered two-hundred-pound body. He vows he'll never touch another drop of alcohol and, while denying the ever had a drinking problem, goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which in prison are not anonymous. (His attendance is the first thing the parole board will ask him about, he says. "If you don't go, they use it against you. If you do go, it doesn't help.")
page 340, paragraphs 1-3, lines 1-17