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A driver involved in a January 2009 serious truck accident that took the life of a male motorist has pleaded guilty to criminal charges in federal court in Philadelphia. The 58-year-old truck driver could be sentenced to between 10 to 16 months of incarceration for falsifying his truck driving log books required by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
No less than 15 false statements were allegedly included in his truck logbook, which constituted representations to federal transportation authorities about how many hours he had been driving and when he rested.
Drivers of commercial trucks are required by federal law to verify the entries in their logs and are prohibited, for safety reasons, from driving over 11 hours daily and must rest or sleep for a minimum of ten hours in a row.
At the time of the accident, the trucker admitted, he had been operating his truck all the way from California to Virginia, but then proceeded to drive to Pennsylvania. He was “fatigued and tired”, federal prosecutors asserted, having exceeded the allowable daily hours of driving without adequate sleep.
According to the trucker’s own statement to police following the accident, he had slept, at most, five or six hours or so at a rest stop before proceeding on to Philadelphia. When he encountered the motorist’s car, his truck plowed into it. The truck was pulling as cargo of over 73,000 pounds of broccoli, and the heavy truck pinned the motorist’s vehicle underneath it, inflicting fatal injuries.
In an earlier criminal prosecution for vehicular homicide, the truck driver was given a sentence of from three to 23 months of incarceration, followed by five years on probation. It was not reported if a wrongful lawsuit was brought on behalf of the motorist who was killed against the driver or trucking company, but it is certainly possible.
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Trucker pleads in fatal crash,” Michael Hinkelman, Oct. 3, 2011.