Ten years, one week, and two days ago, Gene Mikale Erickson died in a car accident, a passenger in his girlfriend's Saturn Ion. The driver, Candice Anderson, survived, and was charged with criminally negligent homicide based on what appears to have been sloppy police work. Today, seven years after her conviction, a Texas judge has cleared Anderson's record, based on findings that blame the fatal crash on the same faulty GM ignition switch that's currently linked to 35 deaths.
At the time, Anderson's accident was blamed on intoxication. The police trooper who investigated the crash decided—before lab results came back—that Anderson was intoxicated. As The New York Times reports, "his police report referred to the seemingly inexplicable circumstances of the accident, her history of recreational drug use, 'witness testimony and Anderson's behavior at the scene,' which was disoriented and emotional." The police report emphasized the "seemingly inexplicable lack of skid marks or evasive action" in the broad-daylight crash, where Anderson's car left a rural road and smashed head-on into a tree.
Anderson pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in October 2007, based on a trace amount of Xanax in her system. She served five years probation and paid more than $10,000 in fines. And her criminal record resulting from the plea has dogged her ever since: Automotive News reports that Anderson, 21 years old at the time of the crash, abandoned her ambitions of becoming a nurse due to the felony conviction on her record.
That conviction came five months after GM had begun an internal investigation into ignition-switch defects. Erickson's death was one of 13 fatalities GM internally linked to the ignition-switch defect, Automotive News reports. Engineers concluded in May 2007 that Anderson's airbags did not deploy due to an inadvertent shutoff, five months before Anderson pleaded guilty. GM denied having assessed the cause of the crash in a June 2007 letter to the NHTSA.
In the ensuing years, GM's ignition-switch problems became publicly known, eventually being linked to 35 deaths in accidents eerily similar to Anderson's: An inadvertent shutdown cutting power to the car's steering and braking assists, resulting in an impact without airbag deployment.
GM settled with Anderson over her numerous injuries for $75,000 in 2008, most of which went to her legal bills and to Erickson's young daughters, Automotive News reports. Now that the crash has been pinpointed to the ignition-switch defect, Anderson stands to receive a much larger payout from GM's victim-compensation fund. She says she plans to make a claim and "move on with [her] life."
Both the district attorney who prosecuted Anderson and the police trooper who investigated her accident petitioned for her exoneration in light of the new knowledge of the GM ignition-switch defect. "Had I know at the time that GM knew of these issues and has since admitted to such, I do not believe the grand jury would have indicted her for intoxication manslaughter," the district attorney, Leslie Poynter Dixon, told the Times.
- Report: GM Never Contacted Family of First Fatal Ignition-Switch Crash Victim
- GM Ignition-Switch Engineer: "I Did My Job"
- GM Settling With Ignition-Switch Crash Victims Using No-Limit Fund Payouts
This morning, Van Zandt County District Judge Teresa Drum threw out Anderson's conviction. It's a relief to Anderson, who for 10 years has lived with the assumption that she was responsible for Erickson's death. "She lives in a small town, and her community thought she murdered someone that was held in high regard," Anderson's lawyer Bob Hilliard told Automotive News. "She was called a murderer to her face."
"It's overwhelming; it's a range of emotions," Anderson told The New York Times. "I'm elated. Things are upside down. Or, really, right-side up."
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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