Bronx prosecutors had little chance of convicting bus driver Ophadell Williams of manslaughter despite the horrific carnage he caused while asleep at the wheel, legal experts said yesterday.
Because 15 people died in the March 2011 crash, Bronx DA Robert Johnson may have felt obligated to indict Williams on the beefed-up charge, but the case was doomed from the start.
Unlike drunken driving, it’s not illegal to drive while tired, said defense lawyer Steven Epstein, a specialist in drunken-driving cases.
“There’s a certain societal acceptance of it . . . People drive tired all the time,” Epstein said.
It also would have been difficult to show that Williams’ failure to get enough sleep was criminally negligent, said criminal defense lawyer Joe Tacopina.
Under New York law, someone is criminally negligent if they “fail to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk.”
“The guy would have had to know when he went to work that day, ‘Geez, I probably shouldn’t go to work today because there’s a risk I will endanger these people on the bus,’ ” Tacopina said.
“It’s not like he was a sleep doctor who should have known better,” Tacopina said. “He was a bus driver. He was a working man who worked long hours to make ends meet. Just because this is a horrific tragedy does not mean it’s a crime.”
A judge in Syracuse reached a similar verdict in February in the negligent-homicide case of John Tomaszewski, a driver accused of killing four people when his bus slammed into an overpass in September 2010.
Unless a driver is drunk or driving way over the speed limit, it’s nearly impossible to make a deadly crash a crime, said Tomaszewski’s lawyer, Eric Jeschke.
“If it was a crime for people to be stupid or careless, there’d be criminal prosecutions for every accident,” Jeschke said.