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Boxing star Hannah Rapp killed by alleged road rage driver while cycling in Texas
(sports.yahoo.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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"The driver of the car, Charles Medina, 31, was later arrested and charged with manslaughter..."
MANSLAUGHTER???????
IANAL but AFAIK they only need one charge to hold him and they can tack on more charges later. Realistically plea bargaining means that he won't actually get convicted of murder, but they could still use a murder charge to get him to cop to manslaughter.
Dudes been in jail 13 times already. Maybe we can just decide he's not good for society at this point and put him somewhere he can't hurt innocent people anymore. Or maybe I'm the crazy one for thinking this
I'm surprised they didn't just ticket him for failure to yield right of way or something equally minor.
That's what the person who hit me (a pedestrian) got. Less than a $70 ticket. I got a permanently injured knee, a crooked nose, $12k in medical debt, and 7+ years of ruined credit.
Still bitter about it twenty years later.
Track him down and run him over with a car.
In most legislations the qualifyer for more than that is premeditated action. And being a moron with low impulse control and a tendency for road rage sadly is the opposite.
The actual question is how someone like that is still allowed behind a wheel.
As I understand, it's Mens Rea that determines whether it's manslaughter or murder.
It's hard to argue this person didn't do it on purpose. Hence, murder, not manslaughter.
My understanding (not a lawyer) is the difference is intent to kill. Murder requires that the accused clearly intended to kill the victim, while manslaughter only requires that the accused intended to do the thing which resulted in the victim's death.
"Hard to argue", sure, but that's not the standard of a legal trial. The prosecution would need to prove beyond doubt that the driver meant for Rapp to die, not just that he meant to hit her with his car.
It looks like this could go either way as a reasonable person would assume that intentionally hitting someone with your car poses a real possibility of killing them. Looks like the examples of negligent vehicular manslaughter are usually things like reckless driving or driving under the influence.
Personally (not a lawyer) I'd consider it murder if I was on a jury given the information I have. Hitting someone with a car on purpose is akin to hitting them with a club. Sure, you may not have thought it was likely to kill them, but you weren't trying not to kill them.
That premeditation can be as short as a few seconds. People get convicted of murder when they get in a bar fight, leave the bar to grab a gun, then come back into the bar to continue the fight, resulting in an eventual shooting. If you kill someone in a random act of passion in a bar, it's manslaughter. But just the short time to go and grab a weapon is enough time to meet the standard of premeditation. All that matters is you have a brief moment to think about it.