Blacksburg Law Blog

During the holiday season, you hear about many causes to help protect children or treat them for serious medical conditions. One you may not hear much about is child deaths from car crashes. However, auto accidents are the leading cause of unintentional deaths among children 1 to 14 years old, reports MedlinePlus of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

ScienceDaily shared a recent study that looked at these fatalities from the years 2010 to 2014. It revealed which area of the country was the most dangerous for children in collisions and why.

For the most part, individuals in Virginia and all across the nation have a lot going on in their lives. Being busy is not always bad; however, multi-tasking while driving is often frowned upon and is frequently descried as dangerous. While it might be important to check that e-mail, sent that text or take a phone call, the fact of the matter is that this is distracted driving, and this conduct causes far too many accidents on the roadways each and every day.

Who is more likely to drive distracted? With it being National Teen Driver Safety week, facts from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention can help highlight the rate of automobile collisions among teen drivers. In fact, teens are known as the most at-risk population on the road. This is for many reasons, as they are new drivers and do not understand how even a minor distraction lasting a few seconds could have a deadly result.

Whenever Virginia law enforcement officers seek to question you with regard to a criminal matter, you would do well to remember that no law requires you to voluntarily speak with police officers or provide them with any information other than your name and address if they request identification. In fact, just the opposite applies in the United States.

You undoubtedly have heard various iterations of the Miranda warning since you were a child watching TV or going to “cop show” movies. Just to refresh your memory, the Miranda warning’s four parts consist of the following:

1. You have the right to remain silent.
2. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
3. You have the right to an attorney.
4. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

In Virginia and elsewhere, it is obvious that commercial truck serve a major role in commerce. In a time where more people are purchasing items online instead of the store, large trucks are used to transport packages across the state or several states to their final destination. Because of this, it is rare for motorists to travel on the roadways without sharing the road with a semi-truck or tractor-trailer truck. While this seems commonplace, this also means the risks associated with these trucks are also commonplace. In other words, there are always constant risks of being involved in an accident with a large truck.

How common are truck accidents? The simplest way to put this is that the rate of truck crashes is not going down. With the number of trucks increasing year by year, the U.S. has also experienced an increase in truck collisions. Just looking at the numbers from 2015 to 2016, the number of trucks of the road increased from 11.2 million to 11.5 million.