Traffic Justice

A senior hit by a driver in Midtown earlier this month has died. NYPD charged the driver with violating the victim's right of way.

Update: Danny Lin was sentenced to one and two-thirds to five years in prison. The sentence was “half of what prosecutors had argued for,” the Daily News reported.

A grand jury has indicted Marlon Sewell for second-degree manslaughter six months after he jumped a curb in Fort Greene and killed 30-year-old Victoria Nicodemus while driving with a suspended license, Gothamist reports. Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson had refrained from pressing felony charges until Nicodemus's family pressured his office to take action.

In rejecting the case against a school bus driver who struck and killed an elderly woman in a Queens crosswalk, a criminal court judge deemed the city's Right of Way Law unconstitutional. The constitutionality of the law had previously been upheld in a different court, however, and street safety advocates don't expect the new ruling to hold up. Applying the same logic would render criminal statutes against drunk driving unconstitutional as well, they say.

A driver who killed a man on a Brooklyn sidewalk while attempting to evade police pled guilty to manslaughter.

Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson charged the driver who killed Victoria Nicodemus on a Fort Greene sidewalk with unlicensed driving, but did not file charges for taking the victim's life. Six months after the crash, Nicodemus's family says the DA is dragging his feet on the case.

Update: Tiffany Murdaugh was sentenced to two to six years in prison.

A driver who struck and killed a woman in a Brooklyn crosswalk pled guilty to a Right of Way Law violation.

Update: Darcel Clark’s office sent us this statement: “Our office is investigating the incident with the NYPD Accident Investigation Squad, as we do with any fatality or serious injury when a pedestrian is struck.”