An extremely serious road accident took place near the city of Sibiu, on DN1, on December 4, 2022, in the evening, in the area known as Hula Bradului.
The Romanian citizen Ion Sporici was behind the wheel of a BMW 525D and had been driving for 17 hours without stopping. He was returning from Germany and heading home, in Gorj, where he was awaited by his life partner, whom he was going to marry shortly.
Under the effect of fatigue, the driver lost control of the car in a curve and crashed violently into a Dacia Logan car rented by a Spanish family on a trip to Romania. Alicia (21 years old), Cristina (15 years old), Pepe (67 years old) and Maria del Carmen (55 years old), members of the Rodríguez family, originally from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, were the innocent victims of the accident.
Overtaking on the curve, on the continuous double line
The father and mother died on the spot, upon impact, Alicia died in the ambulance that was taking her to the hospital, and Cristina, the little girl, four days after the accident, in the ATI ward of the County Hospital in Sibiu.
Alicia Rodríguez studied in Romania, with a one-year Erasmus scholarship, at Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu. She dreamed of becoming a teacher. Her family decided to visit her during the Constitution Day holiday in early December.
On December 4, 2022, in the rented Logan, the two sisters and their parents were returning from a trip. They didn’t reach their destination because the driver from Gorj drove in the opposite direction, overtaking a truck over the continuous double line, in the curve, and hit the car in which the family from Canaria was traveling head-on.
Long string of chicanes behind the wheel of the BMW
The man was charged with aggravated manslaughter, with prosecutors arguing that by continuing to drive despite being in an advanced state of fatigue, he accepted the possibility of killing other road users.
The impact came after a long string of harassments reported by other drivers who thought they were dealing with a drunken or drugged young driver.
Cited as witnesses in the trial, they said that the driver of the BMW was driving at excessive speed, overtaking columns of cars on a continuous double line, avoiding the impact with trucks or other cars at the last moment, forcing the other drivers to make sudden maneuvers to avoid him.
“I thought he was a young man who was either drunk or drugged, as he was making figures in traffic since he was on the highway,” said one of the witnesses cited at the trial.
“The defendant traveled at an excessive speed (128 km/h before the accident) on a road with a speed limit, he made several maneuvers to overtake vehicles in the column in which he was traveling on a section of the road where overtaking was prohibited , clearly endangering the other traffic participants, given that he was in an advanced state of fatigue, assumed and accepted the possibility of a road event with fatal consequences both for him and for other traffic participants .
The defendant himself admitted that he was in a state of severe fatigue, as he drove from 4.12.2022, 4:00 a.m. until the time when the traffic accident occurred, at 8:21 p.m., without breaks (about 17 hours)” , it is stated in the indictment of the prosecutors.
The court of first instance accepted the legal interpretation of the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Sibiu Court and sentenced the driver to 20 years in prison, and an insurance company was obliged to pay moral damages in the amount of 800,000 euros.
Ion Sporici did not admit his guilt. He claimed that he was “blinded” by the headlights of a car, which is why he ended up on the wrong side.
Sentence reduced to 10 years in prison
However, the Alba Iulia Court of Appeal gave a different interpretation to the facts of the Romanian driver. The higher court decided to change the legal classification, from qualified murder to manslaughter. Inevitably, the final sentence was significantly reduced to 10 years in prison.
Also, the amount of moral damages to be paid to the nine civil parties, relatives of the victims, was reduced to a total of 430,000 euros. In the case of Ion Sporici, the judges of the Court of Appeal held “premeditated guilt”, a legal term rarely used by magistrates.
“Guilt with foresight or foreseeability is a form of guilt characterized by the fact that the perpetrator foresees the result of his deed, but does not accept it, considering without grounds that it will not occur”, shows the interpretation of Criminal Law.
It is a term close to intention, but it is never considered to be an intention. In the case of Ion Sporici’s “premeditated crime”, the magistrates also used the fact that he was driving a BMW car, with a powerful engine.
“When analyzing the elements of subjective typicality, one must start from the moment of the appearance of the state of danger, i.e. from the moment when the defendant, driving at a speed higher than the maximum allowed limit on the road sector where the traffic accident occurred, performed a maneuver of overtaking by violating the continuous double line longitudinal marking, with the consequence of the traffic accident in which the four victims died.
At this moment, the defendant foresaw the possibility of a road accident, but the Court considers that the possibility of avoiding the foreseen result was based on certain objective circumstances that lead to the retention of fault with foresight”, the decision states.
The BMW engine and the judges’ conclusion
To reach this conclusion, “the court took into account that the defendant was driving a car produced by a brand whose engines are of high power, a well-known aspect”.
Magistrates also argue that the speed of travel entitled the driver to believe that he would safely carry out the overtaking maneuver and continue traveling without problems, after returning to his lane of traffic.
“All these aspects were evaluated erroneously by the defendant due to his advanced state of fatigue, the fact that he did not know the road and the visibility at the time of the incident.
The continuous double line longitudinal marking prohibited him from performing the overtaking maneuver and precisely because of the excessive speed and the particularity of the road, the defendant was no longer able to re-enter his traffic lane, thus causing the collision with the car in which the 4 victims were and which circulates regularly”, the judges from the Court of Appeal also argued.
The decision remained final, according to the sentence of March 19, 2024.
Follow us on Google News
Tags: Romanian BMW Killed Spaniards Sibiu Escaped Murder Judges Called
-
