Four years ago, a Florida driver ran a red light at 85 miles per hour, killed an 11-year-old child who was crossing the street, and got off with a traffic infraction: Failure to stop at a red light. Prosecutors said they simply didn’t have the evidence to charge her with reckless driving, which is a prerequisite in the state for a charge of vehicular homicide. Now Florida has made a new law, defining “dangerous excessive speeding” in hopes of curbing such deaths in the future, but the law has a problem — it may not have been enough to charge Anthony Reznik’s killer.
The new law, HB 351, defines “dangerous excessive speeding” as driving “in excess of the speed limit by 50 mph or more,” or “at 100 mph or more in a manner that threatens the safety of other persons or property or interferes with the operation of any vehicle.” The punishment it lays out for dangerous excessive speeding is up to 30 days in jail and/or a $500 fine for a first offense, and going up for further offenses.
The problem
The problem with HB 351, often called the Anthony Reznik Act in its early days, is that it may not have actually done much to help Reznik himself. The law punishes drivers who hit 50 or more miles per hour over the posted speed limit, but the street on which he was killed has a posted limit of 35 mph, according to signs viewed on Google Street View. Reports from 2021 say Samentha Toussaint, the driver who killed Reznik, was traveling around 85 miles per hour when she blew the red light. The “around” here is key — at 84 miles per hour, she would not legally be dangerously excessively speeding, and would get off with the exact same ticket for running a red. Even if she had been traveling exactly 85, or 86, or higher, how would a prosecutor sufficiently prove that? Without a radar gun onsite, could anyone prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she wasn’t doing a mere 84?
The issue with HB 351 is that it dodges the core issue of vehicular homicide: The act of killing someone with a car is not, in itself, sufficiently punished. There are prerequisites, other requirements to warrant a charge, and those are how Toussaint got off scot-free for killing a child. If Florida’s legislature really wanted to protect kids like Reznik, it could simply have removed those prerequisites and instituted punishments for all car-induced killing, but it chose not to. In Florida, it’s apparently still fine to kill with your car so long as you don’t exceed 49 mph over the speed limit while doing so. HB 351 is a step in the right direction, but it’s not walking the right path.
