Soft-on-crime judges are at the point where they decide that the biggest punishment for killing a family of four is the weight of one’s conscience, and not any real punishment that secures justice for the victims and creates deterrence for future criminals.
The case in question took place in San Francisco. In March of 2024, 80-year-old Mary Fong Lau crashed her car into a couple and their two young children, killing all four of them. Lau was driving on the wrong side of the road at 70 miles per hour, crashing into and killing the family as they waited at a bus stop.
PRO-CRIMINAL JUDGES MUST BE REMOVED FROM THEIR POSTS
The judge has decided, based on her age and “remorse,” that Lau will likely not serve any time behind bars. She is likely looking at, at most, three years of probation. She won’t even be losing her driver’s license. The real punishment, according to Judge Bruce Chan, is that she is “going to spend the rest of her days living with the knowledge of the harm she has caused to others.” (She has not been sentenced yet, for whatever that may be worth).
The reality is that this is not a punishment at all, because Lau has not shown any real remorse. She pled “no contest,” not “guilty,” meaning she refuses to even take legal accountability for her actions and acknowledge what she did. Moreover, the family of the victims is accusing Lau of moving around assets to avoid paying out money in a wrongful death lawsuit. Lau’s attorney claims that the reorganization of assets, just months after the fatal crash, is just a coincidence.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL OPTION: IMPEACHMENT OF ACTIVIST JUDGES
What Judge Chan has decided here is that being old is a shield against the law. Lau’s “punishment” will be a brief probation where she isn’t allowed to drive but will be allowed to get behind the wheel again at the age of 83. Her punishment of “spending the rest of her days living with the knowledge” that she killed four people means nothing because she wouldn’t even legally admit responsibility for her crimes. Judge Chan sees her as a possible victim of the criminal justice system because she is old. In doing so, he ignored the actual victims, two parents and their toddler and infant children, who won’t get to “spend the rest of their days living” at all.
There is no justice here. No one is going to be made safer by letting this woman get behind the wheel in three years’ time. We should not be making decisions about jail time based on age, as if a 40-year-old man who ran down a family of four while driving on the wrong side of the road at a dangerous speed has somehow committed more of a crime than an 80-year-old woman who did the same. This is the criminal “justice” system deciding that a dead family of four does not matter all that much, because the real victim is the person who killed them and might have a difficult time in jail.