One morning about 11 AM my wife and I planned to make a trip in two cars, but I had a quick errand to run. When I returned to my rural / suburban street, I saw my
wife waiting in her car, stopped ahead of me on my right. Neither of us knew who was leading our two-car trip, so I pulled up to her car grille-to-grille, planning to get out to talk. As I approached, she began driving in reverse down our empty street and I followed, not sure what was going on.

She then made a cell phone call. Unknown to me, it was 911. It was also unknown to me why the police arrived with siren on, and took me away in handcuffs. I honestly had no idea.

It turned out that she had reported that I had approached at a speed able to cause bodily injury or death (which I didn't), and that she was able to judge my intentions of 'not planning to stop', and she accelerated in reverse to avoid contact between the cars. No contact was made (doing such a thing was not in my strangest dreams).

It's not possible for one to predict another's intentions with complete accuracy. However, I feel the events reveal my intentions; I'm just unsure if it may be proven:

Assume the driver of a moving car (A) intends to collide with a stationary car (B). Due to stopping times, it is impossible for driver (B) to determine in advance if driver (A) is intending to collide, regardless of speed. Driver (A)'s intentions solely determine whether a collision will occur, and this is key. It is not possible for driver (B) to avoid collision, regardless of speed, by accelerating (especially  in reverse), due to inertia of car (A), acceleration rate of car (B) and reaction times. Even if car (B) is moving, driver (A) may always accelerate to cause a collision, if intended.

MPH    F/S    Stopping Time (S)

10    14.67    .73
15    22.01    1.1
20    29.34    1.47
25    36.68    1.83
30    44.01    2.2
35    51.35    2.57

Any help putting my wife's unfounded accusation to rest would be more than greatly appreciated. I can see by the entries in this forum that there are many here much more adept than me at making the facts speak for themselves.

In reality, you should have something looking like

From 10 mph, the time to stop is .44 seconds

15 would be .68 seconds
20 is .91 seconds
25 is 1.13 seconds
30 is 1.36 seconds
35 is 1.59 seconds.

As you can see, at very low speeds, your calculations don't provide much error, but after about 35 mph, you have a full second error.

It's perhaps not possible to readily know some random person's intentions, but you aren't a random person with respect to your wife.  You've met a few times.  She knows you, and presumably has some understanding of what goes through your mind.  And she felt threatened, which leads me to wonder why she'd automatically take what you did as a threat to her life.

The action of driver A doesn't determine that a collision will happen; indeed many thousands of collisions are avoided per day for the response to the actions of some random driver by other drivers.

The inertia of a car isn't relevant as inertia only asserts that objects in motion tend to remain that way and objects at rest tend to remain that way.  It's a given that if your car is approaching an object, then your car is in motion and will tend to stay in motion, on that trajectory unless acted on by some outside, unbalanced force.

Yes, driver A may accelerate to further increase the odds that a collision will occur, but there is no reason to constrain driver B from being able to accelerate to mitigate the actions of driver A.  By your own admission, driver B in this case did precisely that, and I will thus decline the invitation to assume that she wouldn't do what she evidently already had done.

The speed necessary to cause bodily injury or death has a wide range of values.  The range of these values is constrained by the type of injury versus death situation we want to deal with, of course.  You haven't indicated any constraint, so I must assume any injury up to and including a fatal one.  Thus, the speed to cause bodily injury is quite, quite low.

Further, you seem to be arguing that while driving in reverse in a flight for her life, she had a.) the skillset necessary to control a reverse driven vehicle in an aggressive fashion, b.) the skillset necessary for a.) above, but with the addition of the ability to make a phone call while doing so, and c.) the presumption that her husband was attempting to kill her.  This is odd.

Furthermore, you're arguing that the police just came up all willy nilly and arrested you under the following conditions a.) no investigation of the events, b.) no notification to you that you are being arrested for violation of some named law and c.) you and your wife hadn't spoken by the time they showed up.

-- Edited by ashman165 on Wednesday 4th of November 2009 07:54:05 AM