Florida isn't the safest....

I'm thinking that pain medication may have had something to do with it.

a colleague of mine, the nicest person you could imagine and a regular cyclist commuter around London and cycle tourer elsewhere moved to Florida with his US wife. Another friend and I went to visit him just over a year later.  He met us in an effing huge 4x4. When he lent over to take his dark glasses from the glove compartment (cubby as they say in US) there was a huge hand cannon inside. He'd gone completely native. Didn't cycle anymore either ;(  He said he had tried initially but there were too many old people driving and the roads were too dangerous 

Incidentally, this is wealthy retirement country as we know, and they seem to have Golf Cart tracks by the Boulevards.

Surprised that the Judge speculated about whether she was sober in his comments. Garrulous. Seems there had been a lot of legal delaying tactics, and she had been sly enough to drive away then get her car repaired quickly in the next county.

This points up a few things I'd say - one is that the US legal system is a lottery (but we know that). I'd far rather that it was consistent rather than that there was a correct answer at pretty much random once out of every 1000 cases, or whatever it is.

How will damages be done in the USA - will the victims have to sue?

They have a similar but more serious problem to us with elderly driving licences not being controlled, out of creating a society where not-car is very difficult. Here one of our main missing links is a better small-grain public transport system, but at least there are (not good enough) local services coniditions on new developments already in the system.

This old woman lived in an ocean of bungalows perhaps 2-2.5 miles drive from the nearest shop - even in a totally developed area. That's going to guarantee the underlying driving license problem will be impossible to fix for political reasons. This is the area:

I'm pretty sure that there have been a LOT of 'cyclists injured in Florida' stories - I had always been of the opinion, reading the news, that Florida would not be a safe place at all to ride a bike...

I urge you not to go and read the comments unless your blood pressure is well controlled.

Blimey, it seems that cyclists are the problem and not some women who should not have been driving given her medical condition at the time.

Madness. 

The main surprise, had it been in this country at least, is the punishment for leaving the scene.

From the article : "While delivering the sentence, Judge Briggs emphasized that Hamilton’s biggest legal problem wasn’t the crash itself, but the fact she left the scene.

“The impact of what you did is felt by (the victims), but what happened afterward is what impacts you,” he said. “If you had stayed, things would have been much different for you. No sentence I could impose would restore Mr. Hunter and Ms. Laube to their prior condition. This is punitive.”

In addition to two concurrent 60-month sentences for leaving the scene of a crash involving a serious injury to a vulnerable road user, Hamilton faces an additional five years of probation. She also must pay restitution, the amount of which will be determined at a future hearing, and her driving privilege is revoked. Civil litigation is also under way."

And yet our laws allow only minimal sanctions for the same action.

Let's have an educated guess. It's the retirement state of the USA. Old duffers blindly, slow reacting tootling at 40mph everywhere