Originally Posted by
220mph
If you lose control of your car and kill someone you are charged with criminal vehicular homicide or a myriad variations of that.
Just because that is how it is done doesn't mean that it's how it should be done. It all depends on what your ultimate interest is in terms of outcome. If all you care about is getting your pound of flesh, then this approach may heal your pain - although I highly doubt it. This approach also fails to do anything substantive in preventing it from happening again, nor does it consider intent.
If on the other hand you are interested in safety and prevention of similar occurrences, then you need to take the approach that is (generally) taken to aviation accidents. This approach takes systemic issues including policies, procedures, training and even cultures into consideration to try to understand why it made sense to them at the time. If such an approach was taken to road accidents, I suspect that we'd see many times more training and changes to vehicle and road design that would ultimately result in a safer system, but that stuff costs money and it seems no one is willing to pay for it. So instead we turn a blind eye to possible improvements until a particular section of road experiences multiple deaths. Then we decide to spend some money, but the people who were treated as criminals for past accidents at those locations never get to go back in front of a judge for reconsideration.