U.S. Department of Transportation
Killer driver’s short jail sentence
Anchorage driver Bessie Binkowski avoided homicide charges for killing 63-year-old Arthur Stepetin, Jr. in August, but she will be spending four months in jail thanks to a courageous Anchorage judge.
Binkowski was supposed to get out of jail free, but the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) reported that Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna refused to accept a plea deal that state prosecutors negotiated with Binkowski’s attorney.
That deal, according to the ADN, “called for a two-year sentence with two years ‘suspended’ — (with) no jail time unless Binkowski violated the conditions of her release.” This sentence is, in and of itself, harsher treatment than the standard for killer drivers in the state’s largest city and, to be fair, much of the United States.
Binkowski, according to a friend, described slamming into Stepetin after swerving her Jeep Cherokee to get around another car “trying to avoid a drunk.” Had Binkowski been driving anywhere near the speed limit at the time and had she slowed instead of swerved, Stepetin might still be alive today.
Merely reducing her speed from 40 mph to 20 mph before impact would have more than quadrupled Stepetin’s chances of surviving, according to U.S. Department of Transportation estimates. But Binkowski elected to swerve instead.
This is an all too common behavior on the part of American drivers who think of braking for pedestrians as an unnecessary inconvenience.
Camera footage from the traffic lights at the intersection of Northern Lights Boulevard and the Boniface Parkway in East Anchorage showed that Stepetin was trying to cross the road in broad daylight, but suddenly doubled back, apparently to avoid traffic, on the day he died.
Binkowski, according to the testimony of her friend, saw someone in the road ahead but whether or not this was Stepetin is unclear. Whatever the case, Binkowski wasn’t interested in slowing, so she swerved.
The result was that Stepetin was struck and fatally injured. Binkowski didn’t bother to look back. She just kept on going.
Binkowski lawyer Kael MacMaster blamed his client’s decision to run after hitting Binkowski on her being traumatized by the deadly impact. That’s possible. It’s equally possible she was simply thinking about herself.
Binkowski had a good reason to flee. She was already out on bail for a drunk driving charge that stemmed from an earlier incident in which she almost ran into an Anchorage Police Department (APD) patrol car.
Drinking again?
Whether she’d been drinking again before she killed Stepetin is unknown because APD didn’t identify her as the driver of the Jeep that killed him until well after the collision. But even if she had been drinking, she was clearly coherent enough to try to avoid responsibility for what had happened.
In the minutes after the deadly crash, she dumped her car near her home and summoned an Uber to take her to a pre-arranged, early evening date with a friend at a Spenard restaurant. Thanks to the traffic camera on a Northern Lights stoplight, it didn’t take APD all that long to identify her Jeep and find her, but two weeks passed before state prosecutors decided to act.
They ruled out charging Binkowski with assault with a dangerous weapon or homicide, and decided to charge her only with leaving the scene of an accident without rendering aid, a felony, and violating the conditions of her release on the drunk driving charge from back in February, a misdemeanor.
The Daily News duly noted that “nearly two-thirds of Anchorage’s pedestrian fatalities last year involved people accused of dangerous driving in some form: hit-and-run, driving under the influence, or distracted driving” and that most of these cases end in plea agreements.
It then went on to excuse the leniency shown killer drivers with the claim that “most criminal cases in the nation and in Alaska’s backlogged court system result in plea deals rather than going to trial.”
That statement is both true and horribly out of context, given that most plea deals are negotiated to make it easier to imprison people – not set them free.
There is, however, one huge exception to this cheap, backroom shakedown rule, and that exception involves vehicular homicides. Road violence in this country is seldom prosecuted seriously, and the failure to prosecute as if the lives of vulnerable road users killed by reckless or careless drivers matter little is usually explained in the way Assistant District Attorney Alexander Hyatt tried to dismiss the lack of serious charges in this case.
He cited “strong evidentiary concerns.”
Translation? The District Attorney’s office decided that if it was to take a manslaughter or vehicular homicide charge to trial before an Anchorage jury sure to be comprised mainly of drivers, prosecutors might lose the case, and prosecutors just hate to see their track records sullied by losses.
Here before?
The Stepetin case is in some ways eerily similar to the collision that left 65-year-old Eldridge Griffith, a well-liked Anchorage cyclist, dead on Northern Lights in 2014. Griffith made an error in judgment in trying to cross the street.
He would appear to have miscalculated the speed of the traffic, because most motorists speed at will in Anchorage. This might have been the case with Stepetin as well.
Griffith’s killer, Ti Justice, was at the time of Griffith’s death driving an estimated 46 mph in a 35 mph zone and trying to pass another car, although it must be noted he did not swerve beforehand to do so.
Thus, Assistant District Attorney Daniel Shorey concluded that the role of Justice’s speeding in the deadly crash was excusable.
Or in other words, if you break the law and kill someone, it’s OK if there are a lot of other drivers breaking the law and managing not to kill anyone. This is the twisted logic that surrounds road violence in the U.S.
For those drivers who are unaware of the law, motor vehicles are legally required to yield to pedestrians in both marked and unmarked crosswalks, the latter in existence anywhere two roads intersect.
Driver Russel E. Webb did not yield at the clearly marked crosswalk that was supposed to protect people like Higgins. Webb, instead, ran into Higgins, and Higgins died.
For causing his death, Webb was required to pay a $100 fine. APD defended this insignificant penalty for taking a human life by telling the Alaska Landmine that 25 other Anchorage drivers had been cited for failure to yield to pedestrians in 2023 and had paid the same fine.
“These cases all had similar fact patterns,” APD said. “The only difference is that nobody died. There is no law in Alaska that says if you commit a traffic infraction and cause injury or death then that is per se criminal negligence. The driver in this case was treated the same as all these other cases.”
The good news might be that at least APD decided against charging Higgins’ family for the inconvenience caused Webb by his having to stop after the accident to avoid any significant penalty for killing the elderly dentist. Anchorage drivers might want to keep this in mind.
If you kill someone with your car or truck, just stop. If you do, the odds of your getting more than a ticket – unless you’re drunk – are extremely good. Justice, the man who killed Griffith, had THC in his blood, indicating he’d been using marijuana, and was on prescription medications that prosecutors thought might have impaired his driving, and yet he got off scot-free.
Shorey blamed this in part on the failure of APD to conduct standard field sobriety tests or drug recognition testing because of Justice’s “pre-existing medical conditions and limited mobility.”
The question of whether someone unable to get out of his vehicle to be tested for impaired driving should be driving at all was never raised, and the marijuana and prescription drugs were ignored. So feel free to overlook any of those labels on your medications telling you to avoid operating machinery after taking the drug or drugs.
More to this
Now, as easy as it is to blame Binkowski for what became another one of the all-too-common deaths of vulnerable road users in Anchorage, the blame here is not hers alone. The Municipality of Anchorage and the state of Alaska share some responsibility for their role in creating and supporting an environment that encourages people to drive the way Binkowski drove.
By setting high speed-limits on roads through heavily populated parts of the city, they’ve created and reinforced the idea that the number one road priority in Alaska’s largest city is speed. Drivers are under the impression that they are entitled to be able to get to wherever they want to go quickly and without interruption.
Thus instead of slowing, possibly even stopping, for someone on or looking to cross the roadway, Anchorage drivers do what Binkowski did and swerve around them or try to swerve around them.
And when they fail to miss the person in the road, the consequences are deadly because speed kills. The physics, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), dictate that a vulnerable road user hit by a motor vehicle traveling at 23 mph has a 90 percent chance of survival. This falls to a 75 percent chance at 32 mph.
At speeds above 35 mph, the risks of death rise quickly. A pedestrian has a 50-50 chance of death at 42 mph, a 75 percent chance of death at 50 mph and a 90 percent chance of death at 58 mph.
Assistant DA Shorey might have thought Justice’s driving 46 mph in a 35 mph zone on Northern Lights was a small thing, but Justice’s speed more than doubled the risk that Griffith was going to die when struck, and it didn’t help that Griffith was elderly.
“The average risk of severe injury or death for a 70‐year old pedestrian struck by a car traveling at 25 mph is similar to the risk for a 30‐year‐old pedestrian struck at 35 mph,” according to AAA.
When age is taken into account, it would appear that Justice’s speeding might have tripled the chances that Griffith would die. The same applies in the Stepetin case. If Binkowski had slowed instead of swerving and hitting him at speed, he might be alive today.
Inherently dangerous roads
But the problems in Anchorage aren’t just of speed; they are also of design. To start with, the city is full of one-way streets and divided four-lane roads, which are basically paired one-way streets.
One-way streets have been found to make getting around significantly more dangerous for pedestrians in general and children in particular. A peer-reviewed study published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health reported finding that “the injury rate was two and a half times higher on one-way streets than on two-way streets.”
Wide streets, of which Anchorage has many, have also been found to be inherently more dangerous than narrower streets. After studying this issue, researchers from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2023 concluded that one reason so many people – both vulnerable road users and motor-vehicle passengers – die on urban U.S. streets is because of “the oversized travel lanes we see on many American roads.”
The researchers examined more than 1,100 streets in seven major U.S. cities and found that “when you compare 12-foot lanes with 9- and 10-foot lanes, you see that the wider lanes are actually more dangerous. The number of crashes on a street with 12-foot lanes is significantly higher than on streets with narrower lanes. That is the opposite of the general belief and what has been the foundation for street design and lane-width guidelines.”
They also found that when wider lanes are combined with higher speed limits, they “become significantly more dangerous, with a higher number of crashes. The reason is that wider lanes don’t give drivers more room for mistakes, they just make drivers drive faster.”
Shima Hamidi, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at John Hopkins and the lead author on the report, could have been describing Anchorage when he said that “in many cities, we have lanes that are way wider than what they should be.
“Guidelines from The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials recommend a minimum lane width of 12 feet for high-speed and high-volume roadways and a minimum of 10 to 11 feet for urban areas with heavy pedestrian activity. In Europe, the minimum standard is seven to eight feet. That’s how much room there is to narrow.”
The reason that narrow roads are safer is simple; they encourage drivers to pay more attention to their driving. Anchorage is full of wide roads where drivers feel comfortable doing otherwise which is why, if you are observant while moving around the city, you will see a significant number of people texting while driving or focused solely on in-vehicle screens for whatever reason.
Some of them pay so much attention to those screens and so little attention to the road that one has to wonder if they’re watching movies or FaceTiming with someone by using any of the various methods now available for “mirroring” a phone to an in-vehicle screen.
Distracted drivers are now a dangerous problem everywhere in the country, and Anchorage seems to have more than its fair share of them. But there are other road design problems in the state’s largest city, further compounding the situation.
The Stepetin trap
The collision that killed Stepetin took place near a bus stop badly located at midblock on Northern Lights across the street from a popular liquor store.
To cross the street most safely – though there is no real guarantee of safety in Anchorage, where motorists run red lights with an alarming frequency – a pedestrian has to hoof it some distance east to the traffic-light-controlled Boniface-Northern Lights intersection, sometimes wait a considerable time for the walk sign to light up, cross the street, and then hike back to the liquor store.
Many wanting to cross the street don’t do this because a raised median between the four-lanes of Northern Lights immediately across from the bus stop offers a safe waiting zone between the zooming lanes of traffic.
It appears easy and safe to dash across two lanes of traffic to that safe zone, and then wait there for an opening to make the dash across the other two lanes. Many Anchorage drivers, of course, dismiss as reprobate “jaywalkers” the people who think like this and die as a result of collisions.
Drivers who will cruise around parking lots for 10 or 15 minutes or more trying to find a space within 50 or 100 feet of the store they plan to visit criticizing pedestrians for wanting to save a few steps is more than a little ironic, but it is what it is.
In the all-about-me, machine-influenced world of today, driver convenience has become all-important, and the convenience of others the opposite. Many drivers, in fact, get upset that the mere possibility of encountering a jaywalker requires that they pay attention when driving through the peopled parts of Alaska’s largest city and might, God forbid, force them to slow down on occasion or maybe even have to stop.
So they drive like Binkowski was driving, and vulnerable road users like Stepetin become the collateral damage for convenience. Stepetin, obviously, made a bad choice in trying to cross busy Boniface instead of hiking to the stoplight.
That bad decision cost him his life.
Binkowski made an equally bad decision in deciding to swerve around another driver rather than braking because there was someone in the road. But she got lucky. She’s only going to be required to spend four months in jail for killing someone.
And she can take some comfort in knowing that a whole lot of Anchorage drivers will believe this far too stiff a sentence because, in their view, what happened on Boniface Drive was solely the fault of Stepetin for being in the road.
The man who grew up in rural Alaska should have known that in urban Anchorage, “roads are for cars” even if legally that is not the case. Legally, roads are for everyone and are governed by a complex set of rules designed to keep everyone safe.
The only problem with those rules, which include such things as speed limits and red lights, is that the authorities rarely enforce them, which pretty much leaves drivers believing they can do whatever they want. And as a result, people die.
Categories: Commentary
