Editorial for March 2, 2006

Justice denied

Just ask all those bubbleheaded bleeding-heart liberals out there if the death penalty deters other murders, and they’ll give an emphatic "no." These are the same types of misguided souls who most likely think the "sentence" handed down to Richard Miller on Monday is fair and just.

It’s not.

Mr. Miller is the guy who took his daughter Megan out for a driving lesson in Mayfair last April — a lesson that cost a young mother her life when Megan crashed her car onto the front lawn of a nearby home, killing 18-year-old Sarah McGinley.

The Common Pleas Court judge that sentenced Mr. Miller to probation, not prison, for his misdeed is Benjamin Lerner. He’s the former head of the Public Defenders Association of Philadelphia, so it’s no surprise that he sided with the criminal on this case.

Richard Miller says he’s not a bad person. Wrong, Mr. Miller. You are a bad man. A good person does not allow his 15-year-old child — yes, child — to break the law by getting behind the wheel of a motor vehicle and then driving that vehicle. That’s a crime of gross negligence and dereliction of parental duty that should have landed you in prison for at least several months. Laws, after all, are supposed to be obeyed, not ignored.

The victim, whose fiancé, William Wagner, was present at the sentencing, was the innocent victim of stupidity.

We’ll never know if the future Sarah Wagner would have continued to be a terrific mom as her daughter Victoria — whose life Sarah saved by tossing her out of harm’s way before Sarah was cut down — grows up. We’ll never know if Sarah someday would have won a Mother of the Year award, or been a great homemaker, or gone to college to earn a doctorate in chemistry.

These are questions that Richard Miller would be pondering in prison right now, had justice prevailed. ••

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