As a Seattle car accident lawyer I have seen far too many victims that were injured in an accident with a distracted driver. Although cell phone usage is illegal in many states throughout the United States a lot of drivers still choose to ignore the laws causing serious auto accidents. In an example of flagrantly negligent driving, a UK man was recently caught trying to talk and text on two different phones while driving.
The police had spotted him talking on a cell phone while driving. The police then proceeded to pull him over and were extremely surprised to find that he had not only been talking on one cell phone, he had also been texting on another phone with his other hand. After he was pulled over, the driver went as far as to make the police officers wait for him to finish his conversations before addressing them. To make matters worse, the driver did not even have insurance. The UK courts gave the driver a $216 fine and suspended his license for a full year.
The most common cause for traffic accidents is not vehicle failure or adverse road conditions—it’s negligent drivers. Because of this fact, it is a crime to talk on a cell phone or text (or both) while driving in the state of Washington. However, that does not keep some people from doing it anyway. The National Highway Safety Administration has released statistics that show that in 2009, 995 people were killed in a car accident in which cell phone use was a factor in the United States. That same year, 24,000 people were injured in cell phone-related car accidents.