Homicide Conviction Overturned in Accident Traced to GM Ignition Switch

Ten years, one week, and two days ago, Gene Mikale Erickson died in a car accident, a passenger in his girlfriend’s Saturn Ion. The driver, Candice Anderson, survived and was charged with criminally negligent homicide based on what appears to have been sloppy police work. Today, seven years after her conviction, a Texas judge has cleared Anderson’s record, based on findings that blame the fatal crash on the same faulty General Motors ignition switch that’s currently linked to 35 deaths.At the time, Anderson’s accident was blamed on intoxication. The police trooper who investigated the crash decided—before lab results came back—that Anderson was intoxicated. As The New York Times reports, “his police report referred to the seemingly inexplicable circumstances of the accident, her history of recreational drug use, ‘witness testimony and Anderson’s behavior at the scene,’ which was disoriented and emotional.” The police report emphasized the “seemingly inexplicable lack of skid marks or evasive action” in the broad-daylight crash, where Anderson’s car left a rural road and smashed head-on into a tree.Anderson pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in October 2007, based on a trace amount of Xanax in her system. She served five years probation and paid more than $10,000 in fines. And her… Read full this story

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