3 local drivers arrested in 1 week under “Ricky Otts Law”

April 23--Last Monday, Arthur Carpenter hit and killed a 6-year-old boy as the child attempted to cross Raines Road.

Carpenter, 35, had no insurance and no driver's license.

The day before, Anjelca Henderson, 27, and Kristi Shook, 34, were also arrested when both drivers were involved in a crash in Frayser where four children were injured.

Both women had suspended/revoked licenses and no insurance.

All three drivers were arrested under the Ricky Otts law, which requires police to arrest drivers involved in serious accidents who don't have a valid driver's license and proof of insurance.

Carpenter, who killed 6-year-old Christopher Smith, may also face other charges in addition to the Ricky Otts law.

The 2012 law is named for Ricky Otts, a 59-year-old Middle Tennessee man, who was killed in 2010 when his motorcycle was hit by the driver of a SUV.

The SUV driver did not have a driver's license or proof of insurance at the time of the accident and received a misdemeanor citation for failing to drive without proper documentation.

The driver, Jose Vasquez, officials said may have been an undocumented resident who they believe fled the country after the accident.

"So the legislature created this law saying that the guy driving the SUV that hit Mr. Otts may have been in this country illegally," said Shelby County Assistant District Attorney Billy Bond, who handles DUI and vehicular homicide cases for District Attorney Amy Weirich's Office. "So police check to see if you are in this country illegally when you get physically arrested, but they don't check that out in the field."

Bond said they don't track the number of arrests under the Ricky Otts law that come through their office.

"I would be hard pressed to say how often, but I would say on the serious cases it comes up I would be surprised to say if it is something like 20 to 25 percent of the time," Bond said. "But that is a seat-of-my-pants guess. I don't think anybody actually keeps track of it."

Bond added that before 2012 it was left up to the officer's discretion whether to arrest someone without a license and insurance in these crashes.

"It applies to any driver, not just to the driver who appears to be 'at fault' in the crash," Bond said. "We've had cases where the victim of somebody else's bad act was driving without a valid license and without insurance, but they're the one laying up in the Med and police officers don't have any discretion they have to charge them with no driver's license and no insurance, and put them in the prison ward which means you as a taxpayer are footing the bill at that point, which I'm sure is not the outcome anybody contemplated when they passed that legislation."

Former state Rep. Joe Carr, R-Lascassas, who sponsored the bill for the Ricky Otts law, said he supported the measure to bring victims like Ricky Otts justice.

"What was going on was people were escaping justice because of a loophole in the existing law," said Carr said. "All we did was close a loophole saying that if you don't have a driver's license or insurance you will be detained in the event that somebody is killed or seriously injured."

The Otts crash also spurred creation of another law that gives the court discretion to set a higher bail for drivers without a license and insurance involved in serious collisions who are found to be in the country illegally. The bill was signed into law May, 15, 2012, by Gov. Bill Haslam.

"A clerk may set the amount of bail in excess of the listed amounts if the defendant is deemed a risk of flight," the law states.

Opponents of the law said it unnecessarily penalizes undocumented residents who may have jobs and a family and are unlikely to flee the state.

"In my opinion, it does and it is a continuation of policy that is intended to criminalize undocumented residents," said Andrew Free, an immigration and civil rights attorney in Nashville. "It is not a crime to be present in the United States without authorization. That is a civil violation to cross the border without inspection. But it is not a crime to be present in the United States without automatization. Rather than admit that reality, xenophobic state lawmakers here and elsewhere have chosen to criminalize unlawful presences through cutting off people's ability to access things like driver's licenses and then escalate those penalties as they continue to be incurred."

Carr disagreed saying, "It does not unfairly target anybody that is not already breaking the law."

For Ricky Otts Jr. the law brought his family some closure.

Otts Jr. was 38 when his father was killed in the crash on Springfield Highway on the outskirts of Nashville on a fall afternoon six years ago.

"Me and my siblings had to sit there and watch my father laying there dead on the ground for so long," Otts Jr. recalled about arriving at the accident scene. "It kinda scarred us mentally because that is something awful."

He added that they were upset and confused why the driver that caused the crash that killed his father was not arrested.

"They (police) told us that if they arrested him and wanted to go back and charge him with something bigger they wouldn't be able to do that. So that was their case for letting him walk," Otts Jr. said. "We found out later that wasn't the case at all. It was just at that point and time it was up to the officer's discretion whether or not to arrest under those circumstances."

Otts Jr., 43, said his family lobbied legislators to change the law, and he was elated when Haslam signed the bill into law four years ago.

"I went to the ceremony in downtown Nashville, and I wore my dad's boots that he had on the day he got killed," said Otts Jr. "This law offered us a little bit of closure. We want people not to have to go through what my family went through with knowing someone wrongfully took a life or hurt somebody bad and gets to just walk away from it."

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