Tuesday, December 23, 2025

How A Speeding Ticket Can Be Worse Than Running Someone Over

By Lynn La, CALMATTERS

Participants gather during a candlelight vigil for the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Nov. 16, 2025. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters

You can kill someone with your car in California and not even have a point on your license.

A criminal justice reform bill passed in 2020 allows judges to effectively erase a misdemeanor case from existence, shielding people accused of “low-level” crimes from the stigma of having a conviction on their record, something that can limit work and housing opportunities.

But CalMatters investigative reporters Robert Lewis and Lauren Hepler found that the new misdemeanor diversion program has also had an unintended consequence: It allows some people charged with vehicular manslaughter to keep the case off of their driving record.

That means you could face more penalties for a speeding ticket than for running someone over.

• Allison Lyman, whose 23-year-old son, Connor Lopez, was killed when a woman hit his motorcycle in April: “I’m 43 and I will have to live the rest of my life without my son. But there’ll be no record of it for her?”

It’s part of a larger anger and frustration Lyman has at how the system is treating her son’s death. She said she was talking to police and one of the officers kept referring to the case as “low-level.”

• Lyman: “She took my son’s life, but that’s how they’re seen — low-level.”

The 2020 law went further than typical diversion programs, which normally let a judge pause a case and order a defendant to meet certain requirements. The law allows judges to order diversion for almost all misdemeanors, with few, if any, requirements that defendants have to fulfill, and over the objection of a prosecutor.

Read the full story, which is Part 5 of our ongoing License to Kill investigation.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.