Plan9 wrote: › Trust me it's not only in the States.
Summer of 2002. I'm in Greece. Saturday night 5am. I've just finished work & spent an hour or so with my then girlfriend at a bar nearby. We decide to go to her place. I have to stop by my place (which was in the opposite direction) to pick up a soundcard I had fixed for a barowner in her village a couple of days before as to not do the trip twice....
So I take my scooter and tell her to wait for me with the car in town since it will only take 10 minutes to go & come back & I'm not in the mood to drive a scooter for 30 minutes to get to her place.
I go, pick up the soundcard and I'm on my way back to town... Just before you get to the centre of town there is a left turn into a one-way street. Since there is noone coming in the opposite direction and the one-way street has 2 lanes, I dont really slow down to take the turn, I just cut it.
Just as I'm rounding the corner I see a single headlight right in front of me... Next thing I remember I'm in a hospitalbed in Crete with every bone in my left hand crushed, a 'broken' (lovely story for another time) leg and I forget what the english word for a specific kind of headtrauma is...
![Confused](images/smiles/confused.gif)
... Apparently the guy on the motorcycle I crashed with, the american girl sitting on the back of his bike & myself had been flown in by rescue-helicopter since the medical facilities on the island we crashed on were not able to cope with our damages.
So ... we all recover and I never spoke to the guy on the other bike... 2 years later I get a summation for a criminal court over this.. He & the girl had found out there were no witnesses to the accident and they both pressed charges stating to the poilce that I was the one coming from the 1-way street.
2 weeks later, I get another summation for a civil case where they want € 106.758,42 (I can never forget that number) for damages...
Some other facts that were presented in the court: Bloodtests for alcohol... I was measured at 0,23 (Limit is 0,25) immediately after they got us to the medical center. The other guy: 0,56 (0,60 will land you in jail for 2 months), and that was measured 2 hours after because of the severity of his injuries... And the both of them were not wearing helmets, I was....
Anyway... I lost the 1st criminal case and appealed.. Just barely got out of spending a year in a greek prison (Midnight Express anyone? It's only the neighboring country). Same thing happened in the civil suit... Since the criminal court had placed guilt the verdict was based on that... Fortunately the red tape in Greece is so long it will take at least another 10 years before this is over
-P9 (Fugitive)