Taking your eyes off the road for just a few seconds can be like driving blindfolded, warns Dirk J. Derrick, Esq. Speaking with Pearl Carey, on the firm's professional staff, Dirk explains why a distracted driver can be even more dangerous than one who is slightly intoxicated. He also reveals how attorneys prove distraction when no one admits it, why South Carolina law allows juries to award punitive damages for reckless behavior, and what you can do at the scene of a wreck to help an attorney later. He closes by urging drivers to put their phones away and limit other distractions for themselves and their children while in the car.
While past results do not guarantee future results, you are guaranteed our best efforts. Dirk J. Derrick, 901 Main St., Conway, SC, 29526.
Dirk Derrick (00:00):
Welcome to The Legal Truth, the podcast created to provide you general legal information about South Carolina law, lawyers, and the legal process, and hopefully prevent you from being surprised by the unexpected. We will answer many of the questions I've been asked during the past 38 years about South Carolina personal injury claims and workers' compensation claims. We will also discuss existing laws and propose changes in the law and how they affect you. My name is Dirk Derrick. I'm the founder of Derrick Law Firm Injury Lawyers, and I'm your host.
Voiceover (00:32):
Please see required ethics disclaimers in show notes.
Pearl Carey (00:40):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Legal Truth Podcast. Today, we're here to discuss the truth about distracted driving and the dangerous decisions that change lives. I'm Pearl Carey. I'm here with my co-host, Dirk Derrick. Thanks so much for being here, Dirk.
Dirk Derrick (00:53):
Thank you, Pearl. Glad to be here.
Pearl Carey (00:55):
Good. And today, my first question for you, Dirk, is how serious is distracted driving in South Carolina and how many wrecks does it really cause?
Dirk Derrick (01:03):
I think my first answer would be nobody knows. I know that in 2023, South Carolina Department of Public Safety came out and said nationally, over 3,200 deaths were caused by distracted drivers. But the reason I say nobody really knows, I know there's a lot of cases that we get where somebody gets rear-ended, somebody never hits the brakes, and it's not reported as a distracted driver wreck or death, but it's happened. It is bad. If you don't believe it, just ride down the road when someone else is driving your car so you won't be distracted. And look in the cars beside you. How many people have their phones in their hands and are looking at their phones? Major problem.
(01:46):
So it's a bad problem in South Carolina and in the nation overall. There's a lot more cases now where people are just hit very hard from the rear and cars cross over the lines of the lanes. And when we get them and no one's admitting they're distracted, but then we just do our investigation to see if we can determine if they were distracted.
Pearl Carey (02:08):
Absolutely. And for me personally, the first type of distracted driving that comes to mind would be texting. So what are some of the other forms of distracted driving?
Dirk Derrick (02:17):
Think about the different things that can distract you. It can be your eyes. Now my father was a driver's ed teacher and a football coach. So I had my first vehicle, I bought a truck when I was nine from my granddaddy when I was working on the tobacco farm. So I was driving a pickup truck on dirt roads in South Carolina, which that may be another issue. But my father always taught you don't just look at the road, you got to look at the road, you got to check your mirrors. There's some movements of the eyes that you have to do to be a driver where you're driving defensively. But think about when you start taking your eyes and looking at your phone, taking your eyes and looking at something going on in a car, taking your eyes and managing children. When you take your eyes off the road, that is distraction.
(02:58):
Second thing can be just your mind. Have you ever driven down the road and you're daydreaming or you're in your own brain thinking about a problem you have or something you're going to do, and then realize you just went five miles down the road and don't recall driving those five miles? Well, you were distracted with your own mind. I don't think those ever show up in text or any kind of traffic reports or death reports. It can be through your ears distraction. It can be something you're listening to and get your mind off of driving. I think the texting is the number one problem we have because people do not realize how long they look down and how far you can travel while you're looking down.
(03:42):
I have some data. Distance you travel if you don't look at the road for five seconds. So if you're reading a text, you're looking ahead, you're reading a text, you're looking down like this and then you're looking up. If you're going 35 miles an hour, you travel 257 feet in five seconds. That's a little bit shorter of a football field. If you're going 55 miles an hour, you travel 403 feet. And if you're driving 70 miles an hour, you travel 513 feet. So many things can happen in the length of a football field up to almost two football fields as far as people coming on the road, people stopping, unanticipated stopping.
(04:20):
And then when you add on top of that your reaction time if something does happen in front of you, what most accident reconstructionists will tell you is that it takes you somewhere between three quarters of a second and a second and a half to see something, realize it's a danger and then respond to it. So you add that many feet on top of what we just talked about and it explains why there's so many wrecks and people either never hit the brakes or they hit the brakes at the last second.
Pearl Carey (04:49):
Absolutely. So clearly distracted driving can be a huge issue and it can cause a lot of damage, not only to the driver, but to potential pedestrians and other drivers. So how does South Carolina handle distracted driving? Is it illegal?
Dirk Derrick (05:01):
Yeah, it's been illegal to text while you drive for a while in South Carolina. And in 2025, they enacted a law that if you want to be on the phone, you need to be doing it hands-free with some exceptions, but they have added that law. I don't know how many people obey that law, but with technology and the ability to speak to your phone and speak to Siri and tell Siri to call people, holding it in your hand is not needed so much anymore. So we've tried to, as a state, make it more safe. I don't know if it's working. I haven't seen any data on it.
Pearl Carey (05:31):
Absolutely. And so why in particular is distracted driving so dangerous and why can it cause such serious injuries?
Dirk Derrick (05:38):
Well, if you think about it, you're in a big car, you're driving down the road, there's two, three, four, five seconds that you are not paying attention. There's so many bad things can happen. The reason there's drunk driving laws is that people become incapacitated to fully function behind the steering wheel and to be able to perceive what's going on and respond to it. Well, when you're distracted, it's as if you're blindfolded. You have no chance to respond to it during the period of time that you're not paying attention and look at what's going on.
(06:08):
So drunk driver is impaired, their ability to respond and see things are impaired. And if you're distracted and not looking at the road, you have no capacity. So it can be even worse than somebody who's slightly intoxicated.
(06:21):
One other thing I'd add about the distracted driver and the additional danger of it is the fact that a lot of these people who are distracted, the wrecks occur at a high speed. In every case we see, somebody's made a mistake, somebody's pulled in front of somebody, somebody's run a red light, somebody's done something. But if you have two people involved with a wreck and they're both paying attention, a lot of times if somebody makes a mistake, there can be some adjustments to reduce the damage in the case. If you got one person blindfolded going wide open and never hits the brake, the damages that person can cause can be increased to people who are paying attention, but somebody makes a mistake, if that makes sense? It can cause a more high speed wreck, which caused worse damages, if that makes sense?
Pearl Carey (07:11):
Yes, it does. And so how do lawyers prove that a driver was using a phone or was otherwise distracted while they were driving their car?
Dirk Derrick (07:18):
That's the $90 question. When we get involved with cases, the first thing we do is we send out letters of preservation on the car, on surveillance cameras around the incident location. We talk to witnesses as fast as possible. Very few people who cause wrecks and deaths because they were distracted come in and say, "Ah, I was distracted. I was texting somebody," or, "I was dialing a phone number." Most people don't do that. So we are preserving telephones for the person who's driving. We send them a letter of preservation. And what that means for people who aren't familiar with letters of preservation is it's telling them to preserve it. You preserve that phone, you preserve that car. We send that letter of preservation to the at-fault driver, but also to the owner and maybe even to their insurance company who may take possession of the car when they pay off the damage if it's totaled.
(08:09):
Preserve that car. We want to download the data. In most cars nowadays, they have a data box and that data box can tell us and tell a jury what that person did before or five seconds leading up to the wreck, whether they were on the gas, whether they were on the brake, how fast they were going, and that is circumstantial evidence as to whether or not somebody was distracted. If you can see someone approaching an intersection where there's a red light and there's people going on a green light in the opposite direction and they never slow down, the fact they never hit the brakes is circumstantial evidence that they're distracted. They're not paying attention. We're looking for surveillance, whether it's good surveillance to show they never hit the brakes, never slowed down. You're looking at the evidence at the scene, no skid marks, no attempt to avoid the impact.
(08:58):
You can use accident reconstructionists and human factor experts on cases with bigger damages, how a normal person who was paying attention, how that person would have responded in this situation and this person did not. We download the data, videos. What else am I missing? Cell phone downloads. We can download the information on the cell phone, see what was going on at the time. Sometimes they give us good evidence. Some other times they just show us that data was going back and forth from the phone, but it doesn't tell us exactly what was happening. We go fishing for that a lot. And most of the time we can find something if somebody was distracted. But a lot of times if the cell phone data's not real good, it would tell us whether or not they were texting most of the time. But if it doesn't give us exactly what they were doing and there was just data being transferred back and forth, that's just circumstantial also.
(09:53):
But you add it all together to prove if somebody was distracted. And let me tell you why it's important. With all these focus groups we've done, we've done probably more distracted cases than any other thing, just because it's so many cases that we believe it's caused by a distracted driver. So you pull the data, you pull the phone, you pull surveillance, you talk to witnesses, you look at skid marks, you do everything to try to find the evidence and you present it to a focus group. And we have determined... Because what we're trying to prove is not what happened, but why it happened. And why it happened is really very, very important to jurors. And when we take the depositions of the defendant, they admit that. I mean, very few people will say, "Yeah, I had no idea that I couldn't text and drive. No, I don't think it's dangerous." Most of them will admit, "Yeah, it's dangerous. Yeah, I knew that. Yeah, I knew it was against the law." And so you did it anyway.
(10:45):
Well, there's laws in South Carolina that says if you know something is reckless and dangerous and you do it anyway, you do it recklessly or do it with the conscious knowledge that it's dangerous to the public, the jury can award punitive damages to punish you on top of just the actual damages to pay or to compensate the plaintiff for the physical and mental harm that was caused to the plaintiff. So this punitive damages can be awarded where they can punish more money than they give in actual damages to punish somebody for reckless behavior. So we have determined and found in these focus groups that they will punish people. They'll punish people for texting.
(11:23):
So that's why we're digging into it to see whether or not that exists. And I think it comes down to the defendant and what type of person they are and how strong your proof is that they were distracted and what they were distracted by.
Pearl Carey (11:36):
Absolutely. And so, kind of going back to the accident itself, what should someone do immediately after being injured by a distracted driver?
Dirk Derrick (11:45):
Well, first take care of themselves and their health. I mean, that's what I tell everybody, make sure you take care of yourself. If you're hurt, get care. We can take care of the legal stuff. But also, if you talk to anyone at the scene, if you're able to talk to anybody at the scene, ask the defendant what happened? I mean, why didn't you see me? Why didn't you do that? And see if they admit it. It probably wouldn't be surprising to you that sometimes people say things at the scene that they're not going to tell the insurance adjuster and they definitely not going to tell the defense lawyer if it gets that far.
(12:17):
So a lot of times people are more honest right at the scene where they say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I was calling somebody. I looked down. I was doing this on my phone," something to explain what happened that they wouldn't do so otherwise. So if you're not hurt, you can ask them, you can ask them that. That's about it, other than getting names of witnesses who people, anyone says, "I saw this, I saw what's going." Get the names of the witnesses and their phone numbers.
(12:42):
20 years ago, if a wreck occurred on a road with any kind of traffic, there'd be five, six, seven people stop, give you their names, give you their phone numbers, "Call me if you have any questions or if you need me. I saw what happened." Today, a wreck can happen out on 501 in front of the Tanger Outlet and there's 30 cars around this thing happening and nobody stops. Nobody leaves a name or number. It is amazing how society has changed to where it's just not going to get involved. Thank God we got data in our boxes now in our cars that we can pull some stuff and surveillance, but the eyewitness reports have really gone down over the years.
(13:23):
Our focus group jurors are always shocked by that. They always say, "Well, it happened at Tanger. What do the witnesses say?" I said, "Well, there were no witnesses." Oh, there were no witnesses who stopped." "What do you mean there was no witnesses?" I said, "People don't have to stop. They keep on going. They have their lives." But if somebody comes up, try to get their name and number if you're able to. That's the best two things you can do at the scene to help an attorney later on if they're trying to find out and develop proof of distraction.
Pearl Carey (13:49):
Absolutely. So just collecting that info from the other driver, seeing if they'll tell you exactly what they were doing, and then of course, getting the care that you need after the accident occurs is of the utmost importance.
Dirk Derrick (14:02):
I wouldn't tell anybody to cross-examine the other driver. I think just having a conversation with somebody and being polite. A lot of times people are angry, especially if somebody hits them and hurts them. If you're able to talk to them, try to be polite and find out what their reasoning is at the scene.
Pearl Carey (14:14):
So we've obviously touched on how distracted driving occurs, what the impact can be on the other person in the other car, but what can the general public of South Carolina do to make sure that they're preventing themselves from becoming distracted drivers?
Dirk Derrick (14:28):
That's tough. You want to say just don't do it. Don't do it. I think we're all born with something in us that says, "I know that happens to other people, but I'm smarter than other people. I can drive and I can check my emails or I can text. I have the superpowers. These other people are just not as smart as me. They can't do it like I can do it."
Pearl Carey (14:50):
I'm better at it.
Dirk Derrick (14:51):
I think most of us are born with that. We just think it's not going to happen, but it does. My suggestion is put your phone away, put it in a box between the seats, turn it off. I would say put on a podcast, but don't think about the podcast too much. But I listen to podcasts when I drive. As much as we look at screens, if you're driving any kind of distance, it can feel like, "Man, I hadn't had my phone in my hand. Somebody may be trying to get in touch with me or maybe somebody liked one of my posts." But I mean, the safest thing is just not do it. Put the phone away, teach your children before they become teenage drivers, put the phone away. You won't believe how many wrecks are caused by teenage drivers on the phone. I don't have any young children now getting ready to start to drive, and it would scare me to death.
(15:32):
Put limitations on them, put limitations on yourself. My wife's told me we were traveling not too long ago. She says, "Dirk, you ever just listen to music anymore?" So if the wife's in the car with you, just put on some old classic rock and listen to music and talk to her and don't listen to podcasts and definitely don't talk on the phone.
Pearl Carey (15:51):
Exactly. Well, thank you so much, Dirk, for joining me on today's episode regarding distracted driving. I'm your host, Pearl Carey, and we'll see you in the next episode.
Dirk Derrick (16:07):
Thank you.
Voiceover (16:08):
Thank you for joining us on the Legal Truth Podcast. If you have questions that you would like answered on a future episode, please send them to thelegaltruth@derricklawfirm.com. If you would like to speak to us directly, call us at 843-248-7486. If you find the podcast valuable, please leave us a five-star review and share the Legal Truth with your neighbor, friend, or family member who is seeking reliable information about a South Carolina personal injury or workers' compensation claim. Dirk J. Derrick of Derrick Law Firm Injury Lawyers is responsible for the production of this podcast, located at 901 North Main Street, Conway, South Carolina.
(16:48):
Derrick Law Firm Injury Lawyers has included the information on this podcast as a service to the general public. Use of this podcast and any related materials does not in any manner constitute an attorney-client relationship between Derrick Law Firm Injury Lawyers and the user. While the information on this podcast is about legal issues, it is not intended as legal advice and should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in your particular state. Anyone seeking specific legal advice or assistance, should retain an attorney.
(17:13):
Any prior results mentioned do not guarantee a similar outcome. The content reflects the personal views and opinions of the participants in the podcast and are not intended as endorsements of any views or products. This podcast could contain inaccuracies. The information contained in this podcast does not constitute legal advice and is not guaranteed to be correct, complete, or up-to-date as laws continue to change. In this podcast, you'll hear information about focus groups. Please note that not all of the firm's cases are presented to a focus group. Additionally, when speaking about juries or jurors in relation to a focus group, we are speaking of focus group participants and not actual trial juries or jurors.