

Help needed, Daniel Nicoletti (KDE developer) unexpectedly arrested - flaviojuvenal
http://blog.tenstral.net/2012/11/where-is-daniel-nicoletti.html

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delinka
The translation is not so clear. If someone could answer some questions here,
that'd be great.

David's daughter died over two years ago in an car accident where another
driver is at fault. The accident happened in Argentina. While traveling,
German authorities picked him up on an international arrest warrant.

0) Is my understanding above correct? 1) Do the Nicoletti family live in
Argentina? Are they originally from Argentina? 2) What are the charges in the
curent warrant? 3) If they're related to the death of his daughter, why an
international arrest warrant? Presumably, if he's not from/living in
Argentina, the international warrant makes more sense, however... 4) Why so
long after the accident? 5) Does this man have any other notoriety that would
put him at the attention of law enforcement?

PS: I have no idea how to format a proper list on HN without the indented
quote thing causing a horizontal scroll. I hate horizontal scroll, so ... here
we are.

~~~
rubyrescue
So I don't know the situation but as an American living in Argentina for 5
years I can say a few things about how traffic accidents work here.

So, say you are making a legal left turn on a one-way street, onto another one
way street, and a motorcycle flys around you ON THE LEFT from behind and
doesn't see you turning, and plows into you. (Incidentally, all motorcycle
drivers do this here - if you visit, don't drive until you understand the
alternate "physics" of driving in South America.) In this case, even though
you were in front, you signaled, you were in the leftmost lane, etc, a number
of things will happen in the resulting police investigation and inevitable
court cases (remember i'm sort of 'americanizing' the situation - the exact
law and actors are slightly different but this is essentially what happens):

First, you _will_ get sued by the motorcycle driver in civil court for
multiple hundreds of thousands of pesos, probably at least $150k US. Second,
you will get sued in criminal court (possibly by the "DA") with a crime - in
fact it's possible both of you will, but let's assume in this case you have a
job as a software developer like Daniel and the other guy is working for much
less. In this case the suing will be mostly from the low-wage earner to
(potential) high-wage earner. It is a near-guarantee, that though the high-
wage earner did not do anything wrong, they or their insurance will pay a
significant amount of money to the low-wage earner to settle the civil case.
The fact of the matter is IT DOES NOT MATTER what happened in the actual
traffic accident - it DOES NOT MATTER if you were or weren't at fault.

Now the cases will take possibly a year or longer and that means while they're
going on, you're essentially an indicted criminal with multiple cases hanging
over your head. If you travel or leave the country, etc, you may have a hard
time - if you're an Argentine - leaving. I know people who have had to get a
judge's permission to travel in this situation.

It's very possible, in fact, likely that the detritus of these court cases is
hanging around and it has NOTHING to do with anything that David did, but the
bureaucracy of Argentina sort of 'caught up' with him here in an odd way.
Thank God they move so slowly most of the time - the number of absurd
Kafkaesque situations like this is immense here mitigated mostly by
institutional inefficiencies. However in this case I would guess that this is
somehow the situation.

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tedivm
Cached version -
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yiFaVYf...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yiFaVYf1J7cJ:blog.tenstral.net/2012/11/where-
is-daniel-nicoletti.html+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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flaviojuvenal
There is more info on his blog, his wife is posting on it:
<http://dantti.wordpress.com/>

