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We think of young men, often barely more than boys, who drag-race up Montreal’s Park Avenue or down a quiet suburban street, until they lose control, destroying their lives and those of others in a tangle of twisted metal on the lawn of a daycare centre.

What makes the case now unravelling at the Montreal courthouse so compelling is that it introduces a new list of acts, and another type of driver, deemed to be irresponsible behind the wheel of a car.

Someone who could be any one of us.

Ms. Czornobaj doesn’t fit the usual profile of dangerous drivers. She wasn’t drunk or speeding. She didn’t fall asleep at the wheel. She wasn’t yakking on the phone or texting or driving without her eyeglasses or her hearing aid.

You can punish her until she is 60 years old, but it won’t bring my family back.

She did something that strikes at the heart of every motorist who has ever changed lanes to avoid a slow-moving turtle or an unleashed barking dog, at every tearful pet owner who has sat in the vet’s office with a wounded cat that won’t make it through the night.

The highways of this country abound with signs warning motorists to proceed with caution, to beware the risk of bounding deer and windshield-shattering moose. But for all the cutesy bumper stickers to the contrary, there’s nothing in the Highway Safety Code to protect those who choose to brake for smaller creatures that won’t flatten your tires. As one Sûreté du Québec officer put it, “ducks do not qualify as an emergency.”

What the jury of 10 men and two women will have to decide is whether by halting abruptly in the left lane, Ms. Czornobaj behaved in a way that was outside the realm of what “a reasonable and prudent” person would, and should, have done.

It is difficult to see what value there would be in sending a young woman with a spotless record to jail for acting on an impulse which, however unfocused, was basically good.

Certainly in the days immediately after the accident, even Ms. Volikakis questioned the wisdom of bringing charges against Ms. Czornobaj.

“She saw them die, both of them,” Ms. Volikakis said. “You can punish her until she is 60 years old, but it won’t bring my family back.”