That prosecutor, in a county of two or ten thousand people, knows the family of the dead man, or knows people who do. The folder on his desk has a box for everything the road could measure and no box for what the trooper believed. Nothing in the design asks his question. Nobody is paid to go sit in a widow's kitchen and ask whether her husband meant it. The certificate says accident, and the certificate is lawful, and the certificate may even be true. The machine did not fail that night. It ran perfectly, and it produced an accident, because an accident is what the machine was built to produce when the evidence is thin and the family is grieving and the town is small.
