I-95 Death Row takes 3 more.

ken56 wrote:
So the helicopter crash that took Kobe Bryant was an accident? No one is to blame? Every "accident" has a cause and therefore there is no such thing as an accident. A reason can always be attached as to why something happened. Vehicle crashes are most always blamed on the excessive speed the operator chooses to use according to the NTSB.

In legal proceedings, the word "accident" implies that no one is at fault or negligent. However, more common everyday usage does not seem to carry that connotation, and we aren't talking about courtroom proceedings here. A toddler that pees his or her pants has had an "accident" despite there being an obvious way to foresee the possibility and prevent it. From my dictionary (Webster's New World Dictionary, 3rd college edition):

1. a happening that is not expected, foreseen, or intended.
2. an unpleasant and unintended happening, sometimes resulting from negligence, that results in injury, loss, damage, etc.
(...some other uses that are not pertinent here...)
6. Law: an unforeseen event that occurs without anyone's fault or negligence

To attempt to convince everyone that the meaning of the word is something other than the common, everyday meaning will be quite an uphill battle. I, for one, am not convinced. I would say that crash on the highway is very much an accident, in the vast majority of cases, because usually people do not set out to crash, whether or not they are driving recklessly in some fashion. Indeed, things that are not foreseeable nor avoidable are precisely those that I would typically not call accidents: a tree being struck by lightning and falling on a garage is a misfortune but not so much an accident, while a tree that was cut with a chainsaw and fell on a garage would very much be an accident, in my mind.