public statements

In a thread in another place on this vast Internet, there was discussion about people behaving badly in traffic. The discussion went on to motorcycles behaving badly. One poster said that he had no qualms about cutting off a motorcycle if, in his view, the motorcyclist was doing something wrong, rude or unlawful. He actually said that he would consciously choose to do so. I was disturbed by this statement that he'd be prosecutor, judge and jury and, on the spot, raise the probability of death for a motorcyclist.

I'm wondering about liability in making such a statement on a public forum. If that person were to be involved in a wreck where a motorcyclist was killed, could their public statements come back to haunt them? I could see some prosecutor digging up the statement after a quick search on the web. Could it be used to raise the charge from manslaughter to murder? The Internet can have an awfully long memory.

I wondered this a few years ago when a woman on a news program in answering the question on why they bought the large SUV, she blithely said that she wanted to make sure that the other people got killed rather than her family. I thought that was an amazingly callous thing to say.

This posting in no way is to construed into defending motorcyclists doing dumb bad things in traffic. It's more about the public statements thing.