Is Ohio (and the common law) not tough enough on negligent vehicular homicide?

The question in the title of this post is one inspired by this local story from theColumbus Dispatch, and one I am now planning to ask first-year students in my Criminal Law section later this month.  The story is headlined "To widow, sentence highlights unfairness: Tough penalty urged in vehicular deaths," and here are the details:

Richard Crabtree was killed Feb. 1 in a car accident.  He left behind a wife and three children. The police found the witnesses to her husband's death and brought charges against the young man who ran a red light and killed him.
The prosecutor secured a conviction on the most-serious charge. The judge's sentence was as tough as the law allows. Jenny Crabtree knows and appreciates all of that. But in the matter of the state of Ohio v. Steven J. Tirpak, she also will argue that justice -- for her, her husband, their three children -- was not served.
"Our lives are totally destroyed, forever; and he got 90 days in jail," the Westerville woman said.
Richard Crabtree left work early on Feb. 1 to meet his two older daughters, now 6 and 10, at the school-bus stop. Just before 4 p.m., Crabtree and a driver ahead of him were in the middle of the busy intersection of Polaris Parkway and Worthington Road, waiting to turn left to head north on Worthington.  The light turned red.
"Mr. Crabtree had already entered the intersection," Detective Sgt. Steve Fridley of the Westerville police said.  "You have the right to clear that, once everything's stopped.  The other vehicle, for whatever reason, ran the red light."
The other vehicle was driven by Tirpak, then a 20-year-old Galena man with a history of speeding and criminal convictions for such offenses as theft and possession of drug paraphernalia.
Tirpak never accepted blame for the crash, Fridley said.  He insisted the light was yellow when he broad-sided the 46-year-old Crabtree, killing him.  "Fortunately for us, we had multiple witnesses" who verified the light was red, Fridley said.
Tirpak wasn't under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and he had a valid driver's license.  A review of the evidence left police with two charges, vehicular homicide and vehicular manslaughter. Both are misdemeanors.
In June, Tirpak pleaded no contest to vehicular homicide, which is the more-serious charge and is punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.  Judge David P. Sunderman found him guilty in Delaware Municipal Court.
Sunderman, who declined to be interviewed for this story, sentenced Tirpak last month to 180 days in jail with 90 days suspended, which allowed the court to have further control over him by placing him on five years of probation.  He also was fined $1,000, sentenced to community service and lost his driver's license for five years.
"He got the max," said Peter Ruffing, city prosecutor for Delaware. "The judge threw the book at the kid," Jenny Crabtree acknowledged.
When the crash occurred, she prayed that the other driver would be remorseful and otherwise law-abiding.  She could make peace with that.  But Tirpak has a record of not abiding the law, and he did not apologize. He did not even look at her as she talked about her loss at sentencing. "What I got was the exact opposite," she said....
Because of her experience, Crabtree intends to lobby state lawmakers to strengthen vehicular-homicide punishments in Ohio.  Ruffing would not speak about the Tirpak case in any detail.  He said it is his job to uphold existing laws, not to criticize them or lobby that they be changed, as Crabtree hopes to do. "That's certainly an understandable position by a widow," he said....
Crabtree said the six months since her husband's death have been financially and emotionally crippling. She looked into a civil lawsuit, but Tirpak has no assets.  She can expect only $12,500 from his insurance company. 

There is a bit of an anachronism in the question in the title of this post because vehicular homicide crimes were largely unknown to the early common law (even though it was surely possible to kill a pedestrian while driving negligently a horse-and-buggy).  But the common law did generally confront the issue of merely negligent killings and generally concluded [in the US] that such killings should not and could not lead to any homicide charges.  [In most US jurisdictions before modern reforms, recklessness or extreme negligence was needed to make a matter criminal.[
Because Ohio has statutory provisions that make reckless killings a felony, I am assuming that prosecutors in this case concluded that they would only be able to prove that the deadly driver Steven Tirpak was driving negligently when he caused a fatal accident.  [A reader rightly notes that Ohio still requires a form of gross negligence for criminal liability, though the standard is set forth in language not quite as strong as was at common law.]  That suggests that the victim's family should be at least by thankful that Ohio has not merely codified common-law homicide rules.  If it had, it is possible Mr. Tirpak might not have been subject to any criminal prosecution at all.