6 years in jail for drunk & banned driver who killed Sussex cyclist

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

@oozaveared

Well I mention it because zero-tolerance policies are almost always justified with reference to precisely that 'broken window' theory you cite. That's the main context I know of it from.

Also I am bemused that my friends who live in the US only very recently in fact complained to me about precisely the reverse of what you've just said! That is, they mentioned that in the US (at least the part they are in, which isn't California) speed limits are totally and comprehensively ignored. And that, indeed, they get hooted at if they dare to obey the limit.

I've also seen plenty of posts on web forums from American drivers complaining scornfully about their compatriots who stick rigourously to the limit.

I guess its very possible this situation varies greatly by state.

And US road casualties are much higher than ours, but its very hard to make meaningful comparisons across such wildly different driving environments.

Zero tolerance may well be confused with broken windows because they stem from a similar ethos. Zero tolerance is much more part of an aggressive policing strategy to do with more serious crime. The broken windows theory might be used to justify it but it doesn't necessarily follow. Broken windows as a policy initiative has to do with noticing. It can very much be a Dixon of Dock Green approach. ie the cop isn't going to prosecute you but he will notice and will make you pick that litter up. Same on the roads. The cops don't have to dish out fines but merely stopping someone to have a word can be effective. ie they did something wrong and it was immediately spotted and they were confronted. That's the important bit.

US Road casualties are way higher because the US has an awful lot of very dangerous roads. The Federal and State roads are OK not as good as European roads on the whole but OK. Once you are down to County roads especially in the boonies then that's sometimes a loose dirt track. With a deep ditch on either side for drainage. No lighting, no cats eyes no barriers. Likewise It is the sparsely populated areas with poor roads in the UK that have the highest casualty rates because those are the ones without the lighting, the barriers and with ditches and trees either side. Lincolnshire is the nearest we have to the flatlands. Guess what. Lincolnshire has the highest road casualties in the UK.

Next time you are in the US at a shopping mall please note the speed of the traffic it is literally 5mph and the fact that people stop wait and let you cross the road. That's despite huge wide roads at the mall. Then pop to a supermarket car park in the UK and watch people driving around crowded narrow lanes at 20+ mph defying pedestrians to get in the way. I can absolutely assure you that if you behaved like that in the US you would have a group of incensed people round your vehicle and the security and cops would be called.

There is also the fact that UK casualties have fallen steadily because pedestrians and cyclists have been intimidated off the roads and cars are safer to crash. They have in some ways made the roads more like race tracks, safe enough in a car but woe betide you walking out there or cycling.

ironmancole wrote:

OK, it's perhaps not the finest but it's a start.

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/central-uk-government-and-departm...

Interested to see how it develops, does anyone actually want change and can 'another campaign' change anything?

At least it keeps the issue at heart and promotes discussion.

Just signed. Thanks for starting it up.

ragtag wrote:

His sentence (that is actually going to prison) probably has more to do with his driving while being banned. I think this annoys the courts more than killing people. They don't like being ignored. But agree, being banned and driving while drunk, the guy doesn't give a toss and very little will stop him doing it again.

I agree with the point but think that the courts are right to treat contempt of court very seriously indeed. Otherwise the whole system breaks down.
I know that the police do keep a record and an eye on people with bans. They can't do it round the clock or anything and probably make judgement calls on who is likely to be at it.

The police's frustration is that they catch the same people time and again. The courts fine them or ban them but they are often "can't pay" types and they just carry on as before, it hasn't effected their job, their home, their income and they don't care they just carry on until they kill someone or commit so many offences or such a serious one that they get a custodial for a short while and then they start again.

My wife heard a surreal conversation at work albeit a few years ago before ANPR got so popular. Woman in her office was fined for having no insurance. The fine was relatively small. It was roughly half the cost of the insurance. Sh had figured she was quids in because she hadn't been insured for 3 years. That's how some people think about road crime as a sort of cost benefit analysis for compliance costs.

ironmancole wrote:

I believe it's time a focused campaign was started, perhaps using this guy as the subject, to call for a change in the law to support the notion that killer drivers like this are not permitted to hold a licence again.

If they won't do that then we might as well let sex offenders back into the teaching environment, it's all just madness however you look at it.

Would there be support on this forum to start such a campaign? Motorists should also support it bearing in mind none of them are dangerous and its always someone else's poor driving. It's about safety for everyone at the end of the day isn't it?

Whilst I agree 100% with the sentiment it wasn't the validity of a driving licence that caused the crash. This particular man was already banned from driving, so banning dangerous drivers clearly doesn't stop them getting behind the wheel. Some people will flout the law, whatever you make it, and I feel that this individual is one of those people.

oozaveared wrote:

The trouble is that this sort of sentence is not only half the maximum ( I agree what do you have to do to get the max if you drunk, already banned, uninsured, cause death by dangerous driving and hit and run. I mean what else is there left to take you to 14 years? the trouble as I was saying is that initial sentences are too lenient.

There is a criminology theory nicknamed "broken windows" that studied the effect that run down areas suffer increasing crime and vandalism. In short the sign that some broken windows etc give off is that this is an area that no-one really cares about and that leads to further disrespect. No-one is going to stop you for something like littering in an area like that. Nobody cares.

The lesson that New York City took in reducing it's crime rate so dramatically was to start policing the little stuff. The lesson being that if you do get fined for something seemingly trivial like littering then you had best not consider fly tipping. The point was that the police showed they did care.

Instead of trying to be the motorists friend like some 70's hippy teacher/social worker, the police ought to grow a pair and be police officers. That means sweating the small stuff. Because if you get done for the small stuff it sends the message that the police do care about the road space.

And courts need to back that up. So far as I can tell this sentence should have been near or at the maximum as there are very few mitigating circumstances.

Six years is half so that's what I'd expect yes for causing death by dangerous driving but perhaps with an otherwise clean record, not over the limit, and taking proper responsibility after and not just driving off.

I'm not sure I agree with everything you say.

I agree this case really does make one wonder what on Earth a driver has to do to merit the maximum sentence.

Also, as an aside, I'm curious to know how many drivers each year are actually arrested or convicted of driving while banned, and what penalty they receive.

Because so often you get bad drivers committing other offenses while driving while banned and the 'driving while banned' part appears to add nothing to their rather lenient sentences and you get the impression that had that been the _only_ thing they'd done nothing would have happened at all.
Are driving bans actually enforced in any meaningful way? If not, what is the point of them? Are there statistics on this?

What I'm not sure I agree with is your stress on 'zero tolerance' policing. I'm unconvinced by this because of the way it has led to utterly absurd outcomes where its been used in the US, particularly in schools - children being expelled because they took anti-asthma medication or some such because the school has a 'zero tolerance' policy to drug use.

I don't think coming down like a ton of bricks on people who commit genuinely minor or purely technical offenses makes up for an institutional bias towards lenient treatment for a whole category of serious offenses.

I also read somewhere an academic has shown that penalties for non-motoring offenses have been getting harsher in recent years, while those for motoring ones have been getting softer.

The real problem is a bias in the whole system towards treating certain categories of offence more lightly than others. Motoring-related-crime is definitely one such, though I suspect there are others.

Unfortunately, across all societies, justice seems unavoidably influenced by political factors, i.e. questions of power. Its one of those things that I fear has no complete solution.

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

oozaveared wrote:

The trouble is that this sort of sentence is not only half the maximum ( I agree what do you have to do to get the max if you drunk, already banned, uninsured, cause death by dangerous driving and hit and run. I mean what else is there left to take you to 14 years? the trouble as I was saying is that initial sentences are too lenient.

There is a criminology theory nicknamed "broken windows" that studied the effect that run down areas suffer increasing crime and vandalism. In short the sign that some broken windows etc give off is that this is an area that no-one really cares about and that leads to further disrespect. No-one is going to stop you for something like littering in an area like that. Nobody cares.

The lesson that New York City took in reducing it's crime rate so dramatically was to start policing the little stuff. The lesson being that if you do get fined for something seemingly trivial like littering then you had best not consider fly tipping. The point was that the police showed they did care.

Instead of trying to be the motorists friend like some 70's hippy teacher/social worker, the police ought to grow a pair and be police officers. That means sweating the small stuff. Because if you get done for the small stuff it sends the message that the police do care about the road space.

And courts need to back that up. So far as I can tell this sentence should have been near or at the maximum as there are very few mitigating circumstances.

Six years is half so that's what I'd expect yes for causing death by dangerous driving but perhaps with an otherwise clean record, not over the limit, and taking proper responsibility after and not just driving off.

I'm not sure I agree with everything you say.

What I'm not sure I agree with is your stress on 'zero tolerance' policing. I'm unconvinced by this because of the way it has led to utterly absurd outcomes where its been used in the US, particularly in schools - children being expelled because they took anti-asthma medication or some such because the school has a 'zero tolerance' policy to drug use.

I don't think coming down like a ton of bricks on people who commit genuinely minor or purely technical offenses makes up for an institutional bias towards lenient treatment for a whole category of serious offenses.

I also read somewhere an academic has shown that penalties for non-motoring offenses have been getting harsher in recent years, while those for motoring ones have been getting softer.

The real problem is a bias in the whole system towards treating certain categories of offence more lightly than others. Motoring-related-crime is definitely one such, though I suspect there are others.

Unfortunately, across all societies, justice seems unavoidably influenced by political factors, i.e. questions of power. Its one of those things that I fear has no complete solution.

Thanks but I didn't mention zero tolerance policing. And stupid rules are just stupid rules. So conflating the quite simple idea that the police take a more active role in dealing with lower levels of road crime with zero tolerance and then with the idiocy of some school rules in the US is not really that fair.

Taking a broken windows based approach may merely be to stop and warn, pull people over for etc but just not ignore offences such that people collectively believe that the offence isn't even important enough to be enforced and thereby raising the bar on road crime.

Another example is the study done by Nottingham University where they took the numbers of cars parking is disabled and mother toddler bays that were not displaying a disabled badge or were obviously not parents with toddlers. Notts police then ran those registrations through the computer and found that there was a high number of markers attached, uninsured not MOTd, untaxed, etc but alos the police#'s own markers based on intelligence that the vehicle belongs to a disqualified driver or one with multiple or previous serious driving offences other criminal activity.

The conclusion was that policing low level offences actually is a good way to catch those that commit more serious offences. People prepared to break some rules are very often likely to break other more serious rules. That also corresponds with the broken windows approach.

I lived in the US for a while and I don't want to generalise for a whole continent but I certainly found that speeding was rigorously enforced. If you were travelling any distance over the speed limit then you stood a good chance of being stopped. I can't express the regularity of it enough. On highways you would have most traffic travelling at or around the limit. The odd obvious speeder would pass and in a few miles they'd been pulled over. Regular as clockwork. And every driver on that highway saw that happen.

I contrast that with driving on a UK motorway where a lot of the time you stick out like a sore thumb if you are obeying the limit. That is when you have discussions that end up pontificating whether the police allow you to drive at 80 or 85 and people feeling hard done by that they got a ticket at 81 mph. Where I lived in California the charge for this man would have been Vehicular Homicide - First degree because it was aggravated by alcohol and attempting to flee law enforcement plus he had previous and was on a ban so that would have had him classified as an "habitual" he would have got the maximum and that would have been 20 years. 15 for the offence plus 5 for it being habitual behaviour. Our sentences are not dissimilar but sentencing policy would mean that if he behaved himself in California he could apply for parole at 7 years served. If he didn't then he would serve 20.

Neil753 wrote:

What a sad story. RIP to the cyclist.

But what I've never understood is a ban whilst someone is in jail. Surely it would be more sensible (and act as more of a deterent) if the ban started on the day the offender is released. Does anyone else agree with this?

See bauchlebastart's comment.... (ban starts at end of prison term)

it's not an issue, read the piece again - Since 2009, in cases where a custodial sentence has been imposed, driving bans only start running once the motorist has been released from prison.

garygarry wrote:

it's not an issue, read the piece again - Since 2009, in cases where a custodial sentence has been imposed, driving bans only start running once the motorist has been released from prison.

But the driver was ALREADY banned at the time of the incident.