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news
Justice (Lonpicman, Wikimedia Commons)Community order for careless driver who drove on to make a delivery following fatal collision
A courier involved in a fatal collision that threw a cyclist almost 50 metres has been handed a 12-month community order and an 18-month driving ban after admitting causing death by careless driving.
The Bournemouth Echo reports that Christopher Gibbs, 30, was riding home from work on an "arrow-straight" stretch of the A338 Spur Road near Bournemouth at around 10.15pm on October 3, 2017, when he was hit from behind by a Mercedes Citan van driven by Kevin Johnson.
Evidence was heard from several motorists who passed Gibbs before the collision. Some said the light on the back of the bike had appeared "faint" while others said the victim was "easily" visible from as far away as 200 yards.
Gibbs hit the bonnet and windscreen of Johnson’s van and was thrown 47.5 metres.
Johnson pulled over and made a "cursory" search of the carriageway before continuing to the Applewood Hotel to drop off a suitcase.
Prosecutors alleged dangerous driving for continuing with a shattered windscreen. The charge was ordered to lie on file.
Johnson did not enter pleas to failing to stop after a road accident or failing to report an accident. Both charges were not proceeded with by the prosecution.
After the collision, a passing motorist and lorry driver stopped to give CPR to Gibbs at the scene before paramedics arrived. However, the court heard he had died instantly as a result of "overwhelming head injuries".
After arriving at the hotel, Johnson wiped blood from the van with a tissue and took photographs of the damage. He told mechanics who came to collect the vehicle that he believed he could have hit a deer and may have "blacked out for a second".
Travelling back along the A338 Spur Road, he saw emergency services workers and searched the web for information on road closures.
A police officer spotted the van on the back of a recovery truck and reported it as a possible suspect vehicle for the collision. Attempts were made to track down the driver.
At 6.20am the next day, Johnson searched 'contact police', but did not make a call. Three minutes later, officers arrived at his address and arrested him.
Ian Bridge, mitigating, said Johnson was "desperately sorry" for his "momentary inattention" to the road ahead.
Johnson was sentenced to 240 hours of unpaid work and ordered to pay £250 in prosecution costs. He was disqualified from driving for 18 months.
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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A brilliant line from a comedian friend of mine (may only be understood by older readers): "If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, have a...
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No driver involved https://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/24728452.car-crash-station-way-colch...
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It will be worth the time invested, I'm sure. Hoping that you'll post a review of some kind.
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On the last that's also a problem of success in many ways and I don't think is fixable by "more of the same". Roads attract motoring - better...
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They almost never get to experience them... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngifg--1eW4
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29 comments
It's the 'oh well, I killed another human; not to worry' attitude that gets me. If the justice system was, 'no it's not OK and your going to spend a decent chunk of time in jail reflecting on your actions', people would drive at a sensible speed and pay more attention.
Cars routinely going 100+? Sounds like heaven to me. I'm lucky if I can hit 45 most days with the Honda Jazz flatcap and dog running around the back seat gang out and about.
Routinely doing 100mph+? Don't mean to doubt your word, but are you sure? Because that is mental. I wouldn't particularly fancy driving on a road like that, let alone cycling on it.
This is local to me. Personally I wouldn't cycle the A338 if you paid me. Drivers routinely doing 100mph+ in the outside lane. It was recently resurfaced but they didn't add any cycling provision, despite it being wide with large verges for most of its length.
Having said that, the road is long and straight so the sightlines are good. The driver trotting out the "I hit a deer" bollocks is just that. There are no deer in the area, in 10 years of living down here and using that road frequently I've never seen any (alive or roadkill), or heard of anyone hitting one. It's not part of the New Forest, the biggest thing you'll hit is a badger or fox.
Sadly just the usual response of Hampshire/Dorset juries when it comes to cycling deaths.
Contrast with this fatality less than a mile away
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-24146473
Hit and run, tried to cover his tracks - 6 years. Still not enough but very little difference to this collision.
2nd case in a week we've read about with a cyclist/pedestrian that should have been clearly visible hit by a driver, who failed to stop, and then drove back past the scene without stopping, and the only charges brought are regarding to failing to stop or driving with a damaged vehicle, while 2 people lie dead in the roads . . . both got small-ish fines.
The punishment is reasonably severe as the job he had has gone and if he's a gig economy worker it's costing him up to £150 a day to cover his job until he finds a replacement. (Based on DPD T&C's for 'self-employed' couriers). Then he has to do 240 hours of work for free.
The ban is not long enough, it should be for the rest of his natural with an automatic 5 years inside with no parole if he's caught driving ever again.
What?
How much a week would he be earning inside ? A couple of grand a week?
Why careless driving? Surely if your driving is so bad that you kill somebody that's dangerous driving.
Exactly, by definition of the harm caused then it must be dangerous.
Yet another sickening outcome, I hope the judge gets mown down by an errant motorist and his family have to put up with one of his own giving the driver a slap, except that would never ever happen, because he's not a cyclist.
Yet again the so called justice system proving that it is discriminating against people on bikes and not applying the law. This is sickening ...AGAIN!
Unfortunately, the law doesn't understand plain English, and driving which is clearly dangerous, isn't legally dangerous. But never mind, the government's inquiry into road law will sort it.
We need a radical reform of road law to reflect the situation as it exists, not the system that was set up by drivers to protect them from their actions; a system which was set up when the few motorists were the rich and influential, and their victims were the poor and disadvantaged. We need a system where dangerous is exactly as bloody obvious as it seems to any rational person.
Because both those terms, in this context are legal definitions, not english phrases. Both, as a charge, have specific descriptions of the behaviour that leads to the charge which must be fulfilled for the charge to be found. Unfortunately there isn't a charge of Stoopid Drving by Fuckwit Mc Dumface.
What are those 'specific descriptions of behaviour'? Are they not largely just vague value-judgements left to juries to interpret? (based on their own piss-poor driving standards?)
Seems to me that calling them 'legal definitions', and contrasting them to the 'english phrases' (i.e. normal use of normal English words as normal people would use them) is giving them a false status as some sort of precise, technical, well-defined terms. When actually the 'definitions' they translate to are themselves just English phrases, no more precise than what you started with.
In reality they just boil down to 'how lousy drivers on juries will decide to interpret them'.
The decision what charge to bring has to involve the CPS guessing how our biased, unbalanced, car-centric juries see the world. Nothing to do with some complicated, precise, technical legal language, that's giving false-dignity to the depressing reality.
Really, FrankH is correct, it's just that juries and the legal system don't think in terms of objective reality. (Nor do most people with any form of power, come to that. Heck, you could define 'power' as 'being able to get away with ignoring reality'.)
You're asking a larger social question there, one on which, I suspect, we have a lot of common ground. I wasn't trying to defend the usage or semantics of the phrases, just explaining (ineffectively it would seem) why the application in everyday English is not the same as in the courts.
But the descriptions in law are anything but specific, and even in what seems to be a completely open-and-shut case, the jury can, and does, find otherwise.
https://road.cc/content/news/220521-breaking-news-driver-mick-mason-case...
While this is true, the interpretation of law is generally based on precedent, on the accreted barnacles of previous interpretations and judgements. Once a law has been around for a while and tested in court, an interpretation is settled on through this process of being guided by previous interpretations. Eventually, the wording of the definition in law is almost immaterial and there is a pretty specific interpretation which the legal profession will take. To change this definition requires either a change to the law, to reset the precedent, or an escalation through appeals to higher courts to overrule the precedents. The former is usually sparked, where a law is acknowledged as bad or badly interpreted, by a judge making a deliberately ridiculous ruling to force the issue.
So "legal term" here means "what is widely legally accepted", and is indeed pretty specific, and can well be at odds with what a common sense reading of the actual wording of the law in question might say.
I still don't get it.
Careless driving is below the standard expected by a competent and careful driver.
Dangerous driving is far below the standard expected by a competent and careful driver.
What that 'expected standard' is can surely change, depending on attitudes in society and attidues of jurors? It might be 'specific' but there is nothing 'objective' about that definition. It could easily change over time.
What standard one person expects might be different to what another expects (largely depending on their own standard of driving, or whether they drive at all).
In practice it seems to be left up to jurors to interpret the meaning of both 'expected standard' and the word 'far'. So it depends on the particular experiences and biases of the juror.
I don't see that jurors consult case histories of past legal cases to decide how to interpret those words. And if they did, they would just be copying the subjective preferences of past jurors.
It remains my opinion that an awful lot of jurors interpret those words wrongly.
As proposed elsewhere on this site, the definition of dangerous driving should be defined as driving which would cause you to fail your driving test, which is a whole lot more definitive than the opinions of a jury of drivers.
I think the whole thing needs a bit more reliable input by experts. We know a lot more about The Man On The Clapham Omnibus nowadays, and he's likely to be a ball of bias who overrates his own abilities.
I don't disagree with any of that, but each charge has specific items which must be evident in order for the charge to be applicalbe (i.e. for murder you have to have intended to kill that particular person) and in dangerous driving at least, the actions have to have gone on 'for a period of time', so a momentary lapse of attention doesn't constitute dangerous driving, even though to any right minded person the lapse of attention being that you were picking your phone up off the floor while driving at 100 kph on a narrow road obviously constitutes dangerous driving.
I think there should be an assumption in sententacing that; if you are convicted of a driving offence that occured in an incident in which somebody died you will go to prison for 5 years say. You should then be able to argue the sentence duration down if there are any mitigating circumstances and the prosecution could push it up if there was any poor behavior during or subsequent to the incident such as leaving the scene.
Just wtf is wrong with the justice system here, Cyclist stopped for riding on the promenade was fined £300. knock down a cyclist, send him flying 47 metres up the road, flee the scene and you get a £250 fine and some community service.
Somebody needs to sack some of our judges and start again, absolute disgrace.
First off, in both of the offences you are talking about the individual offending decided to carry on regardless after committing the crime. Idiots the pair of them.
Secondly, the fines are usually proportional to the income of the offender. I have heard that the person in this story has been unemployed for the last 12 months, so the fine would be lower. As a percentage of the persons disposable income though, it could well be significantly larger than the percentage of the promenade cyclist's disposable income (I do not know this, just playing devil's advocate).
A £200 fine to a single person on £60k a year is going to be small, but a £200 fine to a family person on benefits is going to be crippling
You can't compare fines without adding a little perspective, and we do not know what perspectives to add having not been at the scene of the crime or the trial.
I also assume that the driving ban may well be irrelevant. If blackouts are treated the same as epilepsy then as if he is claiming to have blacked out then the DVLA will revoke the licence untill he has been incident free for several years and has a medical assessment.
Draconian punishment!
This just shows all that is wrong with the current sentencing for these incidents if killing someone due to being that inattentive he didn't even know he'd hit a human being is only worth a community order and a driving ban. How many more times does this have to happen before the powers that be get that if someone elects to drive a big lump of metal capable of killing someone and then do kill someone, a commensurate punishment for taking a life must ensue? It probably won't change until a close family member of someone in senior government or high up in the judiciary is a victim. Truly appalling.
" and may have "blacked out for a second". "
What the hell does that mean?
It means he was looking at his phone but made up some bullshit to explain why he didn't see a cyclist on the road in front of him.
Am I going senile?
He hit something had no idea what it was but decided it was deer.
Since you are supposed to report hitting a horse, cattle, ass, mule, sheep, pig, goat or dog, then what was the defence and why no prosecution for failing to report?
And he didn't see the cyclist because...?
The moon was clearly in my client's eyes m'lud
Is it any wonder people drive like utter cunts when this is the state of 'punishment' for killing someone?
Fined £250, 240 hours of community service and banned for 18 months; I bet he's grateful that he wasn't riding a bike on the promenade. I'm hoping that there is more to this than first appears, as the driver left the scene, didn't report the collision and left someone to die, but only gets relatively minor penalties.
I'm sure the government's inquiry into road laws will be addressing the problem of proportionality, where cyclists get fined huge amounts for minor offences, and drivers get let off when they kill a cyclist.