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news
Statue of Justice, Old Bailey (licensed CC BY 2.0 on Flickr by Ronnie Macdonald).jpg“Red mist” driver who deliberately drove at cyclist escapes jail and driving ban
A driver who deliberately drove at a cyclist after a “red mist” descended on him when the rider banged on his vehicle during a close pass has escaped jail and a driving ban after pleading guilty to common assault.
Judge Jonathan Bennett, sitting at Derby Crown Court, handed Curtis Stanway a three-month prison sentence, suspended for one year.
He decided not to impose a driving ban on the 30 year old because it would lead to Stanway losing his job, reports the Derby Telegraph.
Stanway, from Sinfin on the outskirts of Derby, was driving his Audi on the A6 near Belper on 31 May 2020 with his partner and their three children as passengers when he made a close pass on the cyclist.
Phillip Plant, prosecuting, said that in response the cyclist “slapped” the side of the car. Stanway gave him a V-sign, then pulled into a lay-by, with the rider following him.
“The cyclist took his phone out to take a photograph in order to make a complaint about the manner of his driving and the defendant drove his car forward striking the victim and his bike and then drove out of the lay-by,” said Mr Plant.
“The effect was to knock the victim to the ground and he suffered grazes to his shoulder, knees, arms and legs.
“[The victim] rode home and both he and the defendant contacted the police with the defendant saying it was the rider who had damaged his car.
“He was interviewed and largely said it was the cyclist who was the aggressor.”
Stanway was at first charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm but pleaded guilty at trial to the less serious charge of common assault.
Sentencing him, the judge said: “This is a road-rage incident and normally road rage people go to custody. I just don't know what came over you.
“You had your partner and three young children in the car with you, there was a close shave with a cyclist and rather than just leaving the matter you pulled into a lay-by and the red mist came down.”
Stanway was also ordered to perform 100 hours of unpaid work and to pay costs of £1,200 and a £128 victim surcharge.
The so-called “exceptional hardship” loophole allows people convicted of a motoring offence to continue driving if magistrates or a judge can be persuaded they would lose their job, among other things, if they were banned from driving.
Last month, a Parliamentary question from Labour peer and road safety campaigner Lord Berkeley found that from 2011-20, there had been 83,581 cases of motorists escaping a ban after pleading mitigating circumstances – equating to more than one in five of the total who amass 12-plus points each year being allowed by the courts to continue to drive.
He said: “Exempting one in five drivers is wrong. It should be one in five hundred.
“At present, anyone who can afford a loophole lawyer can join the 85,000 drivers who get off.
“A better alternative would be for drivers to think of the consequences before they break the law.”
A report published by Cycling UK has highlighted cases in which vulnerable road users were killed by motorists who had earlier managed to avoid being disqualified from driving after claiming that they would face “exceptional hardship” if they were banned.
The charity’s head of campaigns, Duncan Dollimore, said: “We’ve got courts treating inconvenience as exceptional hardship and a legal loophole that costs lives is making a mockery of the supposedly automatic totting up ban.
“We’ve no assessment of risks when magistrates make these decisions to allow someone to carry on driving, but they are accepting bland assertions that losing a licence will cause them difficulties.”
He added that it is bereaved families “who really suffer exceptional hardship when the courts put the retention of someone’s licence to drive above road safety, allowing irresponsible people to carry on driving until they cause further harm or death on the roads.”
Cycling UK has created an online action enabling people to write to their MPs to “encourage them to take action to help fix our failing traffic laws.”
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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49 comments
On what planet is using a car as a weapon excusable as a minor assault, and not attempted murder?
I need to drive blindfolded in England kill a couple of cyclist just to see if theses story's are real I have a job therefore I'm inviensable and the sun was in my eyes
Wearing the blindfold to avoid the sun in your eyes?
His employer should sack him anyway, if for no other reason than to wipe off the inevitable smirk he'll have on his face.
There was an old lady lived up the road from us maybe 40 years ago. Her teenage daughter was killed by a drunk driver in the early 50s. When we moved to the village in 1980 she still grieved. And the more so because he got hardly anything. She was a decent, reliable woman and could discuss many things. But it would take less than 5 minutes for her to share the details. Clearly the loss and the anger at the lack of punishment still were part of her thought every single day.
I can't imagine the same thing happening now because DD is just a no no. I rather think we need to do the same with feral driving like this. As da badger says driving is a privilege not a right. Anonymous driving also. I like the idea of drivers with points having to have speeding sensors and dash cams too.
Keep up the good work.
We have definitely done a good job on making - or alternatively "it happened that" - drink driving largely socially unacceptable. Which is great. However it has not gone away - e.g. 2019 there were (estimated) 7800 casualties (5% of all road casualties), 2050 KSIs (6%) and 230 fatalities (13%) (source - UK govt. - all road casualties here).
I'm willing to bet there are more people driving about while impaired by drugs now and I'm certain few folks were on their phones 40 years ago.
In some senses I think "feral driving" is a toenail of the elephant in the room. We have made driving a central part of who we are to the extent that we are oblivious to several issues aside from just "road KSIs" - as important as that is. Among them: toll taken on public infrastructure by accidents (even careful drivers are still human), the reduced space (and cash) for modes of transport other than motor vehicles, the lack of independent mobility (now expected) by those who can't access a motor vehicle (including children / the old / some disabled people), the space taken up by all the motor vehicles (overall tarmac and area occupied by parked vehicles), health effects (various), resources taken up building and keeping said vehicles running etc.
Road deaths in the 1970s were far, far higher than now. Drink driving was a massive factor in that. There was a peak in 1972 as I recall, with road deaths about 4.5 times higher than those in 2019 (or five times higher than in 2020, though that was an exceptional year due to the pandemic). In the old days drink driving was seen as harmless and even something to joke about. We've come a long way.
Drug driving and distracted driving need to be seen in the same light.
Seems reasonable to me, twat someone because they annoy you, claim red mist for a get out of jail free card.
Twat someone randomly without provocation and you get locked up.
Anyone care to test this legal hypothesis by punching Judge Jonathan Bennett?
"He decided not to impose a driving ban on the 30 year old because it would lead to Stanway losing his job".
So fucking what if he lost his job. Might make him think before doing in future.
Imagine the "red mist" excuse being used by someone for assault with a glass in a pub or for domestic violence.
You then start to understand how acceptable violence is towards people on bikes...
"sorry yer' honna the red mist decended so I just hit her" *shrug*
Careful now, you'll be drawing comparisons with "Gay panic" defenses like wot Australia has next and then we'll be on the slide until someone pops up to say that being a cyclist is absolutely not comparable in any way with anything to do with "protected characteristics" and this is thus all just a further demonstration of entitlement by MAMILs or something. (Which reference in no way refers to any characteristics, protected or otherwise).
I think pushing for mass cycling and suitable infrastructure to facilitate it is ultimately the way to reduce some of this stuff and the arguments around it. I don't think you can effectively erect criminal law to encourage positive behaviour. That movement has to start elsewhere and the law catch up with it. Unless you go full China and just permanently remove anyone showing any "negative" traits - pre-emptively for best effect.
I've just read a statement by Transport Secretary, Grant Schapps vowing that the government will "fix any loopholes in the law" which is quite a strong and determined statement.
Unfortunately, he was talking about the huge problem of slave-trader statues getting damaged when councils fail to address decades of complaints: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/edward-colston-statue-transport-secretary-6448188
What's the hotline number for "fix that
loophole" again?And what are they doing about the number of statues (or indeed War Memorials) criminally damaged by bolshie* vehicles?
* Can't accuse them of being woke, dozy is more like it.
Clearly, those statues were damaged by autonomous vehicles. You can't hold a driver responsible for unintentional damage. Or intentional damage if they were angry at the time.
What really grinds my gears is that Jacob Rees-Mogg is defending the jury system and I'm not happy about agreeing with him: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/jacob-rees-mogg-defends-jury-6451542
I think there's a double standard here. If these cars are aware enough to drive then they should take responsibility for their actions rather than just hiding behind "faceless algorithms", Elon Musk or even the poor
driverpassenger.Apparently Grant said:
Bloody cyclists:
If he makes a good point then it's a good point. Congratulations on being thoughtful rather than tribal.
Thanks, but is that your real name?
One of the comments on the newspaper article above seemed to be along the lines of "We live in a country where destroying statues is not against the law, so why was he convicted of slapping a cyclist".
OK, I've got it: anyone found guilty of assaulting a statue should not be able to plead hardship.
Update: apparently even Jacob Reese-Mogg agrees:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59893024
Apparently - if only we could get statues of Winston Churchill / Lady Thatcher cycling - we might even have the current government looking at the difficulties around conviction in dangerous / careless driving:
EDIT - got snipped: presumably if you drive over someone and you also damage their clothes and bike, that would be criminal damage at least...? (Yes - I know the whole issue is juries accept that "accidents happen" on the road too readily or even that cyclists are always in part to blame).
If anyone is interested in the facts of that trial, as opposed to the faux culture wars bollocks being promoted by Shapps and the other Tory twats, there's an excellent summary here by The Secret Barrister.
https://thesecretbarrister.com/2022/01/06/do-the-verdicts-in-the-trial-o...
Thanks - that's a most excellent and informative article.
My opinion on the case is that it is an embarrassment to Bristol that the court case went ahead. As the court costs must have been way more than the "damage" to the statue, it seemed to be a purely political decision to prosecute. A far better way that they could have approached it was to recognise how the "democratic" process was being disrupted by The Merchant Venturers for years and accept that an angry mob had more morals and humanity than our so-called leaders. That would have been quick and garnered the support of many (whilst possibly pissing off idiots like Grant Schapps and his make-believe loophole).
If only he would direct his energies to how the jury system is failing road safety cases, which is, after all, within his remit as transport secretary.
After all it's safe to say the jury in the Colston statue case was unlikely to have consisted of 12 protestors, but it is quite commonaplce for drivers who kill to be tried before 12 drivers.
I wonder if the problem is the juries or the instructions given to the juries in driving cases? Certainly, I believe there's issues with the sentencing even when guilty verdicts are given and there's definitely actual loopholes (as opposed to Shapps' imaginary one) when owners refuse to identify the driver at the time and also drivers who leave the scene to avoid a heavier sentence.
The problem is me.
Or rather the problem is us all. Most of us including cycle-fanciers are used to the "way the world works". Our systems strongly organised for driving. We have biases to side with "the majority". So it's quite difficult to stand outside that. And even if we do the problem of shifting the perspective of others remains. In the context of politics I'm often reminded of Douglas Adam's satire of democracy.
But yes there certainly several specific things which could be usefully fixed in the police, CPS and indeed law. I suspect that these often get overridden to some extent by "culture". So if driving is "the normal way to get around" and "road accidents just happen" then we need changes beyond the legal system too.
He assaulted someone in the presence of his children so that's a compounding factor.
Daddy, why did you run that man over in your 2 ton car?
He touched it !
How does anyone swallow this drivel of touching a 2 ton machine when your life is at stake?
He'll probaly be bragging to his mates in the pub about how he "Got away with it"
Thanks to a guillible judge the law ceased to be a deterrent
The fact that the defendant drives a vehicle as part of their job should mean that they are held to higher standards not that it is get out of jail card should they need it.
I don't know what job Stanway does but I would have thought they might think having someone on their books who has such anger issues and a criminal conviction might have cost him said job.
Also, unless the Judge had his powers wrong, he seems to think he could have (and defintiely should have) banned him from driving even though the charges were not driving related.
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